The Road From Coorain

The Road From Coorain by Jill Ker Conway 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 and ways of life that seem a century apart.
She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At
eight still too small to mount her horse unaided she was
galloping miles alone across Coorain her parents thirty
thousand windswept drought-haunted acres in the Australian
outback doing a mans job of helping herd the sheep because
World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved
(and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape
beautiful and hostile whose uncertain weathers tormented
the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and
inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her
large-visioned father and her strong radiant mother who
had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of
loneliness and bone-breaking toil who seemed miraculously
to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the
harsh outback and who upon her husbands sudden death when
Jill was ten began to slide—bereft of the partnership of
work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her—into
depression and dependency. We see Jill staggered by the
loss of her father catapulted to what seemed another
planet—the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded
noisy cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of
the University but with it a yet more demanding course of
lessons—Jill embracing new ideas new possibilities while
at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and
resenting it escaping into drink pulling herself back
striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength
coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and
beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her
newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain in America Jill
Conway became a historian and the first woman president of
Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from
Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power by its
understanding of the ways in which a total deep-rooted
commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and
imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and
anguish and of growing up as a journey toward the
difficult life of the free.