Road From Coorain

I very much liked the first section of the book, which describes her young girlhood on a 30,000 acre sheep station in the Australian outback. It has much of the elegiac yearning of books like How Green Was My Valley (1939)(Richard Llewellyn 1906-1983) and West With the Night (1941) (Beryl Markham 1902-1986). But as the book goes along it really takes on a sort of self pitying tone that I found a bit hard to take. In particular, she complains several times about how they weren't taught in school about how badly the aborigines were treated and the precipitating cause of her flight from Australia is an incident that she attributes to pure sexism. But in general, the story seems to be saying, "Look at all I achieved despite my hard scrabble upbringing out in the bush." Meanwhile, the girlhood she describes, while it does seem a little lonely and quite taxing physically, comes across as nearly idyllic and an ideal background for future self reliance and achievement. Add to that the relative wealth that her family eventually accumulates and the fortuitous appearance of scholarship money at opportune moments and I have trouble seeing what she has to complain about, other than a quarrelsome, but obviously lonely, mother.

She had me early, but lost me later--a half good book.

GRADE: C


colonial / immigrant worldview parallels   January 16, 2000
Katerina Pavelle (Pittsburgh, PA)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful

This book delivers a fascinating account of a fragile ecosystem and an equally fragile human society dependent on it. Jill Ker's coming of age is put into a societal and ecological context, which stimulates my curiosity about Australia and her other works. Her outside look at the "colonial mentality" resonates with my own immigrant's view of the cultures where I have lived, and raises interesting societal questions applicable not only to Australia. "The Road from Coorain" is a fast read despite longer descriptive passages, and I highly recommend it.


Life's tough ... Quit whining and get on with it   February 10, 2001
Jean Quinn (Fredericksburg, VA USA)
12 out of 30 found this review helpful

The Road To Coorain was long, dusty, and uninspiring in this autobiography by Jill Ker Conway. The reader passed by the scenery of childhood with much baggage along the road. This baggage being, too skinny, too fat, too pretty, always too intelligent, female and the mother who is Jill's cross to bear.

That is the overriding theme along this endless road, as Jill Ker Conway never fit into any situation of life due to these terrible burdens of misfortune. She was miserable as a child on the drought bowl of the Australian outback with parents whom she had to parent, no education for her exceptional young nubile brain until Jr. High School in a ghetto. There was the small bit of learning she could pilfer from her brother`s studies and assimilate from correspondence courses which her mother furnished for her. She seems genuinely amazed at her learning ability throughout this story and underlying all must wonder what she would have become with the same privileges that her two brothers received.

Friends did not come easily to this young lady and she claims to have never even been able to produce a conversation with anyone until she held her first job! All because she was cursed with her exceptional introspective mind filled with thoughts far beyond those of mortal men! Being born a female was surely another curse and she grew up well aware of that problem from her earliest memories. What a sad case she was and if all of these awkward situations due solely to her birth position, intelligence and sex were not enough she lost her oldest brother whom she adored in a fatal automobile accident. He was clearly her hero.

The brothers' death leads the reader into a new chapter in Ms. Conway's life and what a tedious one. Filling a good one half of the book with information of her university studies and her mother's emotional weakness. Of course Ms. Conway flourished in the University due to her superior intelligence but continued to be cursed by not having much fun and longed for a "normal" life. Even in "forcing herself" to be normal by ditching classes Ms Conway wins honors for her brilliance.

The end of the Road to Corrain moves swiftly if not abruptly within the final few pages as there is a bit of happiness for Ms. Conway. She falls in love with a young man. This is someone who loves her for her whole self but most especially her mind of course. Alas, it is too perfect a love and they break it off. Her final triumph is to leave her mother who is by now seriously mentally ill and venture to America where she can study all she wants and expand her already expanded mind with more history.

I really hated this book and felt that Ms.Conway while she may be brilliant is a seriously miserable human being with an inflated ego and can see why people avoided her like the plague all her life.


Informative and Interesting   August 7, 2001
V. VanCamp (Ithaca, New York USA)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

'The Road from Coorain' was a very interesting book and I thought it was well written. I found Jill Ker Conway's account of Australia's outback, cities, schooling and history very interesting and informative. I learned much from this book. It was intriguing to see how British history and the influence of the British formed the dynamics of Australia. There are areas in this book that are on the dry side and I did skim a few parts, but overall this book is very interesting.