Sharon Hargest - Calling the mountains home

While other teenage girls were preening themselves down at the local mall, Sharon Hargest was photographing Walter Peak high country farming life, skinny dipping in private bays and cooking for musterers – living the dream.

Schooled by Correspondence on the family’s beloved Walter Peak Station through her high school years, Sharon left home to pursue her passion for photography studying at Southland Polytech, but the mountains kept calling her home.

There was always a visit to her best friend Teresa O’Connell’s busy family home in Panorama Place for social contact where she happily slotted in with their 10 children. “We’d go up there at school lunchtimes sometimes. It was pretty busy. The milkshake maker was on the whole time,” Sharon grins. She boarded there later while working in town.

The Hargests moved to Queenstown when Sharon’s parents, John and Jill, bought 24,281ha Walter Peak Station in May 1980. “I was 13 and three of us kids went to school in Queenstown, while Dad and brother Mike got to know the ropes on the station with the manager for the first year.”

The following year the Hargest kids did Correspondence School on the station, Mum Jill very nervous about her new role. “She said, ‘I know nothing about new maths!’ She’d have to clear us all off the table then cook lunch for all the men on the coal range as we had no power, just a generator and a gas stove. She didn’t like the Rayburn (range), reckoned it had obviously been designed by men,” Sharon smiles.

There was big excitement when the Earnslaw docked with the mail bag three times a week, new Correspondence School booklets or letters from Granny.

“We’d get through our schoolwork early and Mum would say, ‘Let’s do another day!’ My sister Claire would say, ‘No way’, and disappear on her horse for two hours,” Sharon chuckles. There was no messing around for the neighbouring Westaway kids over at Walter Peak Tours. Their mum, Diane, was a teacher and started at 8am sharp so she could be free to bake scones for the Earnslaw tourists.

It was quite an adjustment after Sharon, born in Gore, had started her school life in Mandeville on her dad’s family farm, before they farmed in Oparau, near Te Awamutu.

They’d get together for Correspondence School trips with the Butson kids from Mount Nicholas, Douglases from Cecil Peak, and Rives, who had six kids, from Halfway Bay Station. “Once the Rive kids decided to walk up the Lochie River to the Cascade and up over the Afton Saddle for the Lakeside Station Christmas picnic at Walter Peak with their cousins who were staying. They were about 12 or so. It took two or three days. It was quite hot and the cousins arrived with blisters, asking, ‘How do we get to the lake for a swim? Willie Rive said, ‘It’s like this, Tom, you just put one foot in front of the other.’”

“My brother Mike and I cut, turned and baled all the hay for the station.” 

Sharon became a regular customer at Queenstown’s ‘Happy Snappa’ photo processing store after her dad taught her about photography and the wonders of the night sky. “I shot a really good, four-hour time lapse photo of the Star Trail one night with a tripod pointing to Mount Afton to capture the South Celestial Pole that Dad told me about. The stars were beautiful colours.”

Sharon even won a national award – the Open Section in the Agfa Listener Time Frame Competition – a dawn shot of cows, dust and horsemen setting off into the rising sun. “Mum and I went to Auckland to receive that and I won a camera.”

For two years Sharon worked for the Westaways cooking at Walter Peak Tours, before her two-year photography course in Invercargill, driving home at weekends because she “couldn’t see the mountains and didn’t know if it had snowed or not”.

A stint as apprentice pastry chef and baker at Sweet Memories lasted eight months, not for her. Sharon dabbled in wedding photography then settled back onto the station working for her parents, heading off on the autumn muster to cook for the team. The men took the bunks at St Mary’s Hut in the Lochy leaving Sharon to a mattress on the floor – “a mouse ran over my face one night”. But they were glad of her ‘porridge buns’ made in the coal stove and ‘wild gooseberry jam’ when the hut food ran out once. “People used to use our huts without permission and steal the food Dad hid there, but I found these gooseberries growing wild and an old jar of sugar in the hut.”

The Hargests sold the station in late 1998 and Sharon moved into Queenstown, working as a cleaner, even cleaning the Police Station cells, before Freshchoice opened in 2000, Sharon working in the grocery department for the past 26 years.

Profound experiences her brother had while snow-raking stranded cows to safety in chest-deep snow and descending the mountain in darkness with no torch one night saw him turn to God and join the Salvation Army, training as an officer in Wellington. His experiences so impacted Sharon that she went to the Invercargill Salvation Army Church while at Polytech, sometimes also in Queenstown. “He was up the mountain one night when darkness fell and he realised he’d forgotten his torch. He looked up to the heavens and prayed hard, and an aurora appeared and lit up the snow, then it was pitch black and he inched his way down the mountain. When he got to the bottom Dad met him and asked to borrow his torch, but he didn’t have one. Dad was sure he did as he said he saw a ‘bright light following Ralph all the way down the hill’.”

Sharon is now a Corps Sergeant Major in the Salvation Army stepping up to big responsibilities at times.

For more than 20 years she’s organised Operation Christmas Child’s Christmas boxes that go to kids in need in the Pacific, working in with local schools, a job she’s keen to retire from when a replacement steps up.

She’s also hosted young, post Army training Israeli backpackers in her home back in the day for $10 a night. “Once I had 12 of them all over my lounge floor,” she says.

Sharon volunteered for years as a Bible in Schools teacher with the Army’s Molly Wise, touched by how much it meant to the kids. “We’d teach the Bible stories and things like respect. I have beautiful ‘thank you’ letters from the kids that teachers like Susan McIntyre and Janetta Coulter made into a big book for me.”