The Road from Coorain

Jill Ker Conway's autobiographical account of growing up in Coorain, Australia until she leaves for America to attend Harvard is presented in The Road from Coorain. The road is arduous for Conway. Her father commits suicide and her brother dies in a car accident. Her mother is forced to take over running Coorain but a series of hardships occurs. Conway's coming-of-age in Coorain deeply shapes her worldview but also leads to a newly constructed vision of her native land and her self. As Conway wrote in one essay, "Autobiographical memory involves the subject of the remembered taking him/herself as object. It is reflexive an act of self-witnessing, of self-reconstitution across time" (White 1998, 52).

Conway was born on Coorain, a sheep station located on the plains of New South Wales. Her proud, hardworking parents loved each other and Coorain. Conway becomes a first rate farmhand, aiding her father while secretly obtaining education by listening to her brother's tutors. Her parents' struggles with the land take their toll when a severe drought hits. Her father commits suicide and Conway becomes the focus of her mother's world. During the time she lives in Australia until the time she leaves for school in America, Conway undergoes a series of events that result in a "self-reconstitution" as she matures. This reconstitution provides her with a new sense of self as well as a new sense of her native land and origins.

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ndence there. As she tells us, "Neither would she have the opportunity at work to achieve a kind of independence. Australia was not ready for a strong professional woman unwilling to subordinate herself to cultural norms" (Hoy 2000, 451). Conway attempts to come to terms with the bias against women over time, but her efforts mainly result in the recognition that women are treated as second-class citizens in Australia. This is particularly true with respect to business. From the unequal wages held out to men and women in help wanted advertisements to snide remarks and humor directed at "female" doctors, she encounters palpable barriers to advancement for women. In her own experiences in trying to gain employment at a law firm, Conway learns that the independence she seeks for herself as a professional woman is virtually impossible in Australia's business world. Though she tries to find employment at a law firm, she is told outright that women are suitable for only certain types of law work, if law work at all. With her more mature perspective, she is more angry at having illusions about such realities than at the bias itself: Earlier in my life I might have jumped into the study of law confident that my merits would convin

Category: Literature - T