The account of an Australian childhood in the outback, and in Sydney - an account shot through with family tragedy, a devastating struggle with the desert environment, and an almost magical sense of the Australian landscape.
This beautifully crafted narrative of Conway's journey from a girlhood on an isolated sheep-farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the Presidency of Smith College) is both new and universal.
If few of us have known an eight-year drought in New South Wales, many of us have felt the despair of an ambitous young woman facing a constained female destiny.
