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How one Wānaka aviator's deer-recovery flights created New Zealand's entire deer farming trade.
By the early 1960s, wild deer had become such a problem in New Zealand's high country that professional cullers were paid by the tail. Tim Wallis, a young Wānaka local, started out shooting deer for the meat trade, setting up a processing plant at Luggate in 1963. Two years later he bought his first helicopter — only the ninth ever registered in New Zealand — and promptly crashed it within weeks. It didn't put him off.
By 1970, more than sixty helicopters were working the trade Wallis had pioneered — live deer recovery for a farming industry that didn't exist yet.
Wallis's real breakthrough came when he realised a wild deer was worth more alive than dead. Instead of shooting animals for venison, pilots began herding and net-gunning them from helicopters, then flying them out slung beneath the aircraft to be sold into the emerging deer farming trade. Wallis captured the first animals for Lincoln University's pioneering deer research farmlet himself, flying nine live deer out of the hills around Wānaka in the late 1960s. It was rough, dangerous work — Wallis later noted that some seventy pilots and shooters died in the years the industry was being built — but it turned an out-of-control pest into New Zealand's newest export.
Through the 1970s, Wallis moved from capture into farming itself. His own property, Criffel, became a model deer farm and a source of high-quality breeding stock for the wider industry; the country's first deer auction was held there in 1977. His company, Alpine Deer Group, went on to build velvet, antler, and live-export trade links with Korea, Taiwan, Russia, and Hong Kong — a genuinely global business that traced back to a young man flying low over the Matukituki and Wilkin valleys with a net gun.
Deer farming wasn't Wallis's only mark on Wānaka. His enduring love of flying led him to found the Alpine Fighter Collection and, in 1988, the Warbirds Over Wānaka air show — now one of the largest events of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, still held every two years at Wānaka Airport. He was knighted in 1994 for services to deer farming, export, and the community, and remained based in Wānaka until his death in 2023, aged 85.
You'll pass some of the same high country Wallis once flew low over on the water.
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