Barry Jones (pictured) has been the face of racecalling at Allman Park in Warwick for over three decades. He'll call his final race meeting at that venue on Saturday and he recently shared his interesting life journey to this point with Phil Purser.

Pull up a stump for an hour or so, far from the madding crowd, with well-known country racecaller Barry Jones and one soon gets an interesting insight into the highs and lows associated with race calling, from a man who has spent four decades behind the microphone.

Barry entered the world on 22 July 1944 as the youngest of four children to his parents Charles (call me “Buck”) Jones and his mother Enid, a Charleville girl. Buck Jones, who “played Bulimba Cup football for the Valleys club in Brisbane”, fathered a couple of handy footballer sons, via Barry who “made a few rep sides around Dalby, Goondiwindi and Charleville” and Barry’s older brother Ivan who “played A grade for South Sydney and won best and fairest player two years in a row”.

Barry’s first few childhood years were spent in western Queensland at Charleville, but in 1948, when Barry was aged just 4 years old, his family moved to be based at Dalby, so that Buck could take on a football player/coach role in the town, that job coming complete with a full time job in a local foundry. Barry left school at age 16, joining the local branch of Goldsborough Mort, “which eventually became Elder Smith Goldsborough Mort and whatever they are today, initially doing office work, but later branching out into the stock side of things, doing basic auctioneering work and selling dips and drenches as a rep out west”.

Eventually moving on from his initial employer, Barry “came back to Dalby to work with a fuel company before starting up his own pest control company for a period of time”. He married a Dalby girl and joined the electricity industry, via South West Power, “which became Ergon Energy and I spent 25 years with them, before leaving that employment a few years ago when the amalgamation with Ergon happened and the job shifted to Townsville. I certainly didn’t want to go to Townsville, so I took a payout and left. Since then I’ve kept myself busy by doing a few part time jobs, such as delivering vehicles for Toyota, mowing a few lawns and calling a few race meetings.”

Barry’s love of racing was born when he was only a teenage school student in Dalby. He takes up the story by saying: “I rode racehorses as a kid. We lived next door to the Showgrounds in Dalby and a publican in the town had racehorses and we used to go over and help them feed and whatever and eventually we got to lead a few around and go to the race meetings. When he moved from Dalby, I teamed up with an old fellow called George Fowler, a wonderful trainer, and he had his own racetrack just out of Dalby. I rode trackwork for him for many, many years, right through my school days and it was just in my blood. I loved listening to the racecallers, the Vince Currys, Ken Howards the Bert Bryants and Keith Nouds and those sorts of people and always thought I’d like to be one.”

Foot races conducted in the Dalby area gave Barry Jones the opportunity to implement his desire to be a racecaller. “We had a lot of foot races around Dalby back then and I got involved in calling them and also the Paddy Day Sports and pony races and then one day I got a call from the Jandowae Race Club to the effect that Harold Kirwan, the normal racecaller there, couldn’t make it and they asked if I would call the meeting. So out I went to Jandowae and I had an absolutely disastrous day and I thought, well that will be the end of it; but with the encouragement of the late Geoff Bassingthwaighte, who was the President of the club at the time, and with the help of Harold Kirwan, the father of current Toowoomba trainer Russell Kirwan, who insisted I keep going around the different meetings with him, which I did for a long time, I’d get to call a race or two occasionally. Later on Harold Kirwan took on the job of calling for the then-Channel 10 in Toowoomba, calling Clifford Park races, at which point I took over calling Warwick, Dalby and surrounding areas meetings from Harold around 1978.”

This year marked the forty-third year that Barry has called at Jandowae, but he has also been calling at many other country tracks for about three decades, noting: “I’ve been the caller at Warwick since 1979 or 1980, but I also call the races at Dalby, Burrandowan, Bell, Warra, Taroom, Chinchilla, Miles and Wandoan, then I call once-a-year meetings at tracks like Tara, Talwood and Flinton. Of all the tracks I’ve called at, Warwick and Dalby have been my best, as at one stage they raced every month, but nowadays with the cut backs and whatever, Dalby has eight meetings a year, including their picnic meeting and Warwick has similar, but most of the other tracks I call at are cut back to one or two meetings a year.”

Asked if he had any advice he could pass on to budding racecallers, Barry humbly advised, “Look, I’m not putting myself down, but I never really had the gift. I had very poor eyesight and I didn’t believe I had a good voice for race calling and I certainly didn’t have a retentive memory, but if you’ve got most of those things that are important, just keep at it, because it is just a wonderful life and the breaks will come your way.”

Barry named young Warwick resident Anthony Collins as his heir apparent at that club, describing his burgeoning race calling career as “going along great guns,” continuing, “Anthony was always involved with harness racing calling and he’s on the committee of the Warwick Turf Club, so I just started giving him a race to call at every meeting I went to, then it became a couple and he’s just got a very special gift and I have no qualms that he will take over and do a wonderful job, as he has everything on his side, due to age and so on.”

Asked if he modelled himself on anyone during his race calling career, Barry advised, “When I started I’d have liked to have been like the Bert Bryants and have all these wonderful sayings like ‘called for a cab’ and all those sort of things, but to integrate it into the call at the right opportunity is the thing and using it at the wrong time comes over very poorly, so I just concentrated on trying to get the horses in the right order in the call. In fact, I always tell young racecallers if they get into trouble in the call, just go back to the leader. I’ve never believed I’ve had the ability to go any further than what I have in the country, but I’ve enjoyed the country and met a lot of wonderful friends. It’s just been great and I don’t regret one moment of it. I’ve had a few bad downers, in fact I had one just a couple of years ago, where I was just about at the stage of chucking it in, but most of the people, particularly those at the Warwick Turf Club, where the incident occurred, stuck by me, so we got over that and moved on, but those lows are far outweighed by the many highs I’ve had in the last 35 or 40 years.”

That every racecaller ever born will make an occasional error is a given, but I asked Barry to explain in more detail the Warwick “incident” and to that end Barry stated: “Well it was at the time of the Equine Influenza and I hadn’t called a meeting for quite a while, I guess for a couple of months or more. It was a Boxing Day meeting at Warwick and I had a couple of horses in similar colours in a field of about 14 runners and the one thing I keep telling every young caller I’ve had is, whatever you do, don’t stop, just keep going, and I just made a fatal mistake when they came to the corner. For some unexplainable reason I thought I had the wrong horse and I did the fatal thing of pausing and I struggled a bit to pick them back up again. As they went across the line I had them the way they finished, but it was that fatal pause. Then some person just thought it would be marvellous to put it on You Tube.”

Barry married the apple of his eye, Dalby lass Gina Paulin, in 1966 and the couple have two children – Paul, a son based at the Gold Coast, and a daughter Sharon who resides in Toowoomba. Both Paul and Sharon are married and today Barry and Gina have “four beautiful grandchildren”. Barry and Gina have happily called Dalby home their entire married life and don’t intend ever leaving the bustling country town “as all our friends are here, so we can’t see any point in just packing up and moving somewhere else”.

A visit to the Warwick Turf Club by renowned former Sydney racecaller cum current respected Sky Channel personality Johnny Tapp, way back in 1983, was nominated by Barry as one of his career highlights. “It was the Australia Day meeting and Johnny Tapp was a special guest of the club. We had a five race card and I called the first and last races at the meeting and “Tappy” called the middle three races. He didn’t leave the broadcast box all afternoon, so we had a great yarn, then that night I sat next to him and his wife at a Warwick Turf Club dinner and he sang a song and told a few stories. It was just a special day for me.”

Quizzed whether he was retiring from race calling at all tracks, Barry said, “No, definitely not, but young Anthony Collins is at the right stage now to take over Warwick, so I’ll pass that baton over to him. At this point I’d still like to call at the other tracks I’m calling at.”

It would go without saying that a racecaller who has called races at so many far-flung destinations as Barry has would see some funny things happen in such a long timeframe, so I asked him to recall one that stuck in his mind. He pondered for a while, stating, “You’ve caught me on the hop, but there have been many. I remember an incident in Chinchilla one day that involved the now-retired great Dalby trainer Darby Hopkins. Darby kept telling a certain owner that his horse was no good and to bush it, but the owner just wouldn’t listen. Anyway this particular day at Chinchilla a young apprentice, David Rewald from Taroom, rode it and it ran stone motherless last. But at the dusty Chinchilla track the owner went right off in the saddling enclosure and was going to murder David and do all sorts of things, as he reckoned David pulled the horse, but Darby again reiterated that the horse was no good; however, the angry owner yelled out ‘Well what was he (David Rewald) doing standing up in the irons at the back of the field?’ to which Darby curtly replied, ‘Well he was probably trying to see which way they went’.”

Asked to name the best horse, jockey and trainer he’s seen around the country racetracks he’d broadcast at in his long racecalling career, Barry named subsequent 1976 Doomben 10,000 winner Burwana, originally trained in Dalby by Norm “Darby” Hopkins, prior to the galloper being transferred to Kevin Hayes in Sydney and winning a 10,000, as the best horse he’d called home first. When it came to jockeys he’d seen, Barry thought the late Ken Russell was the best jockey he saw ride in those parts, whilst he named the late George Fowler as the best trainer he’d seen, declaring: “He died many years ago, but he was just the best conditioner of a horse that I’ve ever seen. He was an old man when I joined up with him, well in his 70’s. He trained a horse called Dealing that won three races in the one day at Warra and he often scored doubles with the same horse on the day. In fact the topic came up in The Courier-Mail recently (Mark Oberhardt’s The Ear column) about horses winning doubles on the same day, but I’m sure Dealing is the only one that’s ever won three races on the same day.”

Next Saturday will no doubt be a nostalgic day for Barry as he jumps in his jalopy and travels the long haul from Dalby to call his last race meeting at Allman Park in Warwick, to hand over the reins to 23-year-old Anthony Collins. Let’s hope during that solo trip that he takes the time to reflect proudly on being a loyal and faithful servant to the club for over three decades. No doubt the race club committee, licensees and patrons on the day will give him a farewell to remember.

Barry Jones’ life journey to this point merely vindicates his own words that he instils in the budding young racecallers he takes under his wing, that being persistent will have its rewards in the long term.