In this blog's relentless hunt for interesting books , ephemera galore , old photos , overlooked Dead Sea scrolls and assorted other flotsam , various editions of the Prickle Farm , by former Darwin ABC journalist , muso and radio personality , the late Mike Hayes , have been unearthed. This is an indication that the book and associated radio and newspaper column were very popular with the public.
Two editions of the Prickle Farm are shown here, another one somewhere in the files .
Born in Redding, England, his father suffering tuberculosis , Mike came to Australia , via Sri Lanka, where his mother had been born , with his parents .
He grew up in Melbourne , started as a journalist on the The Age and moved to the ABC.
In Melbourne during the l960s he and his brother formed Australia's first true bluegrass band , the Hayes Brothers and their Bluegrass Ramblers . Moving to Darwin with the ABC, Mike played in a band called Brown Sugar so named because its members were said to be coarse and unrefined.
From the Little Darwin jumbled files the above exclusive photograph shows Mike ,for some unknown reason armed with a bow and arrow, lining up a large barramundi , a marlin or crocodile , perhaps a marauding goldfish , at Fannie Bay , Darwin.
After Cyclone Tracy , Mike and his family took up residence on a rural property in Gundaroo , New South Wales, which became the famous Prickle Farm , near Canberra, where he headed the ABC News team .
In fact , his untimely death at 58 on February 10 , 2003 was raised in parliament . Senator Ursula Stephens told the house the Prickle Farm stories were yarns of mayhem and mishap on a hobby farm . One reviewer, she said, had called them ,"Tales of rebellious dunnies, chooks who thought they were sheep and a sheepdog with no instinct to muster either sheep or chooks. "
Hayes had been well known to many people working in parliament house—especially those in the Press Gallery and the people of the Canberra region through his running commentary on the lives and the loves of the people of Gundaroo, which was broadcast on ABC Radio, and through his weekly column about the Prickle Farm, which featured later in his books of the same name.
"He was a hugely entertaining persona. He was certainly larger than life, dry, outrageously caustic and self-deprecating. He was also an extraordinarily astute observer of human nature. He was gruff and generous and he had a huge social and political conscience."
In a Sydney Morning Herald obituary , Ron Miller wrote : What can you say about a man whose writing created a world that spoke to a whole generation of hobby farmers, put the phrase `prickle farm' into the lexicon and put [the] village of Gundaroo on the world stage; whose musical talent should have made him rich; whose Easter jam sessions were legendary; whose choice of dress was somewhere between Johnny Cash and Hagrid; and whose barbecues almost without fail started out by thawing 15 pounds of chops on the hotplate because he'd forgotten to take them out of the freezer?
The radio series , a newspaper column and books had captured a lifestyle that was quintessentially Mike Hayes.
