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As boarding communities across Australia celebrate National Boarding Week and reflect on this year’s theme, Echoes of Home , a recent cooking challenge at Calrossy captured the spirit behind those words — the comfort of familiar recipes, shared meals and connection to home.
Boarders recently gathered in the Brisbane Street Campus kitchen for a fun MasterChef-inspired competition based on recipes from the newly released Broken Hill School of the Air 70th anniversary cookbook, Dust Off & Dish Up .
More than simply a cookbook, Dust Off & Dish Up celebrates bush cooks, rural families and the enduring spirit of remote Australia. Featuring more than 190 treasured recipes alongside stories of station life and schooling across vast distances, the cookbook offers a genuine insight into life and learning in rural and regional communities. Every copy sold helps support geographically isolated SOTA students through educational resources, learning environments and opportunities that help rural students thrive.
For many Calrossy boarders, the activity became about much more than cooking. As students prepared meals together, conversations naturally turned to favourite family recipes, home cooking and life growing up in regional communities — perfectly reflecting the Echoes of Home theme.
Students embraced the challenge with enthusiasm, recreating dishes including creamy fettuccine carbonara, sausage casserole, porcupine meatballs, French onion sausage rolls, lemon and coconut slice, the classic 2-2-2-2-4 cake and Aunty Mel’s chocolate brownies, which quickly became a crowd favourite.
The Brisbane Street Campus kitchen was filled with laughter, teamwork and plenty of enthusiastic taste testing as students learnt new cooking skills, shared stories and surprised even themselves with how successful their meals and sweet treats turned out.
While the competition was a fun boarding activity, it also highlighted one of the special aspects of life at Calrossy Boarding — creating a genuine home away from home where students feel connected, supported and part of a strong community.
Experiences like this help students build confidence, independence and friendships while celebrating the traditions and connections that make regional boarding life so special.
