Vale Ted Hart - Government tribute

Ken Vowles, NT Primary Industries Minister:

I would like to pay my respects to Ted Hart, highly respected member of the Northern Territory cattle industry who sadly passed away at his home in Katherine on October 29, at the age of 91.

For 35 years up until 2008 Ted was the owner of Hodgson River Station in the Katherine region. Throughout his long and adventurous life he had exemplified the pioneering spirit of the Territory pastoral industry and it will be hard to find a man so well liked and admired.

Ted was born in Mullumbimby, New South Wales in 1925 and grew up on his family’s dairy farm.

He first came to the Territory in 1948 to work on Limbunya Station as head stockman with Aboriginal stock camp before heading back to Queensland where he had his first attempt at owning a station, only to learn the hard way how difficult a business that can be. He and his partner stocked the station with 500 head and a few years later after one of the worst droughts in memory, Ted gave the surviving 50 head back to his partner and walked away.

Ted did a season on Brunchilly then Alcoota, but he got paid off after walking cattle away to Maryvale in a drought. In 1956 he came to Alice Springs region initially cutting and carrying timber for railway sleepers on Loves Creek and Deep Well destined for the saw mill in Alice Springs.

Ted then got a contract fencing and yard building for Eddie Connellan at Narwietooma and then Hamilton Downs and Napperby. In Connellan’s workshop in Alice Springs Ted developed an automatic fencing machine which allowed him to do half a mile a day in one pass with three or four wires, and 350 wooden posts to the mile. Ted, his wife and three adopted sons and two daughters lived on the fence line.

He then went to Amburla, which was at that time an outstation of Hamilton Downs Station, on share farming arrangements.

There he started his own bull breeding project.

He fed his bull on Amburla on lucerne, which he irrigated using a pumping system he devised himself that ran on gas produced from a charcoal burner, the charcoal having been made from hand-cut mulga. 

In 1968 Ted married his second wife Elizabeth and in 1973 they bought Hodgson River, a 1100 square kilometre station in the Roper area. With their two girls Sonya and Donna then aged three and one, they moved onto the station which, at that stage, had a single shed with no power and water.

For many years Ted was the mainstay of the Droughtmaster breed in the Northern Territory.

Ted Hart represented the best qualities of a true Territorian. He was a great bushman and a modest, kind and generous man.

(Katherine Times note: Bess and Ted Hart raised more than $22,000 for cancer research through their annual morning teas.)