Year 9 student Zara’s grandmother boarded at Wenona in 1967. More than half a century later, while she might walk the same Boarding House corridors, Zara’s weekends look nothing like her grandmother’s did 60 years ago. Instead, she has followed a more recent family tradition: rodeo.
“My sister influenced me to start,” Zara explains, “but my family has always had a love of horses and the sport, from before I was born”.
Zara competes in the barrel racing and pole bending events at rodeos, a sport that has taken her far beyond her hometown of Upper Horton – a tiny New South Wales village without a single shop. Last year, she secured selection for the 2025 National Junior High Finals Rodeo after an impressive performance at a three-round qualifying event in Bendemeer. Her results earned her the opportunity to represent Australia at the National Junior High Finals Rodeo in Iowa, USA.
That sense of possibility is what drew the Kelly family to Wenona in the first place. They came across the School at the Tamworth Boarding Expo in 2022. As a former Wenona boarder, her grandmother was particularly proud of the choice.
For Zara, the move from a village of 17 houses to a city boarding house could have been daunting. Instead, she found the early weeks felt rather like a continuous sleepover. “We all just talked, growing closer and closer,” she recalls. The Boarding House began to feel like home, when the girls started “being there for each other, like a big loving family”.
Ask her what day girls miss out on, and the answer is twofold: the depth of friendship that comes from living alongside one another, and the simple luxury of only needing to wake at 7am, because the classrooms are just metres away.
