How a horse-mad girl from the outback became queen of racing in Queensland

Angela Jones can still remember being bucked off her pony onto a prickle bush as a kid on the family farm.

Then there’s her first horse that her father, Jason, bought for a carton of beer.

Not to mention taking an equine companion along with her to boarding school in the outback.

Those childhood experiences helped Jones, now 24, on her history-making journey to becoming the new queen of horse racing in Queensland.

“I was thrown on a horse when I was probably two years old and led around following Dad,” Jones said.

Growing up on a cattle and grain station an hour from the central Queensland town of Clermont, about 10 hours north-west of Brisbane, Jones was always destined for a life around horses.

“My first horse was a little Welsh mountain pony called Starlight that Dad bought for a carton of beer,” Jones said.

Learning the ropes

The second youngest of five daughters, Jones and her siblings, Megan, Emily, Katie and Louisa, were homeschooled by their mother, Julie.

“We did a lot more outside than we did inside and I remember we used to get our schoolwork done really quick,” Jones said.

“The rest of the day would be poking around, doing whatever Dad was doing, whether that was cattle work or mustering.”

Those flexible school hours were reluctantly replaced by boarding school in Charters Towers when Jones was “15 or 16”.

Jones wasn’t going easily … or alone.

After completing her schooling in the Northern Goldfields, the local sand racetrack became her new classroom, where Jones began to learn the craft of “race” riding.

After meeting outback horse trainer Robert Kirkwood, Jones’s sliding-doors moment came in her gap year after finishing school.

“They have yearly amateur races at Charters Towers, and Racing Queensland [RQ] had a little booth there,” she said.

“I met [former jockey and RQ apprentice coach] Shane Scriven and walked up to him and said, ‘I want to be an apprentice jockey, can you point me in the right direction of a good trainer?'”

Bush to the big smoke

Jones’s long road from the bush to the big smoke would take her to the stables of leading Toowoomba horseman Lindsay Hatch and eventually to Queensland’s premier trainer Tony Gollan.

A naturally gifted rider, her path towards becoming a professional jockey was fully in motion.

“I had been watching [Angela] for a little while and she had the potential to be a metropolitan-standard apprentice,” Brisbane-based Gollan recalled.

After riding winner after winner and breaking records during her apprenticeship, Jones created history last season when she became the first female rider to win the Queensland metropolitan jockeys’ premiership.

“I remember when Angela won the apprentices’ title, she looked across and said, ‘I want to win [the jockeys’ premiership] one day’ and now she’s done that,” Gollan said.

“She’s not going to rest on her laurels, and she’s obviously put herself in a position [where] she can win it more than once.”

Gollan, who also claimed his 12th straight Queensland metropolitan trainers’ premiership, said there was a sense of pride for what Jones had achieved.

“She’s a lovely kid and comes from a nice family,” he said.

Ride like a girl

Jones is just one of a growing number of jockeys when it comes to the female revolution in the riding ranks.

“Our female participants continue to play a crucial role in Queensland’s industry and are changing the face of racing in the Sunshine State,” RQ acting chief executive officer Lachlan Murray said.

“More broadly, there continues to be a strong female presence amongst Queensland apprentice jockeys, with 51 of the 64 being female.”

The shift in numbers is even more evident when the 42 trackwork riders currently enrolled in a Certificate III in Racing (trackwork rider) are included.

There are 35 females and seven males in the program, and in recent times, female riders won every race at meetings at Atherton and Gayndah.

As Jones prepares to chalk up more winners ahead of Queensland’s richest race day, the Gold Coast Magic Millions on January 17, she has also set her sights on breaking more new ground in the industry.

“I’ve got a Group 3 and a Group 2 now and I think that’s the thing missing for me.”

It’s been a whirlwind ride for Jones, but the determined young woman from a cattle farm in central Queensland always remembers her roots.

“I was lucky enough to get a win on my very first day I went to the races and it was such an unreal feeling … I remember thinking, ‘I’m actually a jockey,'” she said.