About this guide
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are
intended to enhance your group's reading of Jill Ker Conway's The Road
from Coorain. We hope they will aid your understanding of the many rich
themes that make up Conway's story of her youth in mid-century
Australia. Conway recounts the successive phases of her early life: her
childhood on a remote sheep station, her teenage years in suburban
Sydney, her education at the University of Sydney, and her decision to
become a historian and to leave Australia for the United States. Her own
coming of age is set against that of her country: the British Empire is
disintegrating, and as England retreats to a local rather than an
international role in world affairs, Australia must set out to
rediscover its own identity, not as an extension of England, but as a
Pacific nation with a distinctive culture and history. Conway's search
for her own identity, as a woman and as an Australian, is a complex
story written in a deceptively simple narrative style.
For discussion
- In the first chapter, Conway writes of the "bush ethos which grew up
from making a virtue out of loneliness and hardship" (p. 8). Stoicism and
self- sufficiency are the ideals adopted by the outback settlers. How
have those ideals shaped the Kers' lives? In what way have they been
destructive to the family? Though Conway finally rejected these values,
is it possible that they helped her to break away from her potentially
unproductive life and start again?
- Conway stresses the fact that Australians of her parents' generation
defined themselves as Britons and saw their own country only in British
terms. They equated their national interests with England's; even their
map of the world was seen from a British perspective, with nearby Japan
located in the "Far East." How did this attitude shape the educational
system into which Jill and her brothers were placed? How did it color
their attitudes toward their native country? How did it shape the young
Australians' class consciousness, in a country whose social and racial
make-up was so different from contemporary England's?
- How does Conway present her mother as a prototypical
twentieth-century woman? In what way are the attitudes of Australian
society to blame for the mother's deterioration from being an
independent professional, a "great healer" (p. 195), to a neurotic
hypochondriac? How has her simple system of values proved inadequate to
the complex world of the twentieth century? To what degree do you feel
that she has caused her own problems?
- Conway compares the barriers against women that she herself
encountered as she grew up with those that shaped her mother's life.
Some were openly acknowledged (i.e., the inequitable wages for men and
women offered in the Help Wanted ads). Some were more insidious:
unspoken prejudices buried deep within the culture. How do the two women
differ in the way they confront these barriers? How do their different
educational backgrounds affect their points of view?
- Conway speculates that had her parents encountered failure earlier in
their lives, they might "have learned to bend a little before the
harshness of fate" (p. 23). How does the disastrous drought at Coorain
affect the character of Conway's father? Conway suggests that his death
was a suicide. Does she acknowledge and confront his implied abandonment
of her and the rest of the family?
- "It was a comprehensible world" (p. 50), Conway writes of her early
childhood on Coorain. "One saw visible results from one's labors" (p.
50). In what way does the young girl's comprehensible world turn into an
incomprehensible one? What efforts does she make to confer meaning upon
it? How do religious, spiritual, and intellectual systems of thought
help or hinder her?
- Conway writes that in Australia, "people distrusted intellectuals.
Australians mocked anyone with 'big ideas' and found them specially
laughable in women" (p. 146). But the same Australians who mocked
"ideas" also had a high regard for success, inclusive of academic
success. What shape do these contradictory attitudes give Australian
society? How does the isolated position of Australian intellectuals, as
depicted by Conway, reflect this dichotomy? The United States, like
Australia, is a culture with a significant history of
anti-intellectualism. How is this reflected in our own society?
- How did Conway's experiences with professional discrimination against
women bring her to a more personal realization of the fate of
Australia's aboriginal people? What do her parents' use of the nardoo
stones found on Coorain signify to her?
- Mid-century Australia had an overwhelmingly white population, but
this was not true of England's colonies and dominions in Asia and
Africa. How does Conway's visit to newly independent Ceylon change her view
of the British Empire and of the imperialist credo of white superiority? The credo is
not merely racial, but cultural as well. What perspective is Conway given on her
own society's culture and history by her first encounter with the wider world?
- While the Australians willingly went to war for England, England's
treatment of Australia as expendable during the Second World War
dramatized the actual state of affairs. Conway knew that "it was time to
give up pretenses of the old British Empire, recognize that we were a
Southern Pacific nation, and begin to study and understand the peoples
and countries of our part of the globe" (p. 182). How does Conway relate
her own choice of vocation as a historian to her country's quest for
identity? By extension, in what symbolic ways does she identify her own
life with that of Australia?
- Conway's story, like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, ends with her acceptance of a life of exile. But unlike
Joyce, she sees her exile as resulting from a series of "thorough and
all-encompassing defeats" (p. 236). Is the narrative of Conway's early
life really a story of defeat? Or is it perhaps a story of success?
Conway felt that she had failed in several areas--in making her mother
happy, in running Coorain--but were these quixotic battles, impossible to
win? Do you feel, as she did, that she turned her back on her duty?
- Jill Ker Conway has written: "The rise of democracy has enlarged the
focus of interest in the lives of other people--from monarch, great
general, and political leader to the ordinary person--someone like
ourselves" (Written by Herself, p. vii). How does Conway shape her own
story--that of an obscure, isolated young girl--into a narrative with
wide social and historical implications?
- How does Conway shape the plot of The Road from Coorain? Is it a
romance, a story of material success, an odyssey, a spiritual or
intellectual quest or the story of a conflict between mother and
daughter?
- Conway has written elsewhere about her environmental concerns. What
is the role of nature in this narrative, and how does her own
understanding of the natural world influence her intellectual
development?
- The Road from Coorain is a narrative about separation and the
formation of a strongly bonded female personality. It is thus a story
which runs counter to a current sentimental view of women's lives as
networks of relationships. Is Conway's view persuasive?
Suggestions for further reading
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House; Maya Angelou, I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Janet Frame, An
Angel at My Table; Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career; Carolyn
Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life; Donald Horne, The Lucky Country;
Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika; Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition
of Women's Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present, Women's
Autobiography: Essays in Criticism; James Joyce, A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Gloria
Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.
Also by Jill Ker Conway, available from Vintage Books: |
