Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood—a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds ideas and ways of life that seem a century apart. She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight still too small to mount her horse unaided she was galloping miles alone across Coorain her parents' thirty thousand windswept drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape beautiful and hostile whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong radiant mother who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback and who upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten began to slide—bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her—into depression and dependency. We see Jill staggered by the loss of her father catapulted to what seemed another planet—the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded noisy cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons—Jill embracing new ideas new possibilities while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it escaping into drink pulling herself back striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain in America Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power by its understanding of the ways in which a total deep-rooted commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.
