In retirement, Roberts is being acknowledged for his enormous service to the industry, with his job effectively being a seven-day-a-week role.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But, it all started with a slice of luck all those decades ago.<\/p>\n
From the age of 20 until he was about 30, Roberts worked on a cane farm at Tully in Far North Queensland driving a tractor and sugar harvesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By chance, he was at a family barbecue in Brisbane and got talking to a friend of his father-in-law who worked at Doomben in those days.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Roberts was asked if he could drive a tractor and if he wanted to start on Monday morning.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was the 7th of September in 1987 and I have been here ever since,\u201d he said with a chuckle.<\/p>\n
Roberts quickly rose through the ranks, working as a machine operator at the start, before becoming a team leader then racecourse supervisor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was told by my boss at the time that I showed a bit of potential and I was offered the chance to do a grass management course,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In retirement, Roberts is being acknowledged for his enormous service to the industry, with his job effectively being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[3004,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-22017","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-racing","8":"tag-racing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}