I had set things in good order at Coorain, but that was the last thing I would do for my mother. The woman I knew now was a far cry from the one my father had made me promise to care for. I’d postponed facing what she was really like in the present, but now there was no escaping it. She jeered at psychiatry and mocked the clergy, so there was no way to seek healing for her sick spirit, and hers was very sick. Perhaps, if I got far enough away, I’d be able to see the causes of her undoing. I knew I wasn’t without fault in her decline, and that there were parts I was going to have to atone for.
It was dawn when I went to bed, but I wasn’t tired. The light was coming up on the day I began my departure. I wasn’t exactly elated about it. I felt more like an early Christian convert who has died to the old ways and lives under a new law. Mine was going to be a law of affirming life regardless of past training. It was true I could not look at paintings like Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series without total identification with the view of the human predicament they expressed. I resonated totally to Nolan’s Kelly, the outlaw, facing corrupt and hostile authority, triumphing existentially even as he is destroyed. When presented with a challenge or a chance to serve a lost cause my spine straightened and my psychic jaw stuck out ready for defiance. But I could use my reason to live by another set of rules. As a historian I knew how few free choices ever face us in life, but this choice of mine now was unquestionably one.
On my way to my first class in the morning, I stopped by the Registrar’s Office to pick up the address of the Harvard History Department and the Radcliffe College Graduate School. By the time I went to my evening class, I’d already mailed my request for the necessary application forms. Once I’d surrendered adherence to lost causes I realized that my plans to write a new kind of Australian history couldn’t be fulfilled at the University of Sydney. There really was no graduate program in the humanities at Sydney, and I needed professional training and a group of intellectual peers to progress much beyond my current level of historical understanding. I didn’t want to join my radical friends in railing against a heedless society. I didn’t want to write old-style institutional history of the British Empire and Commonwealth. I wanted to study in the Harvard History Department, where most of the American historians I admired were on the faculty. They seemed to know how to explain the development of a new culture, and I was ready to learn from them. It helped clinch the decision that Boston and Cambridge were about as far away from Sydney as one can get on this planet, and that I’d be totally safe from family visits.
When the forms arrived I was amused to discover that the applicant was asked to write a short biographical essay describing for the Admissions Committee the reasons why he or she had chosen to study history at Harvard. What would the hapless committee chairman do if I wrote the truth, I wondered? That I had come to an intellectual dead end in Australia; that I had rejected the cultural values of the country, and wanted an escape while there was still emotional life in me; that I needed to be somewhere where one could look at the history of empires truthfully; that life had been so trying recently that I had taken to drinking far too much, and hoped that life on a modest graduate student’s stipend would help sober me up; that Cambridge was halfway round the world from Sydney, and that was a comfortable distance; that I was looking for a more congenial emotional environment, where ideas and feelings completed rather than denied one another.
Chuckling about the plight of the Admissions Committee if I and the other applicants told the truth, I wrote dutifully, to the Renaissance scholar who chaired the committee, “Dear Professor Gilmore, For the last eighteen months I have been teaching Australian history at the University of Sydney, and reading American history as best I can here. I want to enroll in the doctoral program in American history at Harvard, for the 1960–1961 academic year, so that I can develop a deeper understanding of American history and explore the parallels and differences between the Australian and American experiences.”
When the acceptance came, my mood changed, though not my resolve. I was haunted by my knowledge of the silence that would enfold the house when I left. I could see my mother, already aged beyond her years, becoming more stooped and skeletal as she forgot to eat and lapsed into greater eccentricity. I had to avert my eyes from the emaciated and frail older women I saw on the street, or in the train, portents of what was to come. I told her my plans just before the arrival of guests, so that she could think of the news as something to boast about. We had lived in a state of armed truce since Barry and Roslyn’s unhappy visit, so that the communication was a little like a communiqué between nation-states. She didn’t falter. By telling her my decision as I did I established that we were going to act out these events by the script she followed in public, the one in which she was the strong woman urging her children to range far and wide. She knew our relationship had changed and that my resolve was firm. But it never entered her mind that I was not coming back, and I never told her. I dreaded the parting but after some rough moments I learned that time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.
The hardest leave-taking by far was with Coorain. I made a last visit there, in early September, just a week before I was to leave. I hoped it would be drought-stricken and barren, but there had been good winter rains, and the plains were ablaze with wild flowers, the air heavy with pollen. There was a spring lambing in process, with enough short new shoots of grass to make the lambs feisty, ready for the wild swoops and dashes that young lambs make on a mild sunny day when comfortable and well fed. The house at Coorain was shabbier than ever, and the only trace left of my mother’s garden was the citrus grove in fragrant bloom. I looked at it all hungrily. “People will grow old and die; the house will decay, but the desert peas and saltbush will always renew themselves. That’s the way to remember it. Even if I never see it again, I’ll know just how they look, and the places where they grow.”
On my last Sunday, we went over to Clare for lunch. Angus, spry and cheerful, was playing host to a large group of red-haired Waugh nieces and nephews. Much of the lunch was taken up with laughing stories of the early days of Coorain, my parents when young, my brothers and me as children. When it came time to leave, Angus gave us all a small shot of straight Scotch to drink my health. “Take a good look at her,” he said. “She’s leaving for America tomorrow, and you may not see her again for a long time.” As we were downing our toast I wondered whether he knew I wasn’t coming back. The question must have passed across my face because as I caught his eye across the room he winked at me, the exaggerated stage wink he’d always given me as a child, when we had a secret we weren’t going to tell my parents. It was a benediction.
Having already sold my car in preparation for leaving, I’d made my way out to Coorain by flying to an airport one hundred miles south of Mossgiel. Since I was making farewells I arranged to go back to Sydney by train, to make the familiar journey one last time. As the Diesel gathered speed away from the Ivanhoe station, I remembered my forty-seven-year-old mother and my eleven-year-old self setting out fifteen years ago. That had been an expulsion from Eden and a release from hell. The journey I was about to take didn’t fit so neatly into any literary categories I knew. It was certainly no romantic quest. I had had my great romantic experience and sought no other. And there was no way to see it as an odyssey, for I wasn’t setting out to conquer anything and there would be no triumphant return. I was leaving because I didn’t fit in, never had, and wasn’t likely to. I didn’t belong for many reasons. I was a woman who wanted to do serious work and have it make a difference. I wanted to think about Australia in a way that made everyone else uncomfortable. I loved my native earth passionately and was going into emotional exile, but there was no turn of political or military fortune which could bring me back in triumph. I was going to another country, to begin all over again. I search
ed my mind for narratives that dealt with such thorough and all-encompassing defeats, but could come up with none. Then calling on my newly acquired sense of allowing time and events to carry me along, I settled down at the window to watch the familiar scenes go racing by.
That night as the Forbes Mail labored up the western side of the Blue Mountains I lay awake in my sleeping car berth, reminded by the familiar red plush compartment of my parents as an energetic young couple shepherding us children to Sydney for a seaside holiday. I wanted to follow the Old Testament injunction to honor them, but it had become impossible. I understood, after much self-examination, that I’d been a willing participant in the process of my mother’s addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers. I’d wanted a calm, gentle woman for a mother, like the other smiling parents I met at the houses of school friends. I should have left her to her rage, fought her harder, not picked up the prescription at the drugstore, not helped pour the brandy. But it was too late now. It was hard to think of so strong-willed a woman as a victim. So much of her deterioration seemed self-imposed. Yet in another sense she was the victim of lack of education, of suburbia, of affluent meaninglessness. Her rage at fate was justified, it was just not tempered by any moral sense or any ability to compare her own lot with the predicaments of others. It was sad that the form her anger took was something I couldn’t cope with any longer. I had certainly tried to rescue her, stimulate her interests, get her involved in charities, anything to harness her energies creatively, but I had to admit that I’d been a dismal failure. The only way I could pay her respect now would be through some sublimated expression of my guilt, generalized toward caring for all frustrated and angry older women. To begin with, I’d have to understand the history of women’s situation in modern society better. It was too simple just to blame men for it, as my mother did, in a primitive and nonmoral way. I wasn’t sure what set of individual or collective wills to blame for the injustice that deprived most women and many men of education, of a creative use for their energies, of a chance to keep on growing and learning as adults. Of one thing I was sure, one couldn’t ascribe all the free will to men and all the determined life experience to women. That might be true of slavery, but not of the relationships between women and men. I wasn’t sure how to go about studying those relationships and their evolution over time, but clearly I was going to find out. It wasn’t exactly the way I’d expected to find a vocation, out of guilt transmuted into an intellectual calling, but perhaps it was as good as any. I had a talent for history, and the fates were prodding me toward putting it to use.
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.
My brother, Barry Innes Ker, has helped me as generously in preparing this narrative as he has through our lifetime of shared projects. The interpretations and any errors are entirely my own.
The names of some persons and places have been changed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
VINTAGE DEPARTURES
PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS
by Tim Cahill
In his latest grand tour of the earth’s remote, exotic, and dismal places, Tim Cahill sleeps with a grizzly bear, witnesses demonic possession in Bali, assesses the cuteness quotient of giant clams in the South Pacific, and survives a run-in with something called the Throne of Doom in Guatemala. The resulting travel pieces are at once vivid, nerve-wracking, and outrageously funny.
“Tim Cahill [has] the what-the-hell adventuresomeness of a T. E. Lawrence and the humor of a P. J. O’Rourke.”
—Condé Nast Traveler
Travel/Adventure/0-679-74929-2
FALLING OFF THE MAP
SOME LONELY PLACES OF THE WORLD
by Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer voyages from the nostalgic elegance of Argentina to the raffish nonchalance of Australia, documents the cruising rites of Icelandic teenagers, gets interrogated by tipsy Cuban police, and attends a screening of Bhutan’s first feature film. Throughout, he remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.
“[Iyer is the] rightful heir to Jan Morris [and] Paul Theroux.… He writes the kind of lyrical, flowing prose that could make Des Moines sound beguiling.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Travel/Adventure/0-679-74612-9
RIDING THE WHITE HORSE HOME
A WESTERN FAMILY ALBUM
by Teresa Jordan
The daughter and granddaughter of Wyoming ranchers tells the stories of her forebears—men who saw broken bones as professional credentials and women who coped with physical hardship and killing loneliness. She acquaints us with the lore and science of ranching, and does so with a breathtaking immediacy that recalls the best writing of Wallace Stegner and Gretel Ehrlich.
“A haunting and elegant memoir.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge
Memoir/Travel/0-679-75135-1
BALKAN GHOSTS
A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY
by Robert D. Kaplan
As Kaplan travels from the breakaway states of Yugoslavia to Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he reconstructs the Balkans’ history as a time warp in which ancient passions and hatreds are continually resurrected.
“Powerfully argued … the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date.”
—Boston Globe
History/Current Affairs/Travel/0-679-74981-0
A YEAR IN PROVENCE
by Peter Mayle
An “engaging, funny and richly appreciative” (The New York Times Book Review) account of an English couple’s first year living in Provence, settling in amid the enchanting gardens and equally festive bistros of their new home.
“Stylish, witty, delightfully readable.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
Travel/0-679-73114-8
MAIDEN VOYAGES
THE WRITINGS OF WOMEN TRAVELERS
Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Morris
In this delightful anthology, women such as Beryl Markham, Willa Cather, Annie Dillard, and Joan Didion share their experiences traveling throughout the world. From the Rocky Mountains to a Marrakech palace, these women show as much of themselves as they do of the strang
e and wonderful places they visit.
A Vintage Original/Travel/Women’s Studies/0-679-74030-9
HOLIDAYS IN HELL
by P.J. O’Rourke
P.J. O’Rourke travels to hellholes around the globe looking for trouble, the truth, and a good time. After casually sightseeing in war-torn Lebanon and being peppergassed in Korea, P.J. checks out the night life in Poland and spends Christmas vacation in El Salvador.
“Whether you agree with him or not … he writes a helluva piece.”
—Richard Nixon
Humor/Travel/0-679-72422-2
IRON & SILK
by Mark Salzman
The critically acclaimed and bestselling adventures of a young American martial arts master in China.
“Dazzling … exhilarating … a joy to read from beginning to end.”
—People
Travel/Adventure/0-394-75511-1
RIGHT ON THE EDGE OF CRAZY
ON TOUR WITH THE U.S. DOWNHILL SKI TEAM
by Mike Wilson
Mike Wilson follows the underfunded, underreported athletes of the U.S. downhill ski team through a World Cup season that culminates at the 1992 Winter Olympics in France.
“The best [book] ever written about ski-racing.”
—Denver Post
Sports/Travel/0-679-74987-X
VINTAGE DEPARTURES
AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE, OR CALL TOLL-
FREE TO ORDER. 1-800-793-2665 (CREDIT CARDS ONLY).
The Road from Coorain Page 25