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Jill Ker Conway
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The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway (1990-08-11) Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1800

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 571 ratings
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Age 11, Conway ( Women Reformers and American Culture ) left the strenuous life on her family's sheep cultivate in the Australian outback for school in war-time Sydney, loaded by a candidly reliant, as of late widowed mother. A vivacious interest and entering acumen light up this curiously target record of the creator's advance from a single adolescence - the most engaging piece of the story - to open accomplishment as leader of Smith College and now teacher at MIT. Talented with a capacity to adjust to an extensive variety of societies and individuals and notwithstanding imbued Australian partiality against intelligent people, Conway gave herself to the investigation of history and writing, impelled on by incredible British-style tutoring. Her further enterprises could without much of a stretch make a compensating second volume.
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  1. Publisher
    Vintage Books; First Vintage Books edition (1990-08-11)
  2. Publication date
    January 1, 1800
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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01FKSVK5K
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Books; First Vintage Books edition (1990-08-11) (January 1, 1800)
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.8 ounces
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 571 ratings

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Jill Ker Conway

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
571 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

BlueWrit
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book.
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2024
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Read this many years ago. Very happy to have a new copy. Great memoir by an accomplished woman who went far from her young roots in the Australian outback.
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delicateflower152
4.0 out of 5 stars A Beautifully Written Memoir ...
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2014
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Jill Ker Conway’s autobiography, “The Road From Coorain”, is a beautifully written memoir. The flow of the narrative and the broad vocabulary used throughout the book are exquisite. Although the impact of her life story is sometimes slowed by her mother's wants and needs, these experiences helped shape Conway and, as such, are an integral part of her story.

Detailing her life growing up in the Australian outback during the second third of the twentieth century, Conway is able to draw the reader into that era. The beauty of the landscape and the harsh reality of the elements, the economic cycles, and the psychological impact on both men and women of these influences are vividly described. The elitism and the class differences between landed individuals and those who managed or worked on the stations become evident as the Conway family’s fortunes roller coaster between wealth and economic hardship.

Societal attitudes toward women’s roles and acceptable occupations could have discouraged Conway from ever progressing. However, Jill Ker Conway’s intellectual strength, coupled with her work ethic, propelled her beyond those roles accepted and available to women in the mid-twentieth century to becoming a university professor and eventually president of Smith College.

Today’s young women may view much of “The Road From Coorain” as ancient history. Women who came of age in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s may remember or may have experienced situations similar to those Conway encountered. All will be inspired by and amazed at Jill Ker Conway’s life and accomplishments.
9 people found this helpful
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Anonymouse
5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous descriptions of the Australian Outback.
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2018
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I knew nothing about Jil Ker Conway until I heard an old interview with her on NPR shortly after she died, but it was enough to intrigue me. This first memoir of hers - I believe there are three - takes us up to the point where she leaves Australia and the clutches of her controlling mother. For me the first half of the book, her time on a desolate sheep farm in the outback, is the most intriguing section. The lengthy opening description of the outback is quite unlike anything I have ever come across and opened my mind to her reoccurring theme that Australia's fascination with English Christian culture was ridiculously out of place: "It is hard to imagine a kookaburra feeding St. Jerome or accompanying St. Francis. They belong to a physical and spiritual landscape which is outside the imagination of the Christian West."
5 people found this helpful
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Susan Berk
5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book: Jill Kerr Conway is a women's woman
Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2014
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Jill Kerr
Conway is one of the most interesting and brilliant women of our time.
She is a true intellectual with passion and feelings who sincerely cares about and works toward the betterment of women.
I found her book honest, authentic and extremely well written,
Her life story and journey is fascinating. She does not hold back. She is true to herself.her descriptive writing from how she looks,what she is wearing and how she manages life's challenges from the bush to academia and comes out a regular person who can inspire us all. If you would like to know the real person and meet her someday, read this book. I am on to her memoir and others of hers......
meet her
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DouginNC
3.0 out of 5 stars Good start, then very judgemental
Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2017
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Summary: "Cursed be my intellect, affluence, and robust life experiences because there may never be someone so exceptional as to live up to my image of myself."

This one book is many books. It is a remarkable recollection of a young life in Australia. Then, in one of the nine chapters, it takes on a literary bent with brilliant and entertaining use of language. Often, it devolves into segments of self-pity as well as loathing toward others. Does that make it a psychological thriller, a mystery, or a narcissistic treatise? Discuss amongst yourselves and support your ideas, as the scholarly Jill Ker Conway probably charged her students and peers over the years.

Psychologically, the reader is presented a person who, through her twenties, couldn't be bothered to hold any work position for any length of time. Whether in law, political administration, fashion, education, or simpler tasks, some aspect of that work was beyond her tolerance. Such attitude is at least partly owed to the affluence that did not require her to work, but that is rarely raised as a factor.

The thrilling aspect of the psychological spaghetti in these pages is the roller coaster of angst poured out by the author, with the reader along for the ride. There is family, social, climate, political, historical, and enough other kinds of angst to fill a world's fair. That may be interesting (the angst or the fair), but one tires from a non-stop intake of it.

Mysteriously, we learn little depth about any characters surrounding the author other than her father during her astounding telling of early years on the Australian prairie, and of her mother as the anchor (with both good and bad meanings inferred) of her life. There are rarely more than brief mentions of others and name-dropping lists; nary a vignette to develop surrounding characters.

I relished the onsetting story set in the unfamiliar Antipodal pastoral land to which the first four chapters were devoted. I was thrilled by bits of artfully-crafted phrasing through that section, which then flourished in most of chapter five and made me feel I was on a journey through life that was discovering literary potential just as it might have evolved for the young lass as her life shifted toward education.

Yet by the end of chapter five to the final pages, the clarion call was that of the prototypical picture of the opera singer in preparation for a performance: "Me, me, me; Me, Me, Me!; Me, Me, ME!!" There was sound and fury but too little substance and story to mold a truly interesting tale despite the litany of subject matter that was mentioned.

Many readers will enjoy this exploration of soul by commentary. The author presents herself as an interesting character. I might have enjoyed the effort had there been more introspection and less outwardly-focused criticism. There were times when I was ready to recommend this work to a teenage relative in the United States, that she might appreciate another kind of life in another part of the world, presented by someone of intellect. Such desire was not there by the end of the book.
12 people found this helpful
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Unknown
4.0 out of 5 stars Down Under and Way Back
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2015
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The book provides an intimate look at the progress from the back country of Australia to a busy world. It is interesting to see how different cultures perceive one's place in life as well as the customs and expectations that govern people, especially women. To be different is often intimidating. Jill's thoughts and reactions to who she is inside and whom she becomes are fascinating. Though sometimes ponderous because of the long, dense paragraphs, the book is rewarding.
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Judy M
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent biography about outback Australia
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 13, 2023
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This is quite a book, well written by a highly successful academic who is the unusually objective about her own life, particularly interesting about her early years on an outback farm - heartbreaking in parts.
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Kes
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book about the Australian experience
Reviewed in Canada on January 10, 2019
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Jill Ker Conway's autobiography is a very insightful look at the Australian experience through the 1920s-50s. Someone else said it's "fascinating how she makes herself effectively a case study in the history of transformations in the social consciousness of Australians in the fifties." Thank you, I was struggling to put that into words!

The first third of the book outlines Jill's childhood in the Australian outback, the second third takes us through her school years and her mother's mental decline, and the final third deals with Jill's struggles against the social values of the time and place, and finally deciding on her path in life. Although the different stages of Jill's life were quite different from each other, I found all three parts very interesting and enlightening. If you are reading for entertainment, I suppose the school years in the middle might be less interesting, but if you are reading to gain insight into the Australian identity, then all three parts are integral to that, and remain compelling all the way through.

The book opens with vivid descriptions of Australia - the land and its solitude, the plant and animal life, the climate, and how all these things shaped the lives and attitudes of the settlers. "The bush ethos which grew up from making a virtue out of loneliness and hardship... When disaster struck, what mattered was unflinching courage and the refusal to consider despair." This is followed by a quick sketch of her parents' background and how they came to hold their 18,000 acre property, to give us the context Jill was born into in 1934.

Jill spent her childhood in the Australian outback where her family raised sheep for their wool. She became her father's station hand at a young age, then had to adjust to a completely different world, ie, city life and the strange rules of school. Her life was marked by several different personal tragedies, including two sudden deaths in the family and the loss of all their sheep during the great drought of the '40s. They held on to the property, though, and made a strong comeback. Jill loved her native land and felt most at home in the bush, but she was also a woman who wanted to do serious work and have it make a difference, so she ended up moving to the United States where she could do the work she wanted; to write about the real history of Australia, not as a British colony but as a country in its own right, with its own cultural identity, as shaped by its environment, the heritage of its aboriginal people, its settlers, and the influence of its South Pacific neighbors.

I have left out a lot about family relationships, because I don't want to write an essay, but those parts are also interesting (and complicated) and pertinent to the subject of Australian cultural values. The Australian class system, and discrimination against women and aborigines, and the Australian experience of WWII (very different from the Western experience of the same) are also important topics. All of these things need to be seen together to see the whole picture of what it meant to be an Australian at that time in history, and Jill Ker Conway shows the entire panorama in vivid detail.
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Annette Welsh
5.0 out of 5 stars Mémorable et une leçon de vie
Reviewed in France on November 25, 2019
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Excellente autobiographie par une femme admirable. Très bien écrit.
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Helereb
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Australia on February 13, 2018
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Great story and well told.
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ELISABETH
4.0 out of 5 stars The Road from Coorain
Reviewed in France on January 28, 2018
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Intéressant récit d'une autre culture, un autre temps. Pour le style... paragraphes très longues, un peu trop denses donc visuellement un peu difficile, faut s'appliquer!
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