By TANIA PHILLIPS
MOVE over Miranda Kerr, there’s a new girl on the block.
Thirteen-year-old Killarney school girl Erin Lloyd has just taken the first major step in her much longed-for modelling career.
Erin, who is in Year 8 at the Killarney State School, was this week named Miss Country Girl Australia Junior Model, winning the online photography division.
Proud mum Sue said the phone call this week was a brilliant surprise for the young singer/model.
“She got into the top 10 across Australia, and we were just proud of that,” Sue admitted.
“When the lady rang us this week to tell us, we couldn’t believe it. She said she’d ring back in the morning when it had sunk in,” she laughed.
Sue said Erin was very excited about the win, particularly as part of the prize is having her name passed on to all of the top agencies.
“She is on cloud nine,” she said.
However, this doesn’t mean that she is about to ditch school and travel the world.
“She needs to have a solid education foundation behind her too,” her down-to-earth mother said from experience.
One of eight children (and the oldest of four girls), Erin is the second model in her family with one of her older brothers also doing a little modelling in the past.
Sue said they entered the competition a year ago, sending in a picture of Erin dressed as an Indian in a peach tree. It was a picture she had taken while waiting to go to band – with the 13-year-old playing clarinet in the Southern Downs Band.
But that picture in the peach tree caught the attention of the judges and so they went to Ipswich for the regional cat-walk competition.
“But we’d never done that sort of thing before, so we didn’t know what to expect,” she said.
“All the girls had big dresses and heels and their hair up. Erin just had a nice party dress and ballet flats and I’d kept her hair down.”
And while she didn’t do any good there – the photogenic youngster caught the eye in the photography section and the rest as they say is history.
