Alan Jones will always be a son of the Sunshine State

Born and bred in Queensland, now-retired shock jock Alan Jones never forgot his roots – and regularly weighed in on matters of the state. Alan Jones announces retirement

THE man who rubbed shoulders with world leaders and was once touted as a potential prime minister never forgot where he came from.

Alan Jones has remained a proud rural Queenslander at heart despite the lofty heights he reached, and has rarely failed to get into any brawl erupting in the Sunshine State.

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Jones was born on a dairy farm near Oakey on the Darling Downs, and the experience of those early years – working on the farm with his dad Charlie, mum Beth, brother Robert and sister Colleen – informed much of his conservative world view.

The background also instilled in him his commonsense approach to issues that resonated so readily on talkback radio, where he often quoted the sayings of his “old man’’ Charlie.

His formative years in education were spent at Acland State School and later at Toowoomba Grammar School as a boarder.

His tertiary education was also solidly grounded in Queensland, including stints at the old Kelvin Grove Teachers College as well as part-time study at the University of Queensland.

Despite settling in Sydney in later years Jones never could keep away from Queensland’s political, cultural or sporting life.

His devotion to the bucolic life of his early years led him to form an unlikely alliance with the Greens as he campaigned relentlessly against the expansion of the New Acland mine near Oakey – a proposal he believed compromised some of the best agricultural land in the state.

Australian broadcaster Alan Jones announces his retirement from radio at his home in Sydney. Picture: Kris Durston

He famously bagged Queensland premier Campbell Newman in the lead-up to the 2015 election, using his extraordinarily popular media platform to dismiss Newman as someone he “couldn’t back to win a chook raffle’.’

He met his Waterloo when he went after the powerful Wagner family of Toowoomba, accusing them of creating a quarry wall which he claimed (wrongly, an inquiry later found) contributed to the devastation of the 2011 floods around Grantham that claimed 12 lives.

Jones made a range of other accusations against the family who built a private international airport in a cow pasture outside Toowoomba, all of which contributed to the Wagners launching a defamation case that found against Jones, and awarded the Wagners close to $4 million.

Jones is sometimes loved, sometimes loathed, by the Australian public but his “down home’’ credentials have never been in doubt.

As he explained in 2015 during his bruising (and some would argue, highly successful) pursuit of Newman, he felt compelled to weigh in on Sunshine State issues simply because “once a Queenslander, always a Queenslander’’.