The Road from Coorain

Few things seem further from North America than Australia. Not only is it half-a-world away, but the culture varies dramatically. Conway grew up in the back-country of Australia where she often did not regularly see other families and neighbors were tens-of-miles away. That simple start, told as well as it is in this book, sparks the reader’s interest. The fact that she ended up at Harvard by the end of the book should pique even more interest.

Conway details her life in the outback, her transition to a private school in Sydney, and her undergraduate days at the University of Sydney. As such, this memoir is a real-life coming-of-age tale. She describes how she fell in love with the field of history and decided to dedicate her life to show more being a scholar of women’s history.

Her writing style is impressive and entertaining. Not only does she describe things accurately and with a healthy distance, but she also picks interesting details that bring her world alive to the reader. Obviously well-read, she shows the character that brought her from an oppressive environment towards eventually becoming a leader in women’s education.

I find personal inspiration from feminists like Conway. Often, men are not encouraged to find their own place in the world like many women (especially ambitious women) are forced to. As such, the narrative of male lives often does not involve the quest for being and existence. However, I find that I, too, have those questions. Conway’s tale gives me some more rungs to hang my experience on, and for that, I am grateful. show less

This is probably the best memoir I have read to date. I find myself drawn to memoirs to gather insight into how people achieved their goals or philosophy or overall situation in life, but am frustrated by tales that whine, that pat themselves on the back, that blame others, that name drop and gossip, or that don't reflect on what they learned or how. This was not any of that.
The first third of the book covers her life on the plains of Australia on a sheep farm. The life was hard, but all she knew. The family was fairly isolated and very dependent on each other. She identifies her relationship with her parents and her brothers, admittedly adding in insights that she obtained upon reflection as an adult, but which did not take away from show more the immediacy of the account. Her dealings and descriptions of the few people that they had contact with and the rare trips that they took off the ranch gave a real feel for her life. The weather played an enormous role in the well-being of the ranch and that came across loud and clear.
When the death of her father and the extended years of drought send them to Sydney, we get a different perspective; how an intelligent, socially inept child attempts to adapt to city life and other children. Conway looks at what were her actions and what she was trying to do and reflects on what she did right and what was wrong. She is not sugar coating, blaming or dramatizing, but trying to understand what happened and how it got her to the next situation.
The last third of the book deals with her coming to terms with her intellect, her education, her search for a personal philosophy and an understanding of her country and her place in it. Her strained relationship with her mother, her ambition and ambivalence toward Australian society converge in an understanding that she does not fit into Australia and must leave despite her love for the land of the outback. I have never read a more thoughtful memoir and look forward to reading her follow-up, True North. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1168976. html

Wow. Once I got going, I really couldn't put it down. It's a really impressive autobiography, of a woman growing up in Australia before, during and after the second world war, as a child on a remote sheep station (the Coorain of the title, which some diligent Googling locates here), and then at school and university in Sydney, suffering the deaths of her father and brother and the slow decline of her mother. Yet at the same time it's a story of empowerment and enlightement, of spiritual, intellectual and moral development, as the young Jill realises what it means to be a white woman in Australia, and later to be a white Australian woman in the rest of the world.

Her descriptions of the landscape show more of western New South Wales are lyrical, which makes her account of the long years of drought that killed her father and their lifestyle all the more gruelling. (Six decades on, things weren't much better). Then, after the move to Sydney (she was eleven), she is compelling on the human landscape, both of the silent girl from the bush suddenly immersed in the ways of the city, and of the daughter struggling with her mother's ambitions and her own aspirations. The ending, of course, only points to new beginnings.

I confess I know very little about Australia, despite my four and a half years working for its former foreign minister. While I've enjoyed my dabbling in Peter Carey's novels, I have to say that they did not whet my enthusiasm anything like as much as The Road from Coorain has. show less

This is the memoir of a woman who grew up on an Australian sheep farm and would go on to become the first woman president of Smith College. I started this book expecting to read a story about the Australian outback and got that--and a lot more. Yes, the picture of growing up on a isolated sheep "station" in the forties was certainly interesting. Conway starts with the landscape, giving a picture of the flat and vast vistas, the endless periodic droughts in the arid, ecologically fragile land and how it and the very masculine, stoic "Bush ethos" shapes you. But above all this is an intellectual, as well as emotional, memoir. Growing up with her parents and two older brothers she was so isolated she couldn't remember seeing another female show more child until she was seven years old and had no playmates her own age. Her memoir was a story of continually expanding intellectual and social horizons. First when she moved to Sydney to enroll in a girl's school at eleven, then as a student at Sydney University in the fifties. She described beautifully how her experiences changed her life and thinking. From what it was like to first encounter writers such as Marx, Samuel Butler, James Joyce, Jung, T.S. Eliot, to the shock of finding herself rejected for a civil service position despite being at the top of her class--solely because she was a woman. The writers who inspired and challenged my thinking were different, but I could identify with her intoxication upon encountering a larger world of ideas, and appreciated how she began to ponder how being a woman and an Australian had shaped her and history. show less

Conway leisurely sets the scenee for almost 2 chapters before getting to her birth. She analyzes, from her more mature perspective, the social structure she is a part of. The importance of landscape in the development of her character was important, and more clearly states an intuition I have felt.
As I finished the Australian book, I saw similarities with The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston: in both, women were dominated by their mothers, and both used their scholarly skills as a means of escape from the roles laid out for them. Conway's book, even tho it ends when she is about 26, leaves us assured that she does find her own path because the perspective of her older self is evident.
2011 review

I’ve been wanting to read this book forever, and recently found it in the library. It doesn’t disappoint. It begins with a whole chapter describing the Australian bush country – the shape and colors of the land, the weather, the birds and animals, the people. It’s as though she’s painting a vivid, detailed background, empty of specific characters. And then the characters appear: Jill and her family.

Conway leaves very little out, but at the same time, crafts her life story with great skill and command. The main thing that comes through is that she was shaped by Australia, with all its contradictions – its very strong code of behavior coupled with the emulation of all things Britain. She describes her emotional, physical and show more educational development as she becomes conscious of these contradictions and works through them.

At the end, she says “I’ll never refer to Asia as the Far East again." show less

A memoir about discovering where you are. Conway describes her childhood and adolescence with a historian's eye for detail and context. She details her discovery of gender, race, and class discrimination, post-colonial politics, and how her typically Australian willingness to suffer in the face of hopeless odds has permeated her family life.

This was so impressive in its beauty, emotional honesty, and intellectual rigor. It was a great introduction to Australia for those of us for whom the name only conjures kangaroos, exotic poisonous animals, and Ned Kelly, and it's also a great introduction to the transformative power of history as an academic enterprise. I will definitely look for more from Conway in the future.