‘I ALWAYS LOVED COWBOYS!'

Country music superstar Reg Lindsay’s widow Ros has created a beautiful tribute to him

- Phillip Koch

He was one of Australia’s greatest country music stars. And now the fan who fell head over heels in love and married Reg Lindsay has recently put the finishing touches to her own extraordinary memorial to the music giant.

“I watched him from when I was a teenager on TV and loved his music,” says Ros Lindsay, who reveals their love affair began in 1986 when the dashing Reg accidentally spilled a drink on “my lovely prairie dress” at the Cootamundra Rodeo.

On top of a profuse apology, romantic Reg declared “I’m going to marry you” to the smitten Ros – and two years later the couple did just that on Queensland’s Brampton Island, forming one of country music’s most celebrated unions.

PERFECT PARTNERS

The couple first met two years before that fateful drinks accident at the Warwick Rodeo in Queensland where Ros, a glamorous barrel racer and steer roper, was competing, and Reg was performing to his adoring fans.

“We hit it off straight away,” she says. “We enjoyed the same music, rodeos, horses and the country life. He was a very kind man and I always liked cowboys. He was gentle and caring and quite a romantic. He took me on a trip to Nashville and spoiled me rotten.”

Sadly, Reg, whose first wife was Slim Dusty’s sister-in-law Heather McKean, died of pneumonia on August 5, 2008, at age 79, after spending five years in Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital following a brain haemorrhage, heart attack and a series of strokes.