Synopsis
In the 1930s, Jill Ker's parents bought a sheep farm on the western plains of New South Wales. In 1944, they lost nearly everything when a drought hit. Forced to leave Coorain, 11-year-old Jill and her mother settled in Sydney where Jill struggled to find a place for herself among Sydney's elite. Her story, both a chronicle of life in the Australian outback and the odyssey of a brilliant woman fighting the constraints of her time, offers a loving view of Australia. Includes a taped afterword by the author.
Verlyn Klinkenborg
In ''The Road From Coorain,'' one fire starts another. The author's predicament as a woman in Australia becomes a measure of Australia's predicament in the British Empire....''The Road From Coorain'' is the work of a writer who relentlessly tugs at the cultural fences around her until they collapse, leaving her solitary under an immense Australian sky, enlarged to herself at last. What emerges most clearly from this book is the depth of Jill Ker Conway's feeling for ''the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level''. -- New York Times