Australian Dictionary of Biography

Charles Wiltens Andrée Hayward (1866-1950), journalist and writer, was born on 21 July 1866 at Court Huntington, Herefordshire, England, second son of Johnson Frederick Hayward (1822-1912), gentleman, and his wife Ellen Margaret, née Litchfield. Johnson Hayward had migrated to South Australia in 1847, and had prospered on the northern sheep runs; he returned to England in 1864, revisiting the colony in 1869. Andrée was educated at Rugby School and matriculated to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1885 (B.A., 1888). He was called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in 1890. After working in South Africa he moved to the Western Australian goldfields in 1894.

Hayward was briefly at Cue before starting as a reporter on the Geraldton Express; he was sub-editor in 1896-98 under John Drew. In 1897 his Along the Road to Cue; and Other Verses was published under the pseudonym 'Viator'. From 1898 he edited the Murchison Advocate at Cue, from 1901-02 the Kalgoorlie Sun and in 1902-04 the Perth Sunday Times. In 1905 he returned to the Express for twelve months before rejoining the Sunday Times under his close friend J. E. Webb's editorship. In Perth, on 7 November 1900, Hayward had married Elizabeth Marie Dunn. In 1922 he moved to Sydney and joined the Bulletin, where he wrote light satirical verse and topical articles under the pseudonyms 'T the R' (Thomas the Rhymer), 'Midford', 'Oxmead', 'Victor', 'Iford' and 'Pipards'. He died at Cremorne, Sydney, on 10 August 1950, survived by his wife, a daughter and two sons.

Hayward was a 'tall, willowy and soft spoken' man. He was a leading figure in the group of Western Australian goldfield writers whom Alfred George Stephens praised for their vigorous, versatile and 'manly' verse. Hayward had read widely in the classics but admired contemporary writers such as Calverley of Punch, J. K. Stephen, Kipling and Bret Harte. He had read some Australian writers in England, and after migrating he became a devotee of Henry Lawson, 'Banjo' Paterson, Edward George Dyson and other Bulletin contributors. After the nostalgia for England of his early work, Hayward's editorials, articles and poems soon supported the populist, patriotic strain in Australian literature and life. He saw verse as 'an essential ingredient of journalism' and espoused Labor on the goldfields, as in 'The Sneer of Septimus Burt' (1895), in which he ridicules the attorney-general's opposition to votes for miners:

'Tis a voice that has rung aforetime, since the days when the world was new,
Wherever the sweating thousands have toiled for the favoured few,
'Tis the horsehair wig that is speaking to the roofing of cabbage tree,
Stiff broadcloth and speckless linen to moleskin and dungaree,
The puny quill to the pickaxe, the gown to the clay-stained shirt,
The man of words to the worker—the voice of Septimus Burt.

Hayward relished the goldfields' comradeship and vigorous language and his writing reflects respect for those prospectors and miners who survive, with a sense of humour, their harsh surroundings. Coupled with this social concern is an Anglo-Saxon superiority and a fear, common then, of an influx of 'alien bands … from Asian lands'. His influence on literary policies and journalism in the West deserves comparison with A. G. Stephens's role in Sydney: both significantly affected the development of a distinctively Australian literature.