GETTING AN EDUCATION

THE MESSAGE CAME through loud and clear, via text. There was no room for interpretation.

“Hi Mum, I love it, it’s been the best week ever.”

It’s a little terrifying when your first-born prefers her boarding school over our home, and certainly our wideeyed 12-year-old is having trouble containing her glee.

This year our daughter Harriet started boarding at St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School in Brisbane. It’s a day we have long known was coming, but the emotions accompanying such a milestone are hard to predict.

My parents still joke about my own initiation into life beyond the farm gate: while they prepped themselves for a teary farewell, off I ran without looking back. Compared to my tiny rural primary school, boarding school was the ultimate slumber party: a community of silly, giggling 12-year-old girls, and I was all for it.

Although it’s still early days, Harriet seems to have inherited this enthusiasm. Her mood is as bright as the pop of neon Crocs — the unofficial after-school uniform — jostling their way along the hallways as girls bounce, laugh and talk over each other.

Boarding school has long been a ritual for country kids across Australia, and the essence of the boarding experience doesn’t seem to have changed dramatically since my school days, although these days there’s no tiptoeing into the dining hall after hours to sneak spoonfuls of Milo. Well-stocked common rooms and kitchenettes put my pantry to shame, and with sushi on the afternoon-tea menu, day girls no longer need to pity the ‘starving boarders’.

Phone cards, reverse charges and the old two-second ‘ring me back’ trick every boarder would well remember are also history, and time once spent waiting in a payphone line is now dedicated to TikTok dances and Snapchats.

It feels like only yesterday I was the boarder waiting for the payphone, but now that little handheld vortex of distraction is a brutal reminder of the generation gap. >

“It’s this bush kid’s dream,” says Georgina of her daughter Harriet’s boarding

Mobile phones are one of the trickiest challenges to navigate in modern boarding houses, and a school’s policy on usage can be a deal breaker. Yet for all social media’s well-documented evils, it has been — as intended — a wonderful communication tool for the family.

Social media spared us much of the uneasy churn that accompanies any fateful ‘first’. Our hours leading up to drop off were dominated not by nerves, but the maddening pings of a group-chat discussion revolving around what each girl was wearing. For six months prior to the big farewell, we’d had transition days and sleepovers, and the school was fabulous at gradually initiating the girls. Social media did the rest.

Come day one, a contact list full of bitmojis transformed into actual faces and personalities — and they were even more fun IRL (ridiculously, there is now a legitimate abbreviation for ‘in real life’).

Our experience has been positive, which has eased the transition enormously, however I’m mindful that this is not always the case. Almost three decades later, I still vividly recall girls, eyes red-rimmed, trying to stifle snuffles at the dinner table. Their grief is seared into my memory, although, to add a disclaimer, they are all now happy, well-adjusted adults, waving their own children off to boarding school.

The aftershock of rugged emotions for those left at home once a child goes to boarding school is also not lost on me.

A friend recently described how their cat continues to circle through their daughter’s bedroom, meowing painfully in confusion. The cat’s crying is so unsettling that she admitted, through tears, that they’re hoping their daughter’s scent abates soon so the cat will give up.

It’s a grim reality, and thankfully we’ve been spared a long goodbye, although there will be bumps in the road ahead. Friendships and boundaries will be pushed and broken, and the novelty of living with hundreds of teenage girls will at times lose its shine.

Our little family has been prematurely dismantled. It’s something I try not to let my mind linger over, but the reminders are ever present. One less towel to straighten in the bathroom, an empty seat throbs at the dinner table and a silent bedroom, a small and empty world suspended somewhere between childhood ballerina ornaments and Mecca Cosmetica shopping bags.

Right now, however, our daughter’s world is big. Friends, sport, school, weekend shopping trips — it’s this bush kid’s dream, and each day is abuzz with opportunity.

And then, ever so occasionally in the quiet lulls of conversation she’ll ask how the dogs are, or what her siblings have been up to, and I know she’s thinking of home after all. g Georgina Poole is a journalist based in Moree, New South Wales, who is passionate about sharing stories from the bush.