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Gold 104.3 radio's Patrina Jones remembers buying her first car – a 1985 Ford Laser five-door hatchback – from a family in Shepparton, having spotted it parked on their front lawn with a 'for sale' sign on it.
The presenter and newsreader on Melbourne's The Christian O'Connell Show – which will launch nationally this month – saw the car while commuting via train from her hometown of Wangaratta to Shepparton. She was there to do an unpaid news-reading shift at community radio station 3SR while also studying at Swinburne University.
Jones kept the manual red hatchback for four years, and continued to purchase Laser model cars throughout her twenties and thirties.
“This car started a real love affair for me with Ford Lasers,” says Jones.
“I owned five over several decades because they ran on the smell of an oily rag. They were the best cars. My first car had wind-down windows and a cassette deck."
On her playlist was Bryan Adams, Olivia Newton-John and the Xanadu soundtrack. There was also a trip to Rockalonga in the zippy Laser – a rock music festival in Yarrawonga in the early '90s where she saw Johnny Diesel play.
It was her dad Ray, an experienced truck driver, who wanted to purchase the car before Jones got her licence.
“The red Laser was owned by an Italian family who kept this beautiful little car on their front lawn, very close to the radio station where I was working. It was a private sale. I got my licence on my 18th birthday and already owned the car. Dad actually thought it would be good if I learned to drive it when I was an L-plater,” she says.
“Dad and I knocked at the door, and it was sold to us by a woman whose brother had moved back to Italy to get married and wasn't coming back home. It was a cash sale, all very easy and quick. I can still remember the registration – DCD 475 with Victorian number plates."
Being a country kid on a semi-rural property meant that Jones had plenty of chances to learn to drive as a young kid on farm tracks.
“My dad had his own transport company and had been driving trucks for a long time. He was ultra-vigilant about safety on the road, and being a country kid, in a semi-rural area, I was already driving Dad’s ute and even my brother’s Celica from the age of nine. Never on the road, just on tracks on the farm,” she says.
It took a little while to get the hang of the manual gear stick and riding the clutch, but she nailed it eventually.
“I kept kangaroo-hopping it, stalling it – but eventually it clicked,” says Jones.
Her next car purchase was a white 1990 Ford Laser.
“I was working at 3WM by that point and had a big magnet sticker of the station on the back of the car. It was also the last white vehicle I ever owned,” she says.
Jones, who returns to the airwaves nationally with Christian O’Connell on Gold 104.3 on 19 January 2026, also has a podcast Rage Against the Menopause, which is back with a second season.
“I remember when I started going through perimenopause and menopause, I felt a huge sense of injustice that we weren’t talking enough about it,” says Jones.
“There’s a lot of talk around conception, pregnancy and birth, but not about the other side of a woman's life. I felt women didn't feel supported or heard.
“It’s something women have needed and embraced, and I also get emails from men, who tell they didn’t really fully understand it or realise what their mums or partners were going through,” she says.
On being the first FM radio station to go national with a breakfast program, Jones is over the moon.
“It's a real pinch-me moment to be honest, because I really never thought in my early fifties that I would be doing this, let alone telling my 16-year-old self this would happen.”
Jane Rocca is a Melbourne journalist and author who writes for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s Sunday Life Magazine, columnist The Dish at Good Food, Harper’s Bazaar Australia, ABC Arts. She has written four books and hosted a podcast series Some of My Best Work with Mushroom.
