Conway 'The Road from the Coorain'

Earlier this year I came across the biography of Jill Ker Conway, a celebrated educator and author.
Her autobiography,  'Road from the Coorain', is about her childhood on a New South Wales, Australian station.  It is an insightful look at a country life that during draught years survival takes super human effort.

The Ker family who bought a station and took their chance to live on it and try to manage a fast amount of land with delicate soil and make a living out of the land is the setting for which Jill was born into.
Her Mother a nurse by training and her Father a farmer who had managed other properties for land owners were coping in this vast and delicate area of New South Wales.   Jill had no playmates and never saw another girl until she was seven years old let alone go to school was taught at home.   She has the ability to learn to read at an early age and her Mother to her credit made learning a game for her.

The enormous struggle to make the land profitable only has a year or two before the WWII.  Not only do they lose and help with the station but then a slow slide into a drought which is to last for five years and claim her Father's life and her mother's mental health.  Jill is thrust into the the suburban setting of Sydney in 1950 and its school life.  

Through the backdrop Jill embraces academia and finds a strained balance between caring for her Mother who has slipped into alcohol to deal with her problems.  Jill slowly gains strength, and comes into her own emotionally and intellectually which gives wings to her new found self.

Jill Ker Conway eventual went on to enrol in the Doctorate program at Harvard of the 1960/1 year.  From that point on she never looked back.   She became a Professor of History at the University of Toronto and the first woman Vice President and later the President at Smith College.

I would say with the stylish English it is a masterpiece.