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HAYES, EDWARD (TED) (1914–1988), pastoralist, was born in Alice Springs on 25 August 1914, the second
son of Edward Hayes and his wife Jane. The first eight years of his life were spent at Maryvale Station, where
he grew up with Aborigines. The Aboriginal men were stockmen, gardeners and goat shepherds and the women
worked around the house. In reflecting on his childhood, Hayes later stated, ‘We had Aboriginal women looking
after us as children and they were very good. In the afternoons when we went to get the cows with them they used
to show us where all the bush tucker was and how to gather it.’
This was a significant beginning in his education for life in the bush and established a relationship with
Aborigines that he never lost. The Hayes children’s education at Maryvale depended on the availability of a
governess until the family moved to Undoolya Station in 1922. The proximity of the homestead to Alice Springs
allowed Hayes to complete his education at the school run by Ida Standley. He left school at the age of 13 and
shortly after went droving with his father. At the age of 15 he gained further experience with a professional drover
but this was his only employment away from Undoolya.
On 18 October 1937 Hayes married Jean Bloomfield, daughter of Lewis Bloomfield and his wife Lillian
of Loves Creek Station. Following their marriage, Hayes took over the management of Owen Springs, another
Hayes family station. In 1939 he moved back to Undoolya to manage for his father, who contemplated retirement
in Alice Springs. Hayes purchased a third share in Undoolya in 1947 and in 1953, when his father did retire,
he became sole owner. In 1960 he purchased Deep Well and ran the two stations as a single entity comprising
2 600 square kilometres.
Hayes’s education as a pastoralist, under the tutelage of his father, was based on the knowledge that the
survival of the pastoralist depended on wise management of the fragile land. His keen observation, initiated as
a boy by family and Aboriginal wisdom, enabled him to recognise the effect that the variations due to drought
and changing seasons had on the delicate balance between animals and vegetation. His conviction that this arid
environment determined the parameters of man’s encroachment enabled him to achieve a delicate balance between
modern technology and the environment. During his early years at Undoolya the station was mostly open range
with limited natural water, which concentrated cattle in specific areas. Consequently this not only reduced stock
numbers but eroded the areas around the water. Further, when there were no subdivisions or paddocks, mustering
was labour intensive.
By the 1960s Hayes was subdividing and building cattle traps at watering places with trap paddocks to hold
the cattle for drafting. He maintained that unless cattle were subjected to regular handling they soon became as
wild as feral animals. By the late 1980s he had completed almost 600 kilometres of fencing and was able to handle
all his cattle twice a year. By this time Undoolya and Deep Well had 60 watering points so well placed that there
was no need for a man made bore. The value in beef quality and the preservation of the fragile land surface was
immeasurably enhanced when every beast was close to water.
Much of the soil had a heavy crust, which prevented easy penetration of rain. Hayes noted the significance
of grass growing where the hoof marks of grazing cattle had broken this crust. This gave him insight into ways
of improving revegetation of native and introduced grasses. In 1951 he introduced buffel grass and at the time
of his death he was in correspondence with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
concerning a new variety. Throughout his life he continued to read widely and critically the journals that widened
his own knowledge with an uncanny ability to distinguish the relevant from the impractical in respect to the arid
terrain he knew so well. He not only achieved a remarkable degree of self-education but had an analytical mind that
enabled him to extract the practical application to his own beloved Undoolya. He not only knew Poll Herefords and
land management but had the business acumen to hold a balance between income and expenditure that enabled him
to survive the inevitable droughts and market fluctuations. In the last 30 years of his life he doubled the carrying
capacity of Undoolya and, by his grazing controls and revegetation, enhanced the quality of the land.
Through his interest in the agricultural college at Katherine he expressed his concern for adequate training
for those involved on the stations to enable them to know and recognise, amongst other things, the danger of
introduced weeds. He recognised the threat to the land when Bathurst Burr was discovered but, while waiting for
government action, never hesitated to stop and remove by hand any he saw propagating. Hayes had a reverence for
this land where, to use his own words, he was born and bred. He grew up with Aboriginal children who were ‘born
and bred’ on the same land, learned much from their elders and shared something of their mystical relationship to
this land of his own birth. ‘You must’, he once said, ‘run your farm to the betterment of the land. The land is where
my heart is. If I had my life over again I wouldn’t change anything’.
In the latter part of his life Hayes served in a variety of community organisations. He was a Life Member of
the Alice Springs Show Society, President of the Central Australian Pastoralists Association, a Life Member of the
Australian Beef Breeders Association, a Life Member of the MacDonnell Ranges Racing Association and a Life
Member of the Police Boys Association. His other memberships included the Northern Territory Development
Corporation, the Bush Fire Council and the Australian Rangeland Association.
In May 1983 he delivered the National Trust’s annual Doreen Braitling Memorial Lecture, speaking of the
physical and social isolation that shaped the lives, attitudes and values of his pioneering parents and grand parents.
In doing so he was not aware of how much he revealed about himself. The history of his parents’ and grandparents’
generations with their stories of courage, tenacity and mateship in coping with accident, sickness and death far
from help, engendered not only pride in his forebears but the same quality in his own life. He told the story of
his parents again with his articles on them in the first volume of the Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography
(1990).