I grew up on “Lignum Park Station,” a 70,000-acre sheep and cattle station outside Ivanhoe in the Central Darling Shire of western NSW. Out there, lessons came through the crackle of the School of the Air, and an occasionally frustrated Mum.
Between the ages of 6 and 10, it was heaven. Textbooks came in the postman’s truck twice a week (if we were lucky.) So by the time my sisters and I got to 11, our parents had no choice but to send us off to boarding school.
To say it was a shock would be an understatement. For starters, I wasn’t used to being surrounded by so many people! But things were different then; we didn’t have mobile phones that meant I could call or text Mum and Dad whenever I wanted to. So I did it a bit tough to start off with. But boarding opened my world beyond the boundary fence, and as the years rolled by, I knew I wanted that same sense of growth and independence and opportunity for my three girls.
Home these days is a small farm near Coolamon, forty minutes north-west of Wagga. Wagga is a big regional city, so it wasn’t that I needed to send my girls to boarding school for their secondary education. I wanted to. But that didn’t make the first goodbye easy. The first time I drove away from the boarding house, my eldest’s bed was half-made and her smile at the door was brave but not quite convincing. I counted the kilometres home in reverse; away from her, away from that hug I hadn’t held long enough. Somewhere between the highway signs and the static on the radio, I had to remind myself: this was exactly what I’d always planned for.
As a single mum, sending your children hundreds of kilometres away means trusting someone else to care for them. The first calls home can be reassuring: full of excitement about hockey trials, new friends, and hot chips on Saturday night. Other times: a snoring roommate, a failed maths test, a wave of homesickness that comes out of nowhere. In both moments, you remember why you chose this.
Maddie and Annabelle began at the same school, though their paths soon diverged. Zoe, having watched her sisters’ very different experiences, chose a different school altogether. One family. Three schools. Three journeys. Each chosen to fit the individual.
Over the years I’ve watched the changes in all of them. They’ve learned to live with people they didn’t choose, run their own schedules, navigate life without me leaning over their shoulder. Boarding life gave them resilience, but also lightness – the knack for adapting, for finding humour in small inconveniences. And it gave them friendships that will last decades.
The moments I remember most aren’t the milestones. They’re the little things, but they’re vivid in my thoughts: the first leave weekend when they burst through the door, dump their bag in the hallway and sprawl across the couch with the best blanket; the Sunday night ritual of packing them back up: clean uniforms, tangled chargers, mismatched socks; the silence in the car after the holidays, a mix of reluctance and readiness.
Now, Maddie is 21, Annabelle 19, and Zoe 18. They’re out in the world – studying, working, making their own decisions. They carry themselves with ease, recover quickly when things don’t go to plan, and read a room better than most adults I know.
People sometimes ask why I didn’t just send them all to the same school. The answer’s simple – they’re not the same person. I wanted each girl to feel her school was hers, not a hand-me-down choice from her sisters.
Boarding school isn’t the only path to independence, but for us, it was the right one – even if it looked different for each daughter. It was never about prestige or legacy. It was about knowing when home is the best place to grow, and when it’s time to step outside it.
