Conway, Jill Ker (1934-2018), was an Australian-born historian, educator, and author. Conway is best known as the author of a highly praised autobiography, The Road from Coorain (1989), and its sequel, True North (1994).
Jill Kathryn Ker was born on Oct. 9, 1934, in the small town of Hillston in central New South Wales, Australia. She grew up on her family’s isolated sheep ranch, called Coorain. Her father drowned when she was 11, and three years later she moved to Sydney with her mother. Ker received a B.A. degree from the University of Sydney in 1958. However, the lack of opportunity for women scholars in Australia and a poor relationship with her mother led her to immigrate to the United States in 1960. In 1962, she married John Conway, a Canadian college professor. As Jill Ker Conway, she became a United States citizen in 1982.
Conway received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1969. She taught history at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. She was also a vice president of the university from 1973 to 1975. From 1975 to 1985, she served as the first woman president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Conway was visiting scholar in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for several years.
In The Road from Coorain, Conway described her early years on the family sheep ranch. Critics praised the book for its vivid descriptions of the barren landscape of rural New South Wales. The book tells about Conway’s struggle to make a place for herself in Australian educational life. It earned her a reputation as an important feminist writer. In True North, Conway describes her academic life in North America and discusses the ways in which women have portrayed themselves in similar autobiographies. In When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998), Conway discusses the historical and social pressures that force women to tell their stories differently from the ways men tell theirs. Conway died on June 1, 2018.
