“The Road from Coorain” Jill Ker Conway

I have seen and enjoyed many films set in Australia, some of which are autobiographical and most about women, and so it only seemed natural that I read an autobiography of an Australian woman. I chose “The Road from Coorain” on a recommendation from my sister, and I bought it at Gulliver’s used book store in Fairbanks, Alaska, two years ago. As with several books that I finished this past January, I started it last year and have read bits of it over time.

Last spring I took a minority perspective literature course. This is the only literature course that I have ever taken in English, and even though the students were of mixed ages, I was the oldest person in the course, including the instructor. I have read a lot, but I read mostly for pleasure and have never been schooled in literary analysis, which should be painfully obvious from this blog. The nine books that were required for the minority perspective course were not outside of my reading interests and I devoured the first five over Christmas break before the class even started. I was somewhat disappointed that the students of the class did not share my love of reading and made me feel that even in my limited world view of literature I have a broader interest in literature than many of them even though they were mostly English majors. In particular, they complained frequently about how much description there was in the books. I didn’t really understand what they were talking about, and with the exception of one of the books, I had no trouble maintaining interest in the reading.

This brings us back to Jill Ker Conway and “The Road to Coorain.” I think I now know what the students meant about too much description and may have approached my limit. I was engrossed in the stories of life on the station, her family and the vagaries of Australian weather, but there were times when I found the descriptions a little tedious and wanted to get on to the next chapter. I am still puzzled how I can want to read something and yet find parts of it drudgery at the same time, and I suspect this was what the students were referring to.

Jill Ker Conway was born four years after my mother, and I connected with her in that way but also because she spent so much time with her own mother as I did with mine while growing up. I found the contradictions in her mother interesting, that she had a career early in life when few women did and yet could not overcome the trauma of the deaths of her husband and her brother. She was able to use her skills and fortitude to nurse a friend near death, but she could not comfort herself in her grief. I wondered if Jill’s mother’s need for order was a symptom of some disorder or if that was a mechanism for coping with depression. Her ability to relax those restrictions while in Europe was something I couldn’t understand, and that leads me to believe it was a coping mechanism.

Another aspect of Jill’s life that I found compelling was her development as a person of the world. She came from a very narrow upbringing with little interaction with the world beyond what they could hear on the radio, where there were strong traditional ideas of how men and women worked and behaved. Over time, she came to her own conclusions about dress, behavior, native cultures and career and it was important for me to read about the development of her ideas and how she struggled and succeeded in putting them into action. Her experiences in college and graduate school resonated with me. In particular, her surprise at doing well on exams by doing what she enjoyed is an experience I share. After college she felt caught by her family dynamic and, even though I knew she moved to the U.S. and became the president of Smith College, I was almost surprised that she left Australia at the end of the book.

I have read two reviews that say “The Road from Coorain” inspired the reader to travel to Australia. Maybe it is because I have seen movies like “The Rabbit Fence,” “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” and “Japanese Story” that highlight the beautiful scenery of Australia, that “Coorain” did not inspire me to travel there. However, it is the images from those and other movies that I thought of as I read about the sheep station. “Coorain” also brought Nevil Shute’s book “A Town Like Alice” to mind, and I mentally compared Jill’s mother’s and Jean Paget’s experiences as women working among men in agricultural Australia.