Meet Ashley: Walter Peak Rural Team Leader, dog handler, and now, author

Ashley Tikitiki grew up in St Andrews, a small country settlement south of Timaru. She spent five years in Christchurch before spotting a job ad for rural demonstrator at Walter Peak. Her logic at the time? She'd had a few pet lambs and horses growing up. How hard could it be? 

"Very hard," she'll tell you now, laughing. "But a good kind of hard." 

That was nearly three years ago. The six-month summer job never quite ended, something she says is a common theme in the rural team. 

She came for the mountains. Walter Peak was stunning, and she wanted hands-on experience outside of an office, picking up skills she'd never have learned otherwise. The dogs were a big drawcard too,  she'd always loved them, and the idea of working alongside them every day sealed it. 

Her first few weeks included learning to reverse a trailer up and down the airstrip until she had it nailed.

Ashley is now Team Leader for the rural team, and no two days look the same. She plans the demonstrators' shows and tours, assigns jobs, trains dogs, cares for unwell animals, and troubleshoots whatever the farm throws at her, which is plenty. 

"I'm a teacher, a shearer (ish), a dog handler, a host and a leader." 

The part she finds most rewarding is enabling her team, making sure they have what they need to do their jobs well. 

Guests see the shows. They don't always see what happens after 8pm. Ashley's team has helped sheep give birth at nine o'clock at night, rescued newborn lambs from spring floods (in what's affectionately called the L'ambulance, a Lego truck), retrieved sheep that decided to go for a swim in the lake, moved hundreds of animals across the hills, and navigated around the horns of highland cattle. 

"We don't just do farm tours and shows. There's a lot that not many people see, jobs that make this role incredibly fun." 

In her time at Walter Peak, Ashley became fascinated by its history. Who had lived here? Were the ghost stories true? What did it look like a hundred years ago? She started researching,  archives in Dunedin, long-out-of-print books, every corner of the internet. Six months later she had more material than any university assignment she'd ever written.

So she wrote a book.

Walter Peak: How She Came To Be covers over 300 years of the property's history, from Hugh Mackenzie building one of New Zealand's most reputable merino stations (topping the London wool market three times) to its ill-fated attempt as a large-scale resort, to its modern era under RealNZ. It features hundreds of photographs, many taken by Ashley herself. 

And then there's the name. Walter Peak hasn't always been called Walter Peak. Before European settlement, the mountains were known as Ka Kamu-a-Hakitekura, named after a young girl who swam across the lake using the peaks to guide her. The mountains were said to twinkle and glimmer in the morning light. The name means the twinklings seen by Hakitekura. 

Ko au te whenua, ko te whenua, ko au, I am the land and the land is me. 

"We are lucky to live and work here," Ashley says. "But Walter Peak is equally lucky to have had us,  and those before us, care for her."