The Road from Coorain

by Jill Ker Conway

Book Overview

In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood--a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394574567
• ISBN13: 9780394574561
• Release Date: April 1989
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A book that will stay will me always.

"The Western plains of New South Wales are grasslands." Grasslands that with their vastness, their cycles of drought and bounty, and above all their isolation, shaped a little girl who would one day become Smith College's first woman president.This book has been marketed as a coming of age story for girls. It's surely that, and a remarkable one. It is also (for this American reader, anyway) a fascinating look into a culture of many similarities - but with subtle, yet sometimes startling differences. Something else it ought to be is required reading for any young woman (particularly any gifted young woman!) trapped by a co-dependent relationship with her birth family. Read it, and think about what this world loses every time a woman capable of Jill Ker Conway's lifetime achievements subsumes her talents and sacrifices her dreams because the code of her childhood demands it.A book that will stay will me always.--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of "Love, Jimmy: A Maine Veteran's Longest Battle"

Seeking Coorain

Prior to reading this book, I had no interest in travelling to Australia. By the time I had finished the first chapter, my interest was a burning desire. Conway's prose style is descriptive to the point of painting vivid pictures while not being verbose or tiring. My husband and I sought to experience the "outback" west of Coorain. What a memorable stay - on a sheep station where the sheep shearer's cottages were used as guest houses. We've given copies of the book to at least 20 friends over the years as house guest gifts, Christmas and birthday presents. Local book clubs have feasted on its powerful story of what it was like for a woman to grow up in Australia in the middle of the last century.

A Fascinating Autobiography

Jill Ker-Conway's childhood in rural Australia and mid-20th century Sydney was one of the best autobiographies I have read. As an Australian, it was wonderful for me to see so clearly how our historic ties with Britain shaped our nation and our psyches, both positively and negatively. But this is not just a book for Australians. Many of my American friends have thoroughly enjoyed this book too. Ker-Conway's writing is fluid and poetic and is a sheer pleasure to read.

Australia and America - are their histories similiar?

Jill Ker Conway is an excellent, focused, academic writer, now President of Smith College in USA. She grew up in the orange dust of the Australia bush with no children as playmates, yet remembers a wonderful childhood with an especial concern for her mother's life. She writes this book as a successful adult, reconstructing the steps that got her through the University of Sydney's very demanding late-1950's history department. At that time, university studies were open to women, but the focus was on males, both living and dead white men. It was British colonial history that was taught, and most educated people picked up an inferiority complex about being Australian. Near the end of the book she writes about how she shook herself loose of this view, became proud and fond of the outback, and finally accepted that she was a city person. NEar the end she lands a history-teaching position at the U. of Sydney while enrolled in a Master's level program there, and it all closes tantalyzingly with a successful bid for a position at Harvard in USA. I've noticed often as a tourguide that British, Canadian and Australian women on my buses are very well-read and discuss books as a matter of fact, as something that one should know. They speak in a crisp and exact way with reasoned opinions. This writer falls in that category, well at the forefront of course. She knows herself, her own mind, and knows injustice and sexism when she experiences it herself. Her widening eyes begin to grasp that Europeans have simply grabbed the land of the aborigines. As a historian, she starts to want to know their view. To me, as an American, it is a slippery slope. There is only one logical conclusion: that all the land should be given back. Since this cannot be done, and Asians are beginning to flood into Australia as well since the 1960's, then the best strategy of the whites, if guilt they do feel over this landgrab, is to donate of their own accord time, help, money, food, clothing or training to their own poor. Academics around the world are concerned with the rights of "native peoples", but to turn back the clock is impossible. The interlopers are here. I greatly look forward to hie'ing my white yet hairy flesh over to the library and looking for the sequel to her life story and changing views. May she come to some peace about her ancestors' plopping down on the abo's!

Inspiring and beautifully written

This story deeply touched me. I wish I'd read it when I was in my 20's. The descriptions of the Australian outback and its history are beautifully written. But more importantly this is the story of a young girl's development of strength, intellectual curiosity, courage and individuality. Her puzzlement and subsequent outrage at the gender discrimination she was subject to struck a nerve for me. I particularly recommend this book to college age women, but it surely would be an inspiration to anyone.