Land Girls

TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD PIP WILKIE IS BATTLING TO ENSURE FUTURE GENERATIONS CONTINUE THE TRADITION of five generations.

Words: Kate Coughlan  Photographs: Guy Frederick

PIP WILKIE’S AVERAGE WORKING WEEK makes NZ Life & Leisure want a lie down with a cup of tea. But this 28-year-old woman (right), in love with the land her family has farmed since 1872, is not complaining about a thing. She doesn’t mind being in sole charge of the 500-hectare property, spending 30 hours a week at a local Middlemarch cycle-hire business, teaching every Friday at the local primary school, restoring farm outbuildings and running a 20-bed homestay and farm tourism business. How fortunate that this Pip Wilkie – teacher, Dunedin College of Education graduate, farmer, hostess, cook, gardener, dog breeder, carpenter, housekeeper – has inherited the hard-working and entrepreneurial genes of her illustrious forbears.

In 1846 one of her great-great-great grandfathers, Charles Kettle, arrived at Otakou to survey a new city, to be called Dunedin, in the province of Otago. In 1872 another of her distinguished ancestors, her great-great grandfather John Roberts, himself a civic leader, provincial politician, founder of the stock and station company Murray, Roberts & Co and a knight of the realm, purchased a vast landholding at the foot of the Rock and Pillar Range east of Middlemarch. He named it Gladbrook after a small gurgling stream that the property’s Scottish shepherds said reminded them of home and made them glad.

He paid 17,200 pounds for 122 acres of freehold and 35,000  acres of leasehold plus 22,000 sheep, 53 head of mixed cattle, one team of eight bullocks, five horses, an eight-roomed house, a large imported Australian kitset woolshed and six miles of fencing.

The rest of the boundaries were rivers and mountain ranges. He paid a quarter upfront, with the balance over three years at nine percent interest.

John Roberts had been sent to the colonies in the 1860s on behalf of his family, Scottish woollen merchants George Roberts & Company of Selkirk, to further the family fortunes by buying wool and finding buyers for Selkirk tweed. His parents kept up a stream of advisory missives – the mother on moral matters and the father on money matters. These unfailingly instructive letters kept arriving long after young John had matured enough to marry Louisa Jane, the second daughter of Dunedin surveyor Charles Kettle, and establish  Murray, Roberts & Co which operated as a land investment firm for both the Scottish and New Zealand arms of the Roberts clan. Though it was purportedly a stock and station firm, Roberts refused to have anything to do with the small farmer, particularly in Central Otago. “He thought they were a bad risk, which was perfectly true,” says historian Helen Harraway.

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