HORSING AROUND
She may have made her name on Keeping Up With The Kaimanawas but, Kelly Wilson tells Nicky Pellegrino, writing is her real job
She may have made her name on Keeping Up
With The Kaimanawas but, Kelly Wilson tells Nicky Pellegrino, writing is her real job
Little girls love Kelly Wilson; really love her. Horsey kids who dream of riding ponies and taming wild stallions just like she does will stand in long queues to have books signed or beg their parents to drive them up a kilometre or so of rutted gravel road to seek her out at the Northland property she lives on with her family.
There’s one here today with her parents. Wilson’s father got talking to them in town after they’d spotted the Wilson sisters’ branding on the side of the SUV he was driving so of course he had to bring them home to meet his famous daughter, because why wouldn’t he make a kid’s dream come true.
Wilson takes it in her stride. She isn’t put out at the intrusion but nor does she seem especially flattered by the attention. The star-struck kid gets a tour of the property, a pat of Daminos the £41,000 ($76,000) stallion, a photo with Wilson and then she’s on her way.
This kind of thing has become routine at the Wilson place since she and her sisters, Vicki and Amanda, starred in top-rating TVNZ show
Keeping Up With The Kaimanawas. The first time it happened Wilson was surprised by fans while still in her pyjamas but posed up for a photo anyway. “I think I looked okay,” she says. Almost certainly she looked gorgeous. She and her sisters are all big toothy smiles and long swishy hair, and being photogenic hasn’t hurt them. The high profile that the television show brought has led to other opportunities they’ve grabbed with both hands. For Wilson, 28, that has meant a career as a best-selling author, first writing non-fiction books about the sisters’ adventures with wild horses, then a kid’s picture book and now a series of children’s novels, again based on their real lives.
She finds writing a breeze. “I do 1000 words an hour and it’s normally good enough to go straight to an editor,” she says, matter-of-factly.
Her first attempt at producing a book took her a grand total of eight days. “I never planned to be an author,’ she recalls. “But when our first Kaimanawa horse, Major, died, I decided to jot it down his story just for our own memories — what he achieved as an 18-year-old stallion coming out of the wild was remarkable. And then everyone said it was really good and I should send it to a publisher.’
That story ended up being re-shaped into her first book, For The Love Of Horses, which details the sisters’ hard-scrabble rural childhood. She revisits those years in the first of her Showtym Adventures novels, Dandy, The
Mountain Pony, describing picking grass from the roadside because there was no money for horse feed and being mocked by other kids at ribbon days for having feral ponies and ratty old gear.
“For a long time I was embarrassed by our childhood,” says Wilson. “We had nothing. We’d go round horse shows and collect leftover slices of hay to feed our ponies because we couldn’t afford to buy any. We were rugged-as but our parents taught us that if we worked hard and were determined to make things happen then they would. Now I look back and I’m so proud of where we come from.”
Both her parents are artistic — father John sculpts in metal, mum Heather did the illustrations for Dandy, The Mountain Pony. They brought up three daughters with a fierce work ethic that is underpinned by a strong Christian faith. Wilson attends the Arise church in Whangarei and says her religion forms a foundation for so much of what she does.
“It’s been hugely beneficial in how we treat people,” she says. “It’s taught us to be generous with others, generous with the knowledge we
The more we learn about horses, the more we learn about people. Kelly Wilson
have. It’s been fundamental in our training methods with horses, too.”
All three sisters are famously clean-living. They’re not into partying and drinking — Wilson will have a glass of bubbles at a special celebration — and there have never been lots of boyfriends on the scene. At their Showtym Camps for young riders they’re all about old-fashioned values. Kids have to put away their screens and get muddy, playing outdoor games like tug-of-war and bushbashing, just like the sisters once did.
“We’ve become, by default, role models and I’d like to think we’re pretty good ones,” says Wilson. “The way we were brought up was valuable and if we can communicate some of those lessons to kids today that’s good.”
Training flighty and reactive wild horses has paid dividends when it comes to wrangling difficult people. “If a horse is rearing or bucking, rather than assuming it’s being naughty, we try to work out why it’s behaving that way,” says Wilson. “Does it have an injury or issues with its teeth, is the saddle fitting properly? That translates back to the people we’ve met. When someone’s being difficult or misbehaving, we always question what’s happening under the layers to cause them to act out that way? The more we learn about horses, the more we learn about people.”
ALTHOUGH SHE
grew up riding, Wilson describes herself as the least horsey of the sisters. She even had time out from country life while working as a graphic designer in Auckland but now she’s firmly back in the fold. All three sisters live on the family property, Amanda in her parent’s house, the others in separate dwellings. In Wilson’s case that means a comfortable but plain farmhouse with a washing line by the front door and the classic Kiwi barn, full of rusty old equipment, beside it. She may be earning a good living from the bestselling books and all the endorsements and sponsorship the sisters have attracted but the money isn’t being splashed about here.
Anything truly flashy that the Wilsons have is out in the paddocks — in particular the three expensive horses they bought last year at auction in the UK, two stallions and a mare that are part of a mission to put the showjumping sisters on podiums at the Olympics and the World Equestrian Games.
Because while New Zealand riders have had international success as eventers we haven’t done as well in other equestrian disciplines and the Wilsons are determined to change that that. Their innovative plan involves raising $1.25 million from a syndicate of up to 250 owners to buy and compete an elite team of 10 sport-horses. They’ve branded themselves Team WS and they’re well on the way, with plans to do more horse shopping early next year.
Team WS is a hugely ambitious project and has had its setbacks. Currently Vicki is grounded after suffering a serious concussion as well as a