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Described on the dust jacket as “Recollections of a harsh and beautiful journey into adulthood,” Conway’s memoir retells her life story beginning in a remote sheep ranch (or station) in west Australia. Jill Ker is just eleven when her father is killed in an accident and her mother takes over the ranching operation. With her mother she moves as a teenager in 1948 to Sydney, and for the next dozen years they run the station from long distance. “Coorain,” is the aboriginal word meaning “windy place,” which her father named their property when the family settled it in 1930. Describing herself as “intellectually precocious” but shy and “socially inept,” Jill heads for boarding school in Sydney and then on to the university there. By the end of her first full year of studies at the University of Sydney, she has proven herself an excellent student in both English and history, and her study of Australian history proves particularly mind opening. The memoir deals more with Jill Ker’s intellectual evolution than with her inner emotional or romantic life. Her greatest challenge turns out to be her mother, a bright and capable woman who had to drop out of school and who widowed at an early age and does not remarry. When, despite her excellent credentials, Jill is turned down for a position with the Department of External Affairs, apparently because of her gender, she embarks on a trip to Europe with her mother, after which she opts to go to graduate school not in England, as most Australians would have done at the time, but in the United States.

Australian History

Author Information  

Currently a Visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, in the Australian outback, and grew up on Coorain, an isolated sheep station her father developed in 1930, following his combat service in the First World War. She had no playmates except for her two older brothers. Her father died in an accident when she was eleven, and when she was fourteen, the family moved to Sydney where Jill Ker went to boarding school and the University of Sydney, majoring in history. While at Harvard University working on her doctorate, which she completed in 1969, she married a Canadian professor, John Conway (he died in 1995). She taught for about ten years at the University of Toronto before being named the first woman president of Smith College in 1975, a post she held until 1985. In addition to her memoir, The Road from Coorain (1989), which was made into a movie for television in 2001, a partial list of Conway’s published books includes Women Reformers and American Culture (1987); a memoir of her life in Toronto entitled True North (1995); Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History (1997); a scholarly study of autobiography entitled When Memory Speaks (1998); Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment (2000); and A Woman’s Education (2001), which concerns her years as president of Smith College. She also writes murder mysteries with a friend under the pseudonym Clare Munnings.

Interview by Powells.com
Interview by PBS

Discussion Questions

1. Only about a quarter of Conway’s memoir is located at the sheep station in Coorain; most of it concerns her teenage and college years in Sydney. Which locale engages you most? When she leaves Australia for the U.S. in the last pages of the book, she tells us it was hardest for her to leave Coorain, yet she has not lived there for some fifteen years. What does she think she will miss about that place? Why might she regret leaving Coorain more than she does leaving her native Australia?

2. Reflect some on Conway’s developing relationship with her sometimes difficult mother. At the end of the book Jill is about 26, her mother 62 and addicted to alcohol and tranquilizers. Jill comes to see herself as having been something of an enabler. Do you agree? Does it seem to you that she is deserting her mother at her time of greatest need? How does Conway deal with her decision?

3. Unlike the writers of some memoirs with which you may be familiar (Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Mary Clearman Blew’s Balsamroot), Conway’s includes no dialogue. Why do you suppose this is? When a writer of memoir uses dialogue supposedly remembered from thirty or more years ago, he or she must fabricate it, so most readers do not assume people literally said just what the author writes. What do you think is gained, or lost, by Conway’s decision not to employ dialogue?

4. Jill Ker Conway opens her study of life narrative writing, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998), with a question: “Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?” In what sense might that question be considered “provocative”? Conway also asks, “Why is this drive to engage in scrutiny of one’s own life so characteristic of the West?” Assuming that her observation is correct, how would you respond to that question?

5. Other books in this series deal with cultures quite unfamiliar and perhaps even exotic or alien to most of us, but this one deals with a modern, industrialized, democratic nation with a sizable middle class, and a high standard of living. Moreover, we share a common language. So, what, if anything, do you see that differentiates life in Australia from that in the United States? What characteristics does Conway connect with Australian values and self-concepts?

6. Conway’s memoir concerns mostly the 1940s and 1950s, whereas other books in this series concern more recent decades. Do you have more of a sense of a historical past when you read this book than you do with the others? An exception might be Carlos Eire’s memoir of growing up in Cuba during the late 1950s. If you have also read that book, which of the two do you prefer, and why?