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His knowledge of his family’s history and achievements convinced him that their mutual success in the pastoral
industry was based on what could be described as a family cooperative. His love for his wife Jean and their
children and grandchildren was recognised by his friends in attitudes rather than words. He had a reserve that did
not verbalise on his deep inner feelings and relationships but something of this could be sensed by those who knew
him best. He was a man with simple tastes, reserved with strangers yet warm in the friendships he developed.
Hayes died suddenly on 5 March 1988 and, following a service in the John Flynn Memorial Uniting Church in
Alice Springs, he was interred in the Alice Springs Garden Cemetery. The great congregation of mourners at the
funeral service, representing a cross section of the Northern Territory’s racial and cultural communities, paid its
tribute to him as ‘a man for all peoples.’
There were many other tributes. In the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly he was described as ‘a legend
in his own time’, ‘a man ahead of his time’, ‘one of nature’s gentlemen’ and ‘a great Territorian’. There were
also tributes, in simple words and moving actions, from the old Aboriginal men and women whose ancestral
lands encompassed Undoolya. The old men were proud of their totem relationship and of a lifetime of mutual
acceptance, expressed in ‘sorry beads’ they made and presented to Hayes’s widow.
M Johnston, Salt of the Earth, nd; Northern Territory Parliamentary Record, 1988; Hayes family records and information.
GRAEME BUCKNALL, Vol 2.
HAYES, WILLIAM (c1827–1913), pastoralist, was born in Liverpool and brought up in Wales, where he became
a butcher. He claimed that when he arrived in Adelaide in the early fifties he was only twenty-one years old. The same
spirit of adventure that motivated his migration led him to outback South Australia. It is on record that he passed
through Port Augusta ‘when A D Tassie was the only resident there’. Some years later he married Mary Stratford
of Goodwood. Mary’s parents had met on the ship bringing some of the earliest settlers to Adelaide. Her father,
the ship’s carpenter, healed her mother’s (also Mary) badly scalded leg with bread poultices—the leg the ship’s
doctor wanted to amputate. They were married on arrival in Adelaide. Mary, the future Mrs William Hayes, was
born in a tent on the banks of the Torrens about 1840. She proved to be her husband’s equal as a pioneer, enduring
all the hardships of the years of their nomadic life as station contractors carting wool to Adelaide or Port Augusta,
returning with station stores, dam sinking, fencing and shearing.
In the drought of the mid-1860s they lost all 30 of their working bullocks. Leaving the north they secured work
on drainage and other contracts in south-east South Australia. On returning north William had contracts that took
him as far as Coopers Creek with goods and returning with wool. However, amongst all the contracts he regarded
‘the conveyance of five tons of copper ore in one lump from the Yudanamutpna mine to Port Augusta for exhibition
in London’ as a proud achievement, for he did it single-handed.
In 1884 Thomas Elder engaged Hayes to construct fencing and sink dams on his newly acquired Central
Australian station, Mount Burrell. As Edward, their youngest child, was born on 16 June that year, it is probable
that their departure was after his birth. They set out with three bullock wagons loaded with stores and all their
household possessions, and another two wagons loaded with fencing wire, scoops, harness and all necessary tools
for a far distant land. The slow-moving bullock wagons took several months to reach Mount Burrell. The partners,
Gilmour, Hendry and Melrose, had stocked this station but they had not secured leases for the area. Thomas Elder
purchased the 1 000 cattle and 70 horses on the station. Elder had previously applied for and been granted the
eight Mount Burrell leases, which suggests that he already had some long-standing arrangement with Gilmour and
partners.
As an interlude between his contracts with Elder, in 1890 Hayes took his teams to Warrina, then the terminal point
of the northern railway, to haul a large consignment of steel telegraph poles to Alice Springs. On 1 January 1893
Hayes, ‘the nomad’, began to put his roots down in Central Australia. He claimed this was his wife’s doing,
for at her insistence he applied for a lease adjoining the Alice Springs track at Deep Well. In his first venture
as a pastoralist he purchased 162 cattle from Tom Williams of Paddy’s Hole, Arltunga. He admitted that when
several died soon after he did not share his family’s confidence in his future as a station owner. However, with the
remarkable support of his wife and family, twenty years later they had become the most successful pastoralists
in Central Australia. When interviewed by the press in Adelaide years later, William Hayes wanted to make the
sole topic of the conversation ‘the assistance he had received from his family’. The interviewer commented: ‘It is
doubtful whether the pastoral industry ever produced more remarkable women than Mrs Hayes and her daughters,
who for many years undertook their full share of the station work. They could muster, brand, drove, slaughter and
dress cattle with the best man going.’
In the devastating drought of the 1890s, Thomas Elder withdrew from Mount Burrell and the cancelled leases
were then available for new applicants. A man named Cox secured the homestead block with new lease No. 1720
which he sold soon after to R D Coulthard. On 1 July that same year, 1895, Hayes gained his first foothold on
Mount Burrell by securing the lease upstream on the Hugh River from the homestead block. He continued to apply
for Mount Burrell leases until he held six, every one with a common boundary on the north, east and south with the
homestead lease, while Henbury closed it in on the west. Coulthard, who by this time was involved with his own
Tempe Downs leases, sold the homestead block to Hayes. The title to the homestead block was transferred in 1901.
In 1903 Hayes transferred all seven leases into the corporate ownership of Hayes and Family. He had long since
abandoned the Deep Well lease. In 1903 the Hayes family purchased their first Owen Springs lease and then two
more the following year. All three were secured from the Willowie Land and Pastoral Association. In 1908 they
purchased two other Willowie leases, Nos 1809 and 2172, which joined the southern boundary of Undoolya Station,
and lay between the eastern boundary of Owen Springs and the Ooraminna Rock Hole. Meanwhile negotiations