The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain. We hope they will aid your understanding of the many rich themes that make up Conway's story of her youth in mid-century Australia. Conway recounts the successive phases of her early life: her childhood on a remote sheep station, her teenage years in suburban Sydney, her education at the University of Sydney, and her decision to become a historian and to leave Australia for the United States. Her own coming of age is set against that of her country: the British Empire is disintegrating, and as England retreats to a local rather than an international role in world affairs, Australia must set out to rediscover its own identity, not as an extension of England, but as a Pacific nation with a distinctive culture and history. Conway's search for her own identity, as a woman and as an Australian, is a complex story written in a deceptively simple narrative style.