Australia has one school with its own rodeo arena. On Saturday, RollCall was lucky enough to be there.
If you have never stood behind the chutes at a rodeo, the thing that surprises you is how quiet it gets.
Not the crowd - the crowd is loud. But right at the gate, in the few seconds before it swings, there is a small pocket of stillness. A seventeen-year-old settles onto a bull, works his hand into the rope, and nods.
Then everything happens at once.
On Saturday 29 August, that scene played out over and over on a patch of Central Queensland dirt that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the country.
St Brendan's College sits on 300 acres of bushland at Adelaide Park Road, Yeppoon - about forty minutes from Rockhampton, and only a few minutes from the beach, though you would never guess it from the arena.
It is a boys' boarding school, with around 290 beds across four residences. A great many of those beds belong to boys whose families run cattle and crops hundreds of kilometres inland - properties where the nearest secondary school is not a realistic daily proposition.
And it is, as far as anyone can tell, the only school in Australia with a working rodeo arena on its own grounds.
Not a paddock that gets borrowed once a year. A dedicated arena, upgraded with new chutes in 2022, used through the year by the school's Rodeo Club, Horseriding Club and Cattle Club.
The only school-based rodeo in the country - and it has been running since 1978.
The rodeo itself started in 1978 and has never really stopped. It is now sanctioned by the Australian Professional Rodeo Association and sits on the professional calendar, which means the school's own students compete in the morning and professionals ride in the afternoon on the same ground.
It draws more than 300 competitors from around the country. In recent years the crowd has topped five thousand.
For a school of a few hundred boys, that is a remarkable thing to pull off. For the Capricorn Coast, it has become one of the iconic events on the local calendar.
It would be easy to file this under "school event" and move on. It's worth sitting with it a moment longer than that.
Boarding is a strange kind of ask. You take a fourteen-year-old off a property where he has been riding since he could walk, and you put him in a dormitory four hours from home, in a town where nobody knows what a campdraft is.
Most of school life then asks him to be good at things that have nothing to do with where he came from.
The rodeo does the opposite.
For one Saturday a year, the thing these kids grew up doing is the main event. Their families drive in from properties across the region. The skills they learned from their fathers and grandfathers are the skills on display in front of five thousand people. Home comes to school, instead of the other way around.
You do not have to know anything about bull riding to understand why that would matter to a kid.
RollCall was proud to be a sponsor of this year's Aussie Gold Rodeo.
We work with a lot of regional and rural schools, and we have a particular soft spot for the ones running transport across serious distances - the schools where the bus is not a convenience but the entire reason a child can attend at all. St Brendan's is exactly that kind of school, serving exactly that kind of community.
So supporting the rodeo was an easy decision.
There was a second part to our sponsorship this year, and it is the part we care about most.
A day at the rodeo costs money. Tickets, food, the ride pass the kids inevitably want, fuel to get there and back. For most families that is a good day out. For some, in a tough season, it is one more thing that has to be said no to.
This year RollCall sponsored a family who would otherwise have missed it - covering their day so they could be there, in the stands, watching with everyone else.
We are not going to name them. That is not the point, and they deserve their day rather than a mention in a newsletter.
But we will say this. A community event only really works if the whole community can turn up. If sponsoring a rodeo is worth doing, then making sure nobody is watching from the driveway is worth doing too.
A community event only works if the whole community can turn up.
Congratulations on another rodeo, and on nearly fifty years of keeping something genuinely unique alive.
Thank you for having us. To the students who competed - the school boys in the morning and everyone who backed themselves in front of a home crowd - you did your families and your school proud.
We will see you next year.
St Brendan's College is an Edmund Rice school at Yeppoon, Queensland, on the land of the Darumbal People. The Aussie Gold Rodeo is held annually in Term 3. Photographs courtesy of St Brendan's College.
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