The Road From Coorain Quotes
"The primal force of the sun shapes the environment. With the wind and the sand it bakes and cleanses all signs of decay. There is no cleansing by water."
"Human purposes are dwarfed by such a blank horizon."
"The important things in life were hard work, self-sufficiency, physical endurance, and loyalty to one’s male friends, one’s 'mates.'"
"Knowledge about nature, the care of animals, practical mechanics was respected, but speculation and the world of ideas were signs of softness and impracticality."
"Religion and belief in a benevolent deity were foolish because daily life demonstrated beyond doubt that the universe was hostile."
"When disaster struck what mattered was unflinching courage and the refusal to consider despair."
"The most startling sound is the ribald laughter of the kookaburra, whose call resembles demonic laughter."
"In the recurring cycles of drought the sand and dust flow like water, and like the floods of other climates they engulf all that lies in their path."
"The ideal woman was a good manager—no small task with only wood stoves, kerosene lamps, inadequate water, and the nearest store for canned goods fifty to a hundred miles away."
"Everyone knew the most important gift to a child was an upbringing which would toughen him (her) up so as to be stoic and uncomplaining about life’s pains and ready for its reverses."
"God made the creatures of the earth for man’s use."
"It was wrong to kill needlessly for sport, the way some people hunted kangaroos, but it was moral to kill what we needed to eat."
"The world seemed set up so that the strong preyed on the weak and innocent."
"It was a comprehensible world. One saw visible results from one’s labors, and the lesson of my mother’s garden was a permanent instruction about the way human beings can transform their environment."
"Thus I was introduced to study as a leisure activity, a gift beyond price."
"Every time we stopped to look at the carcass of a dead sheep and dismounted to find out why it had died, it became more difficult to play my role."
"Discipline was strict, and departures from it earned immediate punishment."
"There was not much room in the household routine for the mood swings and questioning of adolescence."
"Poor Bob was treated as an unnatural being for his doubts and accused of being ungrateful for the sacrifices made to send him to a religious school."
"I could always distract my father by reading him reports of the campaign on the various fronts in Europe as we jolted about Coorain in our sulky."
"The notion of a loving God became a mockery."
"Work hard, Jill. Don’t just waste time. Make something of yourself."
"Our conversations as we rode about the place took on a grimmer tone."
"It was always a miracle to me that animals could endure so much."
"I wondered whether his inner dialogue that night was in the voice of a cultivated Englishman, or in that of a foul-mouthed drover."
"She radiated calm. The errant pulse was checked regularly and diagnosed as palpitations, but not a serious arrhythmia."
"I needed no instruction not to mention these conversations. I knew why she was anxious."
"We watched helplessly. Always one for action, she turned swiftly, went indoors, and began to close windows."
"My spirits began to rise and I kept telling my father the damage was not too bad."
"That was only the first storm," he said bleakly. He had seen it all before and knew what was to come."
"We lost our appetite for meat because the flesh of the starving animals already tasted putrid."
"Ladies, we learned, did not consider comfort more important than propriety in dress or manners."
"The best standards were derived from Great Britain, and should be emulated unquestioningly."
"One’s voice must be well modulated and purged of all ubiquitous Australian diphthongs."
"Hardiness was deemed more important than imagination."
"We lived on starch, overcooked meat, and endless eggs and bacon."
"If a student refused to eat the main dish and the teacher in charge noticed, it would be served to her again at subsequent meals until it was deemed that a satisfactory amount had been consumed."
"After I became a boarder in my second term, I looked forward to the two hours which followed dinner."
"Much of my time during the first year or so of my schooling at Abbotsleigh was taken up with the pleasure of defying adult authority."
"I had ballooned on the school’s starchy diet, developed a poor complexion, and I looked the embodiment of adolescent ungainliness."
"I never understood the unspoken rule which required that one display false modesty."
"I liked getting out from under the pressure of my mother’s company, but at the same time, I was burdened by the sense that she had taken on two jobs."
"My mother, now in her forty-ninth year, looked her years, but she had regained some of her old vitality."
"Strangers who sat opposite her in the train or the local bus would occasionally be startled by the gaze of hatred she turned on them."
"The intensity of her feelings did not bode well for anyone’s peace of mind as we children moved at various paces toward adulthood."
"Postwar Australia was a society transformed by the economic stimulus of the Second World War."
"My brothers sought excitement instead in music, and later in the world of fast cars and road racing."
"My first awareness of her fallibility came from my recognition of the contradiction between these two desires."
"Now I began to be less sure about everything."
"I began to think that when I got to the University of Sydney, I would study English literature."
"It was one of my mother’s more endearing characteristics that she thought big about removing the obstacles to her objective of the moment."
"I concentrated firmly on the platform and the daughter of the Governor of New South Wales, who was handing out the prizes."
"When the time came for her to speak, she told us to remember our responsibility to society and to those less fortunate."
"These unexceptionable sentiments pleased the assembled parents."
"Did helping the less fortunate mean that I was really meant to live my entire life caring for my mother?"
"I took myself to task for the uncharitable way I asked this question."
"My mother’s devotion to me...weighed on me like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross."
"At home, my mother was upstairs in bed, furious."
"Below, Barry was in consultation with the family physician."
"The doctor, a blunt speaker, said her dizziness might be attributable to high blood pressure."
"As I came into her room my mother looked up and said bitterly, 'Bloody doctors!'"
"The next day, we took her back to the hospital to receive a new cast."
"Nothing could disperse the storm of anger which emanated from her."
"It was plain that her recovery would take a long time."
"Daughters in Australia were supposed to be the prop and stay of their parents."
"How could I tell this woman who lived for me that I did not want to live for her?"
"I often watched the Southern Cross in the night sky."
"One’s first vision of the University of Sydney was of a graceful sweep of lawn."
"The tranquil golden stone quadrangle reflected the Australian sunlight."
"I felt a thrill of excitement at seeing this architectural expression."
"Would it be on time? The train system was notoriously unpunctual."
"I worried constantly about my responsibilities at home."
"At a deeper level I felt I had no right to exist unless serving the family in some tangible way."
"I radiated too much nervousness and anxiety to make any new friends."
"I should have settled down to working at my books during the journey home."
"At school sitting down to my books in the evening had been the happy occupation."
"I might have been lifted out of it by the interest of my work."
"The French Department insisted that one speak with a near-Parisian accent."
"In philosophy, I could do the logic exercises, but I didn’t really care."
"I lasted to the middle of the year before using my mother’s increasing ill health as an excuse to escape."
"I came to the decision to drop out of the University."
"Barry was not going to make the land his calling in life."
"He throve on landing in out-of-the-way places."
"Other bush pilots might be lackadaisical about their aircraft and its maintenance."
"My mother, nonplussed at this turn of events."
"She had an inflamed gallbladder and gallstones."
"I was glad of her frosty silence as we drove to our evening’s resting place. I had more time to reflect on the marvel of the day’s startling discovery."
"Once I’d thought those voices a tiresome sign of deviation from standard English speech. Now they were an accent like any other, an inheritance of history and dialect."
"I couldn’t control the irritation produced by such accolades, and would usually begin to tell preposterous stories about life in the outback to emphasize how different I was."
"My landscape was sparer, more brilliant in color, stronger in its contrasts, majestic in its scale, and bathed in shimmering light."
"Sacred music and ecclesiastical architecture expressed real universals which spoke to me wherever I met them."
"I wasn’t used to being patronized by people less well read than I, nor to having the history I knew so well explained to me as though I could not possibly know anything about it."
"Australia’s class system seemed harmless enough when one observed British snobbery and class consciousness at work."
"It was a grand extended view on a scale I was used to, but I felt nothing here akin to the mystical sense of oneness with nature I felt alone on the plains of New South Wales."
"I realized that the English romanticism I had taken for a universal was a cultural category in which I did not participate."
"For each of us, in our separate ways, the journey involved the redefinition of our relationship to the past and reconfiguring our sense of geography."
"The conventional tourist visit to Bath, made early in our stay, was unforgettable."
"I came to wait for the ultimate compliment which could be counted on by Sunday breakfast."
"I wasn’t interested in becoming less womanly to avoid that hostility, and I certainly wasn’t interested in becoming more English and less Australian."
"I knew I could manage my departure gracefully if no one came to see me off."