How is this story different from the traditional story of pioneers coping with hardship?
Chapman: Jill wrote a book called When Memory Speaks in which she looks at the history of autobiographies and deduces that men tell their stories differently from women. Men strive for the heroic, while women have a tendency to say, “It happened in spite of me.” Rebecca and I had a conversation with Jill over lunch in which she said, “I don’t want you to make this into a story about man against the elements; that is way too simplistic.” In The Road from Coorain she does pull back from an assertion of the heroic. But I think it’s interesting that the story of her leaving this country is the story of a young woman who finally takes charge of her life — and there’s something of the heroic about that. Jill Ker Conway has said that she was spurred to write The Road from Coorain partly to serve as a corrective to the Crocodile Dundee image of Australia. Did this affect your approach, Penny? Chapman: We certainly wanted to avoid that image. When we came to do the film we went and looked at B
