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Original Title:	The Road from Coorain
ISBN:	0679724362 (ISBN13: 9780679724360)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Biography or Autobiography (1990), Laurence L. & Thomas Winship/PEN New England Award (1989)

The Road from Coorain: A Woman's Exquisitely Clear-Sighted Memoir of Growing Up Australian

Jill Ker Conway

Paperback | Pages: 238 pages

Rating: 4.05 | 11368 Users | 589 Reviews

Details Of Books The Road from Coorain: A Woman's Exquisitely Clear-Sighted Memoir of Growing Up Australian

Title	:	The Road from Coorain: A Woman's Exquisitely Clear-Sighted Memoir of Growing Up Australian
Author	:	Jill Ker Conway
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 238 pages
Published	:	August 11th 1990 by Vintage (first published 1989)
Categories	:	Autobiography. Memoir. Nonfiction. Biography. Cultural. Australia. Biography Memoir

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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 "man's 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 husband's 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.

Rating Of Books The Road from Coorain: A Woman's Exquisitely Clear-Sighted Memoir of Growing Up Australian

Ratings: 4.05 From 11368 Users | 589 Reviews

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I enjoyed reading this story very much, but I have to admit that I liked the first half of the story much better than the last half. I have had a hard time trying to figure out why though. I feel that it was more because of the information about Australia and life on the sheep ranch and conditions then, than the more mundane times of an academic in Sydney. It feels wrong to make this comparison, but it is the truth for me. The isolation and desolation endured by the young woman and her family in

I loved this memoir for two reasons--first for the lyrically beautiful story of growing up in the lonely, remote Australian outback; and second for the story of her struggle to become a well-educated and successful female in what was at that time (early 50s) a 'man's world'. In her story we see the growth of the feminist view as she is passed over for a position simply because she is a woman, and when young male friends at social gatherings turn away when she attempts to discuss serious topics.

Didn't know I was going to love this book. Jill Ker Conway came of age during a time when society did not know what to do with an intelligent woman. She only wanted to be taken seriously, and she was determined to make a difference in the world. And she did! My review: The Road From Coorain

Even if Jill Ker Conway hadn't distinguished herself as the first female president of smith college, I would still highly recommend this book. this is a memoir of her first 25 years growing up in Australia's bush country and eventually moving to Sydney. it is startling to read about conditions and a lifestyle that seem more suited to the 1800s, rather than the mid 20th-century, and i definitely have a tinge of envy that as a seven-year-old, Ker Conway was helping her dad to herd sheep on

This is one of the greats of Australian letters, a masterclass in precise, elegant writing that evokes scenery like few other authors can and layers this with the drama of place and family, so richly told here. It is striking at every turn and I was left marvelling at the restraint in the writing and the emotional punch it leaves nonetheless.

A fantastic and engaging memoir showing how Jill Ker Conway's early years on the sheep farm in Coorain, Australia helped shape her into the academic she later became here in the United States.This book starts off beautifully with in depth descriptions of the harsh Australian outback, a place I've never been, but would like to go, and through Ms. Conway's words I was there. Then the book ends with Jill Ker Conway leaving for America at age 26. I enjoyed the fact that education was fun for her,

Brilliant.I may come up with more words later, but right now I'm in a 'good book coma'.