Hazel and Edgar Adams - Featured in Outback Magazine 2017

" To be able to succeed in life, just go on and tackle the challenges as they hit you "

This couple, Hazel and Edgar, I have known since I was small. Edgar would call me 'little fella', and I strongly recall the way he rolled his cigarettes, rubbing them over and over again between finger and thumb. I have always thought of them as such a beautiful couple, but before this day I had not witnessed Edgar embrace Hazel in this way. Edgar has since passed and Hazel has moved from the property, near Narromine in New South Wales, into town. The family business of cropping and farming sheep is now in the capable hands of their grandsons. Hazel and Edgar were born in the 1920s in the respective pastoral communities of Tambo and Jericho in Queensland's central west. Their early married life was spent at Thylungra, a significant sheep station located in the Channel Country which runs through Queensland and into parts of South Australia, the Northern Territory and New South Wales. Here Edgar worked as an overseer for The Australian Estates Pastoral Company through the great years of the 1950s wool boom. Edgar's talents as a '"sheepman" were recognised while at Thylungra Station and so in 1962 he was promoted to manager at Buckinguy Station near Nyngan in the centre of New South Wales. Edgar considered his time spent managing this 80,000 acre property the most memorable time of his life, and he and Hazel called it home for the next twenty years. Edgar and Hazel retired to a mixed farm at Narromine in 1982 where they enjoyed a further 30 years on the land, with their son, John and his wife Sybil, and two grandsons, Mat and Curtis. On many an occasion the three generations could be found working happily side by side. For Edgar, Hazel was the ever supportive and gracious wife, always by his side; and together they won the respect of all who met them. I think, in this image, I may have captured just that.