‘Family is everything’: The life of Australian legend Jimmy Hayes
IT’S one thing to go and visit royalty. It’s quite another when royalty comes to visit you. Read about the life of JIMMY HAYES.
Northern Territory
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IT’S one thing to go and visit royalty. It’s quite another when royalty comes to visit you.
Even more extraordinary when they ask you to star in a movie they’re making.
Cattleman Jimmy Hayes and his great partner in crime, Gail, are extraordinary Australians, and a natural drawcard.
So it’s no surprise that Hollywood and Tom Selleck came knocking. As did the voice of Australia, John Laws, and one of our greatest singer-songwriters, John Williamson. The latter even wrote a song, ‘Three Sons’, about their family.
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For Jimmy Hayes, a man who has achieved so much, the cornerstone of life is family.
When asked what he is most proud of, Jimmy told the NT News, “Being a part of the Hayes family. I love everything they’ve done.”
To tell this story, we need to travel nearly 200 years back in time to the United Kingdom, where Jimmy’s great-grandpa, William Hayes, was born in 1827.
“As far as we can track him, he came from a place called Flintshire in Wales, which is just across the Mersey from Liverpool,” Jimmy said.
After William Hayes passed away in 1913, the South Australian newspaper The Observer entitled his obituary, ‘A Remarkable Man’.
They describe how a 21 year-old Hayes stepped on to a ship in Liverpool, and sailed to the other end of the world.
He arrived in Australia in 1849, and took up a position on Yednaloo Station, 100 miles north of Port Augusta.
Jimmy and Gail now have an eighth great grandchild on the way.
What an incredible, enduring family legacy that has helped shape our nation.
Jimmy says his great grandfather came to what’s now Alice Springs in 1882, carting telegraph poles for the reconstruction of the telegraph line.
“They took up country at Deep Well first, then Maryvale. They bought Undoolya in 1906- we’ve been here for well over 100 years,” he said.
It was a cattle empire that stretched across 13,500 square kilometres of land.
“I grew up in the pastoral industry. It’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve only ever worked for two people- my old man (Ted Jnr.) and myself.”
Jimmy says when he was a little kid, Undoolya Station was remote living, even from Alice Springs next door.
“We would go for weeks on end without coming to town. The only reason we’d come to town was if we jumped on the back of the old truck or something just to go for a ride. There were only a couple of stores in Alice,” he said.
“We used to go out on the stock camp on the station regularly. My brother Billy and me had a couple of old horses, old Echo and Toy Boy. They were hand-me-downs from my grandfather, old Ted, who’d take us under his arm, and have us on an old leading rein, and we’d go mustering.
“As a four year old kid, as far as going for a drink of water- that was out. You’d have to go from breakfast to dinner time, if you were lucky!”
Jimmy and Gail Hayes are one of the Australian Outback’s great romances.
“We both went to Hartley Street School together. I used to board with the old grandparents in Bath Street, and Gail lived around the corner of Billy Goat Hill,” he said.
According to Jimmy, it was love at first sight.
“We used to admire her even then! If she’d have spoken to me, I’d have taken off,” he said.
“Gail used to come out on the weekends and jump up on a horse, and help us tail cattle. That’s why I’ve got a weak eye- I’d keep looking out of one eye at her!”
They were married in the Flynn Church in 1965.
Jimmy and Gail have four kids, Richie, Andy, Jayne and Benny.
Their respective partners are Lee’ann, Jane, Danny and Nicole.
There are 13 grandchildren, and almost eight great-grandchildren.
William Hayes in 1908, told The Register newspaper, that his daughters could muster cattle, “with or without saddles, with the best men I ever saw.”
Gail has told the NT News, the same is true to this day.
“Our daughter Jayne, could ride just as well, if not better, than the boys,” she said.
“As a lady on a station, you support your husband, you do the book work, and if he needs help putting up a tank, you become involved. It’s a partnership.
“Even today, our daughters-in-law are there helping the boys out!”
Schooling initially was via correspondence from Adelaide, before School of the Air was established.
Jimmy came in to town for some of his primary and high school education, before completing his schooling in Adelaide.
“I used to love rowing of all things. And we rowed up and down the Torrens. We won quite a few races,” he said.
Jimmy moved back to Undoolya at Christmas of 1961, and it was “right in the heart of the drought. It was unbelievable”
The dust storms in particular were immense.
“Sand was blowing through the closed front door and out the back door of the houses. We were literally shovelling it out in a wheel barrow,” he said.
“These dust storms, they’d come in from hundreds of miles away, they were 30,000 feet in the air.
“The wall of dust. It could be quite inspiring, but it was frightening, actually, if you didn’t know it. It would come rolling over the ranges, and you knew it wasn’t good.
“It would linger in the air for sometimes up to a week.”
Through all of the adversity of drought, market fluctuations, and the natural hardships of life on the land, Jimmy went on to become one of Australia’s greatest ever cattlemen.
In 2019, the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association made Jimmy a Life Member.
“All over Australia is subject to drought. We make the best of it. We don’t overstock the country,” he said.
“You’re not going to make huge fortunes out of the country, but we don’t intend to.
“There’s a big difference between living, and making a fortune.
“There were times when you’d be flat out getting $1 per kilo for your cattle. But you hang in there. It gets in your blood. You fight for it!”
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.
Jimmy was listening to the radio coverage, as Armstrong and Apollo 11 were coming back to earth.
“It was the early hours of the morning, and Neil Armstrong said he could see the lights of Perth,” he said.
“I thought, ‘If he can see Perth, then I should be able to see him.’
“I looked up, and it was the most brightest of lights you ever would have seen.
“It was fairly fast moving, straight up above here, and it lit up like a halo around a star.
“From here to when it landed in the Pacific, you could see six or eight of these hallows.
“It was absolutely spectacular.”
Jimmy met the Queen’s late husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.
“He was an absolutely top man, a pleasure to talk to,” he said.
The Queen’s only daughter Princess Anne went horse riding at Jimmy’s Undoolya Station.
The 1st Earl of Snowdon, Tony, came to Undoolya while he was still married to the Queen’s sister, the late Princess Margaret.
Lord Snowdon was also a filmmaker, and he had Jimmy star as the leader of the search party in his film, ‘Ten Who Dared- The Explorers: Burke & Wills’.
Tom Selleck’s ‘Quigley Down Under’ was one of multiple Hollywood movies also filmed on Undoolya.
Jimmy’s Mum, Jean, even became friends with Selleck’s understudy, ‘Big John’, and they’d have a scotch.
Jimmy says Selleck was a “really good bloke”, as were John Laws and John Williamson, who both came to lunch together.
And it was a “privilege” when Williamson wrote the song, ‘Three Sons’, about his family.
Jimmy and Gail say their advice for kids of today, in how to tackle life, is: “If you love it, go for it!”
They say there’s also a need to “get back to basics.”
“More basic things should be taught in schools. Real world things like banking and mortgages.”
Jimmy says kids need to “learn to get out and work. Not just as a teenager, but 5 or 6, doing menial chores. Then the chores get bigger and bigger.”
“Grab a broom and sweep the floor!
“We’ve put a lot of young people through our system here at Undoolya.
“They’ve come out of the city, spent a couple years on the station. We are still in contact with some of them from nearly 40 years ago.
“They like the family attitude. Gail treats them as if they were her own kids. She’s a mother to them.”
As Jimmy and Gail Hayes say, “Family is everything.”
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