The new agriculture teacher at Hay War Memorial High School grew up reading drums on a Zimbabwean farm. Now he is teaching Hay students to listen.

Long before he stood at the front of a classroom, Charlie James was learning to read a drum.

Growing up on a farm in rural Zimbabwe, in a community of around 600 people, he was taught to hear meaning in rhythm.

One beat carried news of a funeral.

Another called people to a wedding.

A third meant a meeting, and everyone within earshot knew to follow the sound and gather.

Listening, in that world, was a skill you learned young, and it mattered.

Decades on, that early lesson has travelled with him to Hay War Memorial High School, where Charlie is the new agriculture teacher, and where, in his own quiet way, he is still teaching young people to listen.

The youngest of eight children, he had agriculture in his blood from the start, born and raised on the land.

He was schooled in English under the Cambridge curriculum, the teachers explaining a concept first in English languages and then again, sometimes in one of the local dialects.

Charlie can speak in seven of Zimbabwe’s many tongues.

He is struck, he says, by how closely that mirrors Indigenous Australian culture, where the language can change from one country to the next, even across his new patch from Hay to Balranald and on to Menindee, much as it does from one region of Zimbabwe to another.

His road to Hay has been a long one.

At 25, with no family nor friends waiting for him on the other side, he won a scholarship to study agriculture in Australia, and simply came.

“I just came here, and made friends,” he says.

He took his degree, returned home for two years to honour the terms of his scholarship, then came back to Australia for good.

In the years since, he has worked on farms and as a consultant, travelling to advise growers on crops such as mung beans and soybeans.

Before agriculture there was a stretch in tourism and wildlife back in southern Africa, on properties that were turning over to safari and visitors.

Home is never far from his thinking. Farming in Zimbabwe looks different to the broadacre country around Hay.

Some growers run commercial operations with tractors and modern equipment, he says, while on smaller holdings people still work the soil by hand or behind two cows and an old plough.

The bigger farms were once held by white colonial settlers, and although land has changed hands since independence, Charlie is blunt about where he believes much of it ended up.

Politicians took more for themselves and never gave ordinary people enough, he says, because that, in his view, is what politicians tend to do.

What he misses most is the way rural communities pull together.

If a neighbour loses her husband, he says, the district will turn up to plant her paddock and bring the seed.

When a house near his own was destroyed by lightning, the whole community arrived with tools and money and rebuilt it in a single day, the way he imagines an Amish barn raising.

In the country areas, he says, people still look after one another like that.

That is part of why he believes places like Hay matter.

He has met plenty of people, here and elsewhere, who have lived their whole lives in one town and never once wished to leave, and he holds nothing against them.

A small place can be a perfect kind of bubble.

But he does not want a child hemmed in by that bubble without ever knowing the wider world is there to be seen.

Being a migrant, he reckons, gave him something many people never get.

“It got me an opportunity to look around and see what other states are like,” he says.

Teaching was a second act.

What drew him to it in the first place was simple enough, the chance to work closely with young people, to understand how each one learns and to find the way to support them.

Already holding a degree, he came across a scholarship aimed at people who could teach the technical subjects that schools so often struggle to staff, the woodwork and the metalwork and the trades, with agriculture among them.

He took it, completed a diploma of education to bridge into the classroom, and began to teach.

For years he moved with the work.

As what was once called a mobile permanent teacher, he held a permanent job with the Department of Education but not a permanent school, posted to one town for a year and then another until a lasting position came up.

There was a year in Sydney, then Lismore, then Western Australia and South Australia, the map of his working life spreading further with each move.

He taught at one Western Australian school of 3,000 students, so large that assemblies were split across separate halls with the overflow watching on television screens, and at the other end of the scale he lived in towns of barely 200 people. He knows which he prefers.

The smaller the class, the better.

“If I have 15, I’ve actually got so much,” he says.

Small numbers mean knowing each child one on one, learning how each of them learns, and finding the way in.

For him that is the whole point of the job.

He came to Hay knowing the school had been without an agriculture teacher for two years, and he is upfront with his students about why he is there.

He chose to come for them, he tells them, and in return he asks only one thing. Respect runs both ways.

His way with young people is less about rules than about levelling with them, treating them as people and explaining the reasoning behind things rather than simply laying down the law.

When he first arrived, some students tried him out, as students will.

He sat them down and told them straight that he had chosen this school and these young people over anywhere else he might have gone, and that respect was the price of his staying.

They came around.

He has taught in some of the toughest schools in the country, the kind in Western Sydney where behaviour can be a daily battle, and says he has never once faced violence himself, something he puts down to letting young people know early and plainly where the line sits.

“The kids love me,” he says, and it is easy to believe him.

He is forever pointing students past the classroom as well, reminding them that a feel for stock or soil might one day make them a judge, an agronomist or a vet, a second string to their bow whatever else they choose to do.

The shortages are real, he says, across agriculture and the trades and out here in health as well, and he believes a school has a part to play in steering young people toward them.

Under his watch, agriculture is coming back to life at the school.

There has been a wool handling workshop run with help from local woolgrowers, students have been back among the sheep, and a group of four took part in the recent Hay Merino Sheep Show.

That it fell on a weekend, when the town’s sporting calendar was already full, meant only a handful could get there, and Charlie was careful with the ones who could not. They should not feel they had failed, he told them.

The people who run these events have busy working weeks and cannot always give up a day, and there would be another chance next year.

Locals rang him to offer a hand, Stacey Lugsdin among them, bringing their stock around for the students to work with and giving up their time, and he is quick to share the credit.

A school and its town should work together, he says, and the students should be in the thick of whatever is going on.

Then there are the drums. Charlie is a trained facilitator of a drumming-based program, a course that ran first in juvenile detention centres, as a way to reach young people who would not listen to anyone and to teach them to work and live alongside others, before it found its way into schools.

For him it has never really been about music.

Over 10 weeks, students learn to play together, and in doing so they learn to wait, to pay attention to the people beside them, and to take their place in something orderly.

Stop a student mid-beat and ask why it stopped sounding right, he says, and sooner or later the answer lands.

You cannot play together if you are not listening to one another.

Even the children who muck about come around to the idea that there is such a thing as order, he has found, and that they have a part to play in it.

The ones who take to the drums often turn into the best listeners and the most willing team players of the lot.

It is the same skill he learned as a small boy on the farm, where a rhythm could call a whole district together, carried now into a Riverina classroom.

He has taught it to childcare groups, and these days to his four-year-old step-grandson, who can already hold a beat.

He is no passing enthusiast.

He has played since he was a small child, and in Western Australia he was among those who helped carry the program out of detention settings and into mainstream schools.

The point, as he describes it, is order of the kind an army shows when it marches, everyone moving as one because everyone is paying attention.

He learned the keyboard the same way, teaching himself from tutorials online, and found the rule held there too.

You cannot learn an instrument, he says, if you will not listen.

In other towns he has taken the drums well beyond the school gate, running sessions for youth groups, for single mothers and for men, on the view that men in particular too often keep things to themselves and are the better for somewhere to open up.

Away from work he likes to wander, taking himself off to the smaller towns of the district whenever he gets the chance.

He recently tried his hand at a camp oven cook-off for the first time, turning out a pork roast, and he plays a bit of social bowls.

His wife, Paula, built and ran a cleaning business that serviced the district around their home in Singleton, in the Hunter Valley.

At its peak the business was employing several local women.

The two of them made the move to Hay together, settling into the flat country that suits them both.

Charlie’s own two children have made their way out into the world; a son in Melbourne and a daughter in New York, who went there on a tennis scholarship and now works in project management.

Paula’s two daughters are, he says, every bit as much his own.

He is not loud about any of it.

Soft spoken and deeply knowledgeable, he has the kind of steadiness that wins a classroom over without a raised voice.

Ask him what he hopes for the young people in front of him and the answer is simple.

Do not give up on them, he says, because one day they break through.

He hopes to stay in Hay for a good while yet.

“I love to be here for a long time,” he says. On the strength of his first year, the town would do well to keep him.

The views documented in this article are those of Charlie James and do not reflect the views or opinions of Hay War Memorial High School.

This article appeared in The Riverine Grazier, 24 June 2026.