In Memoriam:
Dr Jill Ker Conway AC Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business. Formative years spent working the harsh land of a sheep station in outback New South Wales fostered a fierce determination to shrug the shackles of endemic gender discrimination, and lead her to become a trailblazing women’s rights advocate. Yet it was her thoughtful, poignant reflections on life amid this dusty, arid vastness, vividly chronicled in her best-selling autobiography, The Road from Coorain, that truly cemented Jill’s place as an Australian literary icon.
“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.” Jill’s early life was, in fact, punctuated by painful partings. She lost her father in a tragic accident on the family farm when she was just 10, and was sent from her cherished Coorain home to boarding school at 12. Her brother died in a car accident when she was 16, then at 24 she parted with her first true love, an American venture capitalist, with a tearful farewell at the Pan Am terminal in Sydney. Jill’s indomitable spirit, and the inexorable passage of time saw her safely through.
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But it was a departure of a different kind that would forever alter the course of Jill’s life, and culminate in her appointment as the first woman president of Massachusetts’ prestigious Smith College, and her being named Time’s ‘Woman of the Year’ at just 40 years of age.
“I’d arrived at the choice by exhausting all the possibilities of interesting careers in Australia, discovering, one by one, that they were not open to women…so my setting out was not exactly the departure of a conquering hero, but more the ambiguous result of deciding that I needed to get away from Australia, to view life from a different perspective.”
Jill Ker Conway by Sarah Belchetz-Swenson Credit - National Portrait Gallery
