Vet falls in love with farmer and the rest is history

Joyce and Jock Wyllie first met when she was a locum vet visiting his isolated farm in Golden Bay. The busy couple were in no hurry to tie the knot though.

"We'd known each other for 17 years before we got married, so it was quite a long friendship!" Joyce said.

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Jock was born in nearby Collingwood, where he went to school and has lived at Kaihoka on the family farm for most of his life.

The property borders the north-western coastline that is regularly pounded by the Tasman Sea.

Nearby, the Kahurangi National Park's verdant swell of native forest rises and falls over the terrain like its oceanic neighbour.

"My dad came here in 1947, him and his dad bought it. It was originally all rehab farms, very small subsistence farming really," Jock said.

A herd of Angus cattle and 2,800 Romney ewes graze on grassy hills and flats, bordered by steep rockfaces, creeks and bushy gullies.

No wonder film director and producer Peter Jackson asked Jock if he could film some scenes for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, at Kaihoka Station.

"I was quite surprised that Jock said yes, because he's not a people person, doesn't like crowds, and there was quite a crowd," Joyce said.

Getting over seventy trucks onto the property for the two-day shoot required a lot of planning and work.

"They widened some gates, put in some bigger culverts to get the trucks in and put in a big gravel place for them to park, which was to our benefit!"

It was used as Weatherhills in the scene where The Company arrives at a destroyed farmhouse.

Joyce, who hails from Gisborne, loved being a vet and the work took her all over the country, but she is no longer practising.

"Being a large animal vet's the best, because you're dealing with farmers, and they're the best, really."

She stayed on as a vet after marrying Jock, but Kaihoka was too far from the vet clinic to be working after hours.

"You'd go to work and come home and you wouldn't know what's happened during the day."

"Then the kids were on correspondence school, so that was sort of focused for a number of years."

There is never a dull day on the farm. Joyce was feeding chooks when Country Life turned up.

After that, she had a house cow to milk and a mob of baa-ing lambs needed mothering. Most were abandoned during tailing.

"Sometimes it's not so fun when it's tipping down with rain and it's wet and you think, 'who on earth, somebody's got to milk the house cow'. But it's still something you do, and I quite like that."

Outside the farm gates Joyce is heavily involved with the local community.

She is a marriage and funeral celebrant and the newly elected president of Golden Bay Rural Women.

"It's a really nice fellowship of women. My mum came down to live at Pākawau after dad died and she was part of Rural Women as well as the kids were growing up."

Writing about rural and farming life is another one of Joyce's passions, and it took a professional turn several years ago.

"I got fed up with our local Nelson Mail. Every Wednesday, there was a two-page rural feature, but all the articles in it we'd already read in one of the farming magazines. It was just regurgitated."

She suggested that one week the newspaper could get a local sheep farmer to write something, and the next week they could get a local dairy farmer.

The Mail wrote back and said it was a great idea and asked Joyce to start submitting some work.

"What was topical, or what we were doing on the farm, or what I thought about the politics or something. And then it went onto Stuff, and I was always surprised how popular it was."

Now Joyce pens columns for the Golden Bay Weekly.