ISLAND LIFE

Tiffany Barton-Kitchin is a self-confessed “city chick” who loves all-things make-up and beauty.

But the 17-year-old from Herdsmans Cove, on Hobart’s Eastern Shore, also feels right at home in a pair of muddy boots on the Jordan River Learning Federation school farm.

The skilled sheep handler has won numerous awards for showing and judging livestock and is currently in South Australia, preparing to represent Tasmania tomorrow at the national junior meat sheep judging championships at the Royal Adelaide Show.

It’s quite an achievement for the Year 12 student, who had never handled animals until a few years ago and actually found her first visit to the school farm in Year 6 quite frightening.

“It was scary – of course it was,” she says of that first visit. “I was like a baby learning how to walk.” But Barton-Kitchin, pictured with Wally, a two-year-old Hampshire Down she has raised since birth, says she’s glad she persisted with farm life.

Spending time at the farm has also helped her through some tough times in her personal life and has filled her with excitement about the future.

She’s studying retail cosmetics as well as agricultural studies this year and plans to study horticulture next year.

“I’d never been a country girl, I was more of a city chick,” she says. “It was a passion that I never knew about. Now I really want to own my own farm.”