Chefs — Remote Lodges, Islands and Stations

What this listing is

We are not advertising one specific job here. This is a standing listing for chefs who want to work on remote and regional properties in Australia, so that when a kitchen does come up we already know who you are, where you’ll go and when you’re free.

The work

Most of the kitchens we recruit for feed somewhere between twenty and eighty guests, two or three times a day, with a brigade of two to five. The same kitchen also feeds the staff — which is the part chefs coming from town don’t always expect. Your hardest critics live in the room next door and eat everything you cook, every day, for a whole season.

Freight arrives once a week, sometimes once a fortnight, by truck or barge or light plane. You order well ahead and you write the menu around what actually turns up. When something doesn’t turn up, you change the menu. There is no supplier to ring at seven in the morning.

There is no relief chef down the road either. If someone goes down, service still opens.

Living on site

You live where you work, usually in staff quarters. A head chef on a bigger property is sometimes given a cottage or a house, and some of those are partner and family friendly.
Meals are almost always included. Accommodation is usually included, and where it isn’t, it’s cheap.
Connectivity ranges from Starlink that runs fine to a single spot behind the kitchen where a text will send.
Days off are days off on the property. Getting to a town for the weekend is often not an option.
You work, eat and live with the same twelve people for months. It is the best part of the job for some people and the reason others leave in week six.

The shape of the year

Remote hospitality hires ahead of its seasons, usually by two to three months. Roughly how it runs in Australia:

Southern summer — Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Kangaroo Island, the NSW coast. Properties trade hard from December to March. Most of the hiring is done September to November.
Top End and the Kimberley — dry-season operations from about April to October. Hiring runs February to May.
Snow — hiring February to May for a June opening.
Islands and boat-access lodges — the lift starts around June and runs through September.
Outback stations — cooks are usually taken on January to March for the April-to-October cycle.

Operators brief us two to three months before they need someone. That is why being on a register before a window opens is worth more than starting to look once it has.

On money

Packages vary more in this work than they do in town, because so much of what you’re paid isn’t salary.

A head chef role we listed in June — a year-round salaried job at an island lodge — was $110,000 plus superannuation and a bonus, with a private two-bedroom house, utilities, meals and the flight in included. That sits at the upper end. Live-in sous chef and chef de partie roles sit well below it.

We don’t publish a band for every kitchen, because we’d be making it up. What we will do is tell you the actual salary, the roster, what the accommodation is and what comes out of your pay for it, before you go forward for anything.

Who this suits

Chefs who want to cook somewhere genuinely remote and are clear-eyed about what that costs. People who can run a section, or a kitchen, without a supplier network to lean on.

In our experience the ones who last a full season came for a reason beyond the pay — the country, the diving, the quiet, or a year of saving hard with nothing to spend it on.

Chefs and cooks from overseas: both occupations sit on Australia’s Core Skills Occupation List, so employer sponsorship is a genuine pathway in this work — usually a Skills in Demand visa (subclass 482), with a permanent pathway after two years. A sponsored role has a minimum salary attached to it, currently around $79,500. Whether a particular property will sponsor is a separate question: it costs the employer money and months, and plenty of small operators don’t do it. Tell us your work rights when you register and we’ll be straight with you about what that opens and what it closes.

How this works

Register on our find-work page and tell us the sort of property you want and when you’re free. There are two of us and we read every registration ourselves. If something fits, we’ll call you. If nothing fits for a while you stay on the register. We’ll check in about once a year to ask whether you still want to be on it — you come off whenever you ask, and also if we check in and hear nothing back.

Registering here is not an application for a named job. We will always tell you which property a role is at before you go forward for it.

About Wild Ops

Wild Ops is a recruitment agency for remote and regional hospitality in Australia. Cindy is a chef by trade and Jordan is a carpenter who moved into managing properties. Between us we’ve run remote and regional properties here for the better part of fifteen years — luxury lodges on the Great Ocean Road, a boat-access lodge in NSW, a wilderness lodge in the Top End, a motel on the south coast of Western Australia.