Jill Ker Conway Character Analysis

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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 …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

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