It is most fascinating to follow Conway's psychological evolution as a university student. An independent thinker, Conway begins to question the status quo colonial view of her countrymen who at that time regarded themselves as British. Her growing awareness of sexual and racial discrimination, expressed in such earnest tones, renders a timeless quality to this all engaging memoir
I very much liked the first section of the book, which describes her young girlhood on a 30,000 acre sheep station in the Australian outback. It has much of the elegiac yearning of books like How Green Was My Valley (1939)(Richard Llewellyn 1906-1983) and West With the Night (1941) (Beryl Markham 1902-1986). But as the book goes along it really takes on a sort of self pitying tone that I found a bit hard to take. In particular, she complains several times about how they weren't taught in school about how badly the aborigines were treated and the precipitating cause of her flight from Australia is an incident that she attributes to pure sexism. But in general, the story seems to be saying, "Look at all I achieved despite my hard scrabble upbringing out in the bush." Meanwhile, the girlhood she describes, while it does seem a little lonely and quite taxing physically, comes across as nearly idyllic and an ideal background for future self reliance and achievement. Add to that the relative wealth that her family eventually accumulates and the fortuitous appearance of scholarship money at opportune moments and I have trouble seeing what she has to complain about, other than a quarrelsome, but obviously lonely, mother.
She had me early, but lost me later--a half good book.
GRADE: C
