The Road From Coorain - Softcover

Conway, Jill Ker

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9780749398941: The Road From Coorain

Synopsis

The Road From Coorain is the beautifully written narrative of Jill Ker Conway's journey from girlhood on an isolated sheep-farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the presidency of Smith College).

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From the Inside Flap

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 miraculous

From the Back Cover

"Sheer delight." --Washington Post

"A small masterpiece of scene, memory and very stylish English. I've been several times to Australia; this book was the most rewarding journey of all." --John Kenneth Galbraith

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