I live out on a 135 000 acre cattle station with only my family and usually two jackeroos (though only one at present as one of my sons is helping out until he heads to university next month). We live in 'the homestead' (main house) and the men live in a small building away from the homestead known as 'the quarters'.

Because we are geographically isolated, I am in my fifteenth year of teaching my own children (at home) through a School of the Air/School of Distance Education. My eldest son is now working on another property away from home while, as I have said, the other son is heading to university. This leaves only my daughter in our schoolroom.

Once my sons reached Secondary (I taught them during their Primary years from Preschool up through to Year Seven, so eight years each son), we tried boarding school to allow them to grow socially and to also fully participate in things that they otherwise could not via Distance Ed eg music, sport etc. Okay, I wanted to leave the property altogether and make a 'sea change' so I'd never have to send them to boarding school but my husband insisted he was staying and thus boarding school was really the only other option. I could have kept them on Distance Education for another three years but they'd eventually have had to leave for their last two years anyway and by then would have likely missed much teenage interaction. While their participation in such things as music etc had always been high, it took significant effort (driving, finances etc) to participate at a regular or even competitive level and they really did not get to interact face-to-face with children their own ages very often. Their closest friend lived more than 100kms away.

As it turned out, boarding school did not work out so well for us (no surprise to me though!!) so I packed up and moved 500kms away for three years while my husband stayed at home. We returned most weekends, when extra-curricular activities allowed, and for all school holidays. I think I near burnt myself out from all of the extra driving and cooking and cleaning when I got back here each weekend! While I do drive a lot anyway, that situation added a lot of extra pressure....but it was what best suited our family at the time. Actually, if not for thePlenty, I'm not sure I'd have survived...

While my sons went to school each day (each to a different school based on their needs eg my eldest son's school allowed him to enroll in an accelerated program so he began his senior schooling a year early), I continued to teach my daughter through her school for continuity of education, knowing she would eventually have to return home to the property and that school anyway. She also has a physical disability that would not have made it easy for her to attend a mainstream school anyway...not to mention that she and I love our school and the friends we have there within our school community. It's possibly difficult to imagine that my daughter's best friend lives about nine hours away from us but their friendship is as close, if not closer and more meaningful, as that of two young girls who see each other at school every day.

Once my eldest son graduated from his school, we returned home here for good. My second son then spent the following year, his last year at school, at boarding school as it was a policy at his school that School Captains had to board. Thankfully that wasn't the policy at my eldest son's school as he, too, was a School Captain for his school. A silly policy in my opinion but that's another story...!

Our schooling via Distance Education is both like and unlike what you may know as 'home-schooling'. My children have always followed a firm curriculum as set by the Department of Education here in Queensland. I teach and mark the work, and can adapt it or extend it to suit my children's needs (throw in a museum visit, assign extra research tasks etc), but the work that has been set must be returned to the school by a set time for confirmation marking and reporting purposes. Thus, ours is a 'real' school in all ways. The only difference is that the students all live apart from each other.

We have swimming and athletics carnivals, contact days where we get together at the base school which is 400kms from our home (800km round trip) etc. The students have daily radio (now telephone) lessons and during these lessons speak to their classmates who are also on properties (or in other circumstances which required them to be in the school) and participate in extra lessons prepared and delivered by their teachers from the base school.

It was also in this way that my children first learned how to speak Japanese, play the piano, took part in chess tournaments etc.

Aside from our schooling, we have the usual things here that other stations, properties or 'farms' normally do...we get our water from bores, rainwater tanks or dams etc, have chooks for eggs, cows for milk, vegetable garden etc, and we slaughter our own cattle and camels for meat (and we also slaughter sheep that we purchase as live animals from our neighbours, as well as our own chooks when they no longer lay us any eggs ).

Nothing special. All rather boring really, as I said!