196 Books: Australia

The Road from Coorain by Jill Kerr Conway

Hey. Did anyone notice that I've been putting 169 books when it actually should have been 196? Did you notice that and not tell me? Ruuuude. I mean, did I have it right on any of them? Color me foolish. 
We'll get to the book though. No bullet points this time. 

You should know where Australia is. It's its own continent. But here it is. 

And the obligatory description of the book. 

In a memoir that pierces and delights us, 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.

I liked this book. It had a bit of an ebb and flow; some parts I was really excited to read and some were a little meh. But it was really cool to read about life raising sheep and the ups and downs of trying to make a living in the bush. 

There was a point that kind of bothered me. She didn't get a high ranking job because she's a woman and she said she now understood how the natives and Aborigines felt having everything taken from them. I thought that was overstepping just a little bit. 

I kind of wish she'd been able to dig a bit deeper. She wrote quite a bit about the stoicism that's taught growing up in Australia; that combined with her training as a historian made it a little superficial for me. Granted, it was obvious she broke out of that emotional black hole as she got older. 

The best thing I can say about this book is that, though this story worked perfectly for the purpose of my little "project," it left me wanting more.