The Road from Coorain (33 page)

I knew I could manage my departure gracefully if no one came to see me off. Then there would be a predictable succession of
events, all helpfully practical. A farewell to my mother at the house, loading the luggage in the car of the friend who dropped me at the airport. A quick farewell at the curb. It was only if I had to be falsely jolly to a crowd of well-wishers that I might flub this rite of passage which was both a sentence and a release. I was so vehement in my requests to be left alone that all my friends stayed away, except for Nina, who must have waited hidden in the crowd, for she appeared, as if by magic, just as my flight was called, to thrust a tiny package and an envelope in my hand. She hugged me, uttering fervent wishes for a happy journey, and then she disappeared as quickly as she came.

As I walked out to the plane in the balmy air of a Sydney September night, my mind flew back to the dusty cemetery where my father was buried. Where, I wondered, would my bones come to rest? It pained me to think of them not fertilizing Australian soil. Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people’s eyes, and I was content with that.

Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. From 1964 to 1975 she taught at the University of Toronto and was Vice President there before serving in 1975 and for the next ten years as President of Smith College. Since 1985 she has been a Visiting Scholar and Professor in M.I.T.’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and now lives with her husband in Milton, Massachusetts.

She is the author of
Merchants and Merinos
(1960),
The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America
(1982),
Women Reformers and American Culture
(1987), and
True North
(1995), and editor of
Written by Herself, Volumes I and II
.

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