The 25-year-old is the rural team leader at RealNZ’s Walter Peak High Country Farm, where she trains staff in shearing and working dogs, hosts farm shows and tours, and carries out stock work.
Tikitiki says when she began living at Walter Peak 18 months ago, no one could answer her many questions about the area’s history.
"So I dived into the history of the place, just for my own understanding."
She did online research, read old books she found lying around, and visited archives in Dunedin.
Last year, realising she had gathered a lot of information, she made the "split-second decision" to put it all in a book.
She began writing in August, spending hours on the project every day before and after work.
The result is a self-published, 114-page coffee table book, Walter Peak: How She Came To Be, which includes many of her own photographs.
Now at the printers, it’ll be released late next month.
Tikitiki already has many strings to her bow: she has been a volunteer firefighter, an emergency call-taker for the police, and has a wedding photography business — but had never considered writing a strong point.
"I have a university degree, but I didn’t pass high school — I had to go back a second time to get into university in the first place — so academics is not something that comes easily to me.
"If you’d told me three years ago I was going to write a book about a high country station, I probably wouldn’t have believed you."
However, it turns out she "loved" the writing process, particularly finding herself drawn to the people who have passed through Walter Peak over the years, especially the women of the Mackenzie family who farmed the high country station for 80 years from the 1880s.
"Their daughters were out mustering stock with their long skirts tied up, long before their brothers were old enough to do it.
"The Mackenzies were an incredible family that worked through a lot of brutal times out here."
Although beautiful to look at, the land is "unforgiving" and challenging to farm, she says.
The people who live and work there need to adapt and learn new skills, just as she’s done so herself.
"When I came here, I couldn’t drive a tractor, work a trailer or shear a sheep, but being here I’ve learnt so much."
