Spotlight On: Georgina Cartwright

By Brodie Nickson

Georgina Cartwright hasn’t looked back since moving to Queensland as the former Victorian hoop enjoys life in the Sunshine State.

She has settled into her new lifestyle as she juggles her busy riding commitments, travel and life balance out of the saddle.

She and her partner, fellow jockey Michael Murphy, recently purchased 10 acres near Beachmere in the Moreton Bay area.

“I have really settled in and we have set ourselves up with the new home,” Cartwright said.

“It’s just nice having our own little acreage with all of our animals. I felt like if I was in Victoria I would have to move out to Warrnambool or Bendigo and be in the freezing cold.”

The small farm has provided a tremendous escape for the couple as they unwind away from the daily pressures of race riding.

“You get home from trackwork and you never really go inside and relax, there is always something to do,” Cartwright said.

“Yesterday Michael was out on the mower from 10.30am to 5.30pm. We will get home and there is fencing or something to complete.

“The property we bought there has a fair bit of work to do, so it is just a matter of chipping away at it.”

It has proven a perfect escape from the world and a beautiful environment to host their array different animals, including a couple of off-the-track thoroughbreds.

Living and working with thoroughbreds wasn’t always the obvious early career choice for Cartwright, however, after she originally toyed with a career in accounting.

Cartwright was just over a year into her accounting degree at university when she turned to riding trackwork ‘in need of a bit of extra pocket money as a broke uni student’.

“Probably about six months after doing my first morning at trackwork I said to my mum ‘I want to go be a jockey’,” Cartwright said.

“Mum (Jane) said no originally and I went back to do accounting for a few months before moving down to Geelong where Josh (Cartwright, her brother) was.”

Josh was apprentice to Jamie Edwards at the time when Georgina joined her younger brother in Geelong.

She spent a year riding work before entering Victoria’s prestigious Apprentice Jockeys Training Program in 2015.

Cartwright spent a year-and-a-half following in her brother’s footsteps working as apprentice for Edwards, before making the move to Henry Dwyer’s Ballarat stable, where she would stay for almost the remainder of her apprenticeship.

She enjoyed a string of success under the tutelage of Dwyer, including booting home her first black-type winner Ms Catherine in the 2020 G3 Typhoon Tracy Stakes at The Valley.

After tinkering with the idea of heading north to Brisbane the year before, Cartwright made the bold decision to finish the final three months of her apprenticeship on loan to champion Brisbane trainer Tony Gollan.

“I sort of planned to come to Queensland the year before (2019) because I had always seen that girls got quite a good go in Queensland and, obviously, the weather is much better, which also drew me up here,” Cartwright said.

“Originally it was Covid when I moved up so I had to do hotel quarantine, which was an experience.

“Tony gave me a very good go. He supported me for that two-and-a-half months where I had a good claim and really good success.”

Cartwright and Gollan celebrated the end of her apprenticeship with one of her biggest wins in the saddle, the pair combining with speedster Niedorp to win the 2020 Listed Spirit Of Boom Classic.

Fast forward three years and there is a strong sense of calmness and happiness in Cartwright’s voice.

“It is a hard transition to become a senior. I still had really good support of the Gollan stable, which really helped, and once I got going after a year I began to get really good connections and the rest is history,” Cartwright said.

Although she is a regular at most metropolitan meetings across Brisbane, Cartwright said she is happy finding the balance between smaller metropolitan books of rides and a potential huge book at the provincials.

She pays special homage to her manager, Adrian Gray, who she credits for taking a monumental weight off her shoulders when it comes to booking rides.

“I have always been the person to ride wherever the rides are, whether that be Gold Coast one week, Toowoomba the next week, sometimes it can be quite challenging to get a few rides in town so I might prefer to go to the Gold Coast to get more rides,” she said.

“(Gray) has done a really good job with chasing my rides.

“It is just too hard when I am more often than not at the races when nominations come out and it’s alright if you are only riding once or twice a week to do your own rides, but when you’re riding four or five times a week it is too much to do it yourself.”

Cartwright had been consistently travelling to Rockhampton, Mackay and recently got her rewards for the travel on Cairns Cup Day.

She booted home the $150,000 Cairns Cup winner Mahagoni for Lindsay Hatch, before combining with Ricky Vale in the Magic Millions Daintree Guineas aboard former Godolphin mare Pipistrelle.

“I like (travelling), I used to come up here once in a blue moon, but lately obviously with the carnival coming up I wanted to come up here and build some connections with different trainers,” Cartwright said.

Such is Carwright’s passion for her adopted home she has recently convinced her father, Ian, and stepmum, Fran, to make the move north.

"I have tried to convince [my brother] Matt to make the move north but he is starting his training," Cartwright said.

"[But] Queensland certainly is home now."