The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
I took a breather in my bender of 2007 books for my book group’s pick, Jill Ker Conway’s Road from Coorain. It’s a memoir of her girlhood on a sheep farm in outback Australia, her education through university, and her difficult and changing relationships with her family, especially her mother.
Conway is a skilled writer. The beginning of the book is a eulogy to her childhood and the few happy years her family lived on a successful sheep farm, prior to a five year drought.
When my father left in the morning to work on the fences, or on one of the three bores that watered the sheep and cattle, my mother heard no human voice save the two children. There was no contact with another human being and the silence was so profound it pressed upon the eardrums. My father, being a westerner, born into that profound peace and silence, felt the need for it like an addiction to a powerful drug. Here, pressed into the earth by the weight of that enormous sky, there is real peace. To those who know it, the annihilation of the self, subsumed into the vast emptiness of nature, is akin to a religious experience. We children grew up to know it and seek it as our father before us. What was social and sensory deprivation for the stranger was the earth and sky that made us what we were. For my mother, the emptiness was disorienting, and the loneliness and silence a daily torment of existential dread.
After she leaves the outback, she begins to recognize Australia as a country unto itself. She was raised and schooled with England, the great colonizer, as the ideal in all things. She carefully chronicles her developing consciousness of Australia’s social and historical tensions. On visiting England for the first time:
My landscape was sparer, more brilliant in color, stronger in its contrast, majestic in its scale,and bathed in shimmering light.
Conway went on to become a noted historian of women’s history in America, and the president of Smith College. This memoir of her early years is an engaging look into one woman’s struggle for intellectual independence from the constraints of Australian education, and emotional independence from her mother.
Interestingly, there were a few things in this book that reminded me of Marianne Wiggins’ Shadow Catcher, written last year. The description of the self-crushing isolation above is similar to how Wiggins writes of the drive from California to Las Vegas. And both books feature fathers who die early, and somewhat mysteriously, and the children’s subsequent troubled relationship with the mother. I was surprised and pleased to find common threads in these two seemingly random books from my reading pile.
April 15th, 2008 at 1:18 am
We read this a while back in my book group. I’m terrible at recalling lots of detail (and this was a while ago), but I seem to remember feeling frustrated with her characterizations of her mother as “uneducated”. Certainly her mother was not formally educated, and, if I remember correctly, was not happy with the choices she felt she had in her life, but the vast quantities of books she sent for and devoured must still be given some level of respect. Then again, as someone who remains frustrated with much of what passes for formal education, perhaps I’m biased.
I’m hoping that I’ve remembered this book correctly and you’re not scratching your head wondering what on earth I’m referring to.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:15 am
I loved Conway’s memoirs–she has another about her later years in school and then her work in Canada and at Smith. Strangely enough, she was quoted extensively in a recent article in the New Yorker on the firing of the Merrill Lynch CEO. Twice in a 5 day period, after not thinking about her for years. That usually means there’s something I should be paying attention to . . .
April 15th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Mary–no apologies allowed! You have a good memory of the book. I didn’t notice her description of her mother as uneducated. She detailed how her mom educated herself, and then how her mother would always support Jill’s academic successes. Her criticism of her mother was focused on her unhealthy control issues, as I read it.
Kate, I’m glad to hear the others are worth checking out. I’d heard of True North, and am interested to follow it. And your indication of a synchronicity is exactly how I felt when I read the book and it echoed the Wiggins that I’d read and was written so recently, when Conway’s was written twenty plus years ago, and chosen at random my my book group. I’ll see if I can find that NY article online.