The Road from Coorain

Written by Jill Ker Conway

Narrated by Barbara Caruso

In the 1930s, Jill Ker's parents bought a sheep farm on the western plains of New South Wales. In 1944, they lost nearly everything when a drought hit. Forced to leave Coorain, 11-year-old Jill and her mother settled in Sydney where Jill struggled to find a place for herself among Sydney's elite. Her story, both a chronicle of life in the Australian outback and the odyssey of a brilliant woman fighting the constraints of her time, offers a loving view of Australia. Includes a taped afterword by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440702952

Reviews for The Road from Coorain

[brewbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I found that I really could comprehend her world growing up as a young woman in Australia in the middle 20th century. Her intellectual growth from a child of the bush to a scholar was very illuminating. Her world view kept changing as she learned (and thought more) about the world. I will have to attemprt some of her other work. I highly recoomend this biography.

[bookishdame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One must not live in Wellesley, MA, and fail to read Jill Ker Conway's "The Road from Coorain," or at least that was the way it was in the days when her book was first published! Being a Wellesley girl, myself, it behooved me to read...and I did.This autobiography of Wellesley College's President is a coming of age story about the harsh life of Australian countryside. Resilience, hardscrabble wisdom and a stick-to-itivity are some of the virtues learned in Ms Conway's early years that have bode well in her later years. There's also a profound understanding of women's needs, their ways and their accomplishments that was forged in her early years. Perhaps it was during these years she learned that education was the only stability she could count on as her father's death and her mother's illness left her own life without steady ground.An accomplished, brilliant woman, Ms Conway earns the respect of all who have the good fortune to know her, and who are guided by her. She understands women and champions their struggles.This little book in particular has been nominated for and has won various prestigious awards. It's the first of a series of books she has written.I liked this small, thoughtful little volume. There's alot to be discovered in its pages.Your Bookish Dame

[nelliemc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Especially good in the first half of the book, when she describes growing up in an isolated sheep-farm in the middle of Australia. So vivid you can feel the winds, smell the sheep, and agonize over the lack of intellectual/cultural stimulation. A little less involving when she describes the move back to the city after her father's death (suicide?) and her striving to make her way as an intellectual in a society with very traditional feminist values. A little too much time spent on her mother, who was very complex and trying, as if the author was trying to figure her out by writing about her. Unfortunately, I found the author (who eventually left for her PhD in American history at Harvard and the presidency of Smith College) far more interesting than her mother and learned less about her. In particular I would have liked to have learned a lot more why, when she so obviously identified herself as an Australian, she made American history her field.

[pjsullivan_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How does a child from the Australian outback grow up to become president of a prestigious college in America? This is her story, a candid and realistic memoir of growing up on a sheep station in the middle of nowhere. The first part of the book is about her down-to-earth life in the bush. Later, when she moves to civilization, she ponders the larger world. What was the role of Australia within the British Empire? Was Great Britain a cruel colonial oppressor or a role model to be emulated? Was Australia an intellectual wasteland or an admirable land of vigorous pioneers? She wonders where she belongs. She loves the outback, but not its isolation. She considers England, for its historical and cultural riches, but finds it snobbish and condescending. She likes Australia, but doesn't fit in there, and isn't likely to. She has intractable family problems, so she escapes to the other side of the planet, far enough away to "be totally safe from family visits." She makes a clean break, with no intention ever to return. "I wasn't going to fight anymore. I was going to admit defeat; turn tail; run for cover." A good read if you are interested in Australia, in the outback, in sheep ranching, in the empowerment of women, in dysfunctional family dynamics. A straightforward account of one person's struggle for self discovery in a constricting world.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jill Conway's memoir is about her unusual childhood in Australia. Raised until she was 11 on a sheep farm in Coorain, Australia, Conway grows up without other children for companionship. All she knows are her family, (her only playmates being her older brothers), the hard work associated with raising sheep, and the cruelty of mother nature when she doesn't bring the rains. She doesn't have social graces, competitive edges or the typical angsts associated with coming-of age girls. Things like sports, fashion and friendships are lost on her when she finally reaches the big city of Sydney.

[astrologerjenny · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 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."

[elsyd_19 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful! This is a memoir/travelogue, that reads like a novel. I was intrigued from beginning to end. John Kenneth Galbraith called this "A small masterpiece", and so it is.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[raschneid_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[bookheaven_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting true story of life in the outback.