There is a moment in my conversation with Sarah Harris when she tells me about the term she spent supervising three children doing School of the Air while her youngest baby was a newborn.
“Everything else just gets dropped,” she says. “Basically your house is chaos, everything is chaos and you’re just in the schoolroom.”
She then describes those months as “a bit chaotic”.
A bit.
That wonderful understatement probably tells you everything you need to know about Sarah.
Sarah and her husband Rhys are raising eight children on a sheep station in far western New South Wales, about two hours from their nearest town, Mildura.
At the moment, their children are spread across almost every stage of childhood.
Three daughters are at boarding school. Three children, in Years 5, 3 and 1, are educated through Broken Hill School of the Air. And two little boys are still at home.
The logistics are quite something.
Their property has a purpose-built schoolroom and Sarah and Rhys employ a governess. School begins at 8am, with online lessons connecting the children to their teachers and classmates hundreds of kilometres away.
Then there are the trips to Broken Hill for School of the Air activities, camps and sporting events.
And Mildura.
For years Sarah has tried to make the two-hour trip into town once a week so the children can participate in sport.
It began with her eldest daughter and netball when she was about five.
Sarah laughs that Rhys might not have been quite as enthusiastic about the commitment, but once they started, they had to keep going for the others.
Today, she can see exactly why it mattered.
When her daughters transitioned from learning at home to boarding school, they already knew how to play a team sport. They could walk onto a court, join a team and begin making friends.
For Sarah, boarding school wasn’t an unexpected decision. Living where they do, her children have always known secondary school would mean leaving home.
That doesn’t make the leaving easy.
Sarah says she struggled when her eldest daughter first went away.
But now she watches three daughters thriving. They’re playing sport, building friendships, becoming independent and discovering a world of opportunities beyond the station.
And meanwhile, back home, there are still school lessons, toddlers, station life and plenty more children coming through.
As Sarah puts it, “I’m just kind of in the middle of it and it just keeps rolling on.”
And perhaps there is no better description of motherhood than that.
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