Jill Ker Conway Character Analysis

Jill Ker Conway grew up in an oscillating household, experiencing economic failure, personal tragedy, social isolation, and eventual financial success. A gifted student, Conway eventually fled Australia, citing psychological distress and professional stagnation. Conway’s upbringing was largely similar to a rural American girl in the middle twentieth century. Facing social limitations, economic hardship, and controlling parents, Conway received similar autonomy to female Americans. However, her experience differed from the American because she experienced British expectations and religious ambiguity. Though Conway’s Australia placed restrictions on her progress, she too sharply criticizes her homeland. Blessed with a privileged upbringing, exceptional education, and personal success, Australian society offered Conway and her family the best the twentieth century offered. To cast Australia as backwards is to ignore western social mores. After college, however, Conway exhausted much of what Australia had to give to her. Escaping a tyrannical mother and chasing professional success, her decision to come to the United States was correct. Conway’s social expectations were similar to rural American girls’. Despite her mother’s attempts for egalitarianism, “my mother encouraged a strict equality between us,” Conway could not escape traditional gender roles (34). When her older brothers were sent off to boarding school, Conway remained at home, helping her parents grasp with a brutal drought. Once in school, Conway’s life became more typical for a young girl, speaking to her friends about “ourselves and our families…personal quirks and absurdities of our teachers, [and] tall stories for my mother about pranks of the past” (117). Conway fretted about her appearance “My friends had slim ankles. Mine puffed and swelled by the end of a hot day” (145). In college, she sought academic success and social diversion with friends. At a macro level, Conway’s life mirrors an Iowa farm girl who went to college. Facing sexist notions of gender roles and conservative, hard-working parents, both Conway and the Iowan relied on family fortune and personal determination to reach college. Consuming the same American culture, drinking between exams, fretting over appearance, and avoiding sexism, Conway and the Iowan’s lives were quaintly Western. Despite living on opposite ends of the Earth, Conway and her American cultural brethren experienced similar pressures and felt homogenous desires. Despite some similarities to American women, Conway’s upbringing was decidedly British and particularly Australian. Having a governess, attending an Anglican all-girls’ school, and visiting London on a European tour are not American. Conway was brought up to view Australia as an essential part of the British world. “Jolted out of complacency by the fall of Singapore” and “celebrating ANZAC Day with much respect,” Conway initially viewed Australian culture as a British Creole, combining Tudor histories with bush lore (67 and 183). An American …show more content…
The Conway family experienced material economic fortune on their sheep farm. Despite some false starts and a decade of drought, the Conway’s found success with “eighteen thousand acres” of land in New South Wales (18). This parcel would have been financially unreachable in the United States in the 1940s. To have secured such a plot and to have diligent parents virtually guaranteed Conway economic stability. If drought was the Conway’s greatest worry in the era of Hitler, Stalin, Hideki Tojo, and Mao Zedong, then Australia offered a parcel of heaven in the South Pacific. Conway tends to gloss over her economic privilege, which enabled an “eight-week Christmas cruise to Ceylon” and a six-month “journey to England and Europe” (127 and 196). Attending an elite university an elite boarding school, Conway experienced the best Australia could offer in the twentieth century. Allowing herself to be caught up in a stinging rejection from the Department of External Affairs, which she later described as a “great favor,” Conway failed to acknowledge what Australia, through its unencumbered wilderness, gave her (193). Australia, the physical land, gave itself to support Conway and her family. When Conway left Australia for Cambridge, Massachusetts, perhaps the least American place in the United States, she sought an intellectual refuge, one of the few places in the 1960s where a bright historian could do daring work. Had she lived in Iowa, it is likely her criticism would have landed squarely on American culture. Conway’s criticisms of Australian culture ring flat because they were pervasive in midcentury western