Elly-May Barnes is picking tomatoes from her backyard veggie patch. She’s wearing a white broderie anglaise and tulle mini dress and silver lurex boots – not your standard gardening attire. But Elly-May is not your standard woman. Everyone who knows her says she’s something special. She always has been.
“I’ve never done things in a small way. I mean, I was born and nearly died,” she says, and she laughs. The 34-year-old singer/songwriter has a wicked, dark sense of humour, but at the time – born 14 weeks premature, the youngest of Australian rock royalty Jimmy and Jane Barnes’ four children – Elly-May’s life hung in the balance. It was no laughing matter.
“It was probably the most difficult time in my life,” Jane told The Weekly in 2021. “When something like that happens, which is beyond your control, when your child might die ... They would take her bloods every two hours, she had cannulas all through her body. They said to us there was a 50 per cent chance of this baby surviving. Anything else you’ve been through in your life is ... It really puts life in perspective.”
Jane and Jimmy stayed with Elly-May day and night. Sometimes Jimmy slept on the floor beside her humidicrib.
“They saved my life,” Elly-May says now. “They were there from the beginning, making sure I stayed alive in that hospital, and every time I’ve been in hospital since. I wouldn’t be here today without them.”
Jimmy and Jane finally brought their tiny girl home, but Elly-May wasn’t out of the woods yet. At three years old, she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which is a
