When a movie declares itself to be based on a true story or a book--fiction, memoir or history--it would be more truthful if the producers declared it was 'inspired by'. Granted that a work of fiction can be truer to the sense of a story than a fact-based account, when script writers get there hands on a story the original is often hard to recognize in the finished product.
Aside from the sweeping vista of salt-bush shown over the opening credits, a few shots of sheep, and a grassy track of road one gets the sense that most of this movie was shot on the backlot of some movie studio. An evocation of the windy outback which gives Coorain its name is largely missing. The storyline centres on interior shots of Jill and her Mother Eve. Her father who died when she was 11, (was it suicide), and her brothers are minor players in the story. A brother who died of snake-bite is dropped from the piece entirely. Uncle Angus, her Mother's brother (?) appears irregularly at meals and Alec (Conway), an American entrepreneur, figures prominently in the final third in some rather torrid love scenes.
What is made clear is the fact that this is a Man's world even though the story features two very strong women. The boys are sent off to boarding school, Jill is educated at home by her Mother. Her Mother may be the more astute business woman but Bill, her Father is deferred to while he lives and later her brother Bobby, who by his own admission is no station manager, is sent to run Coorain. A strong attachment to the land and identification with it is embedded in this family's psyche. The death of her brother Barry described by Jill as stunningly handsome in a road accident serves, more than the near failure of her station, to unhinge her Mother and reduce her to an attention-seeking wheedler who will do anything including break her own arm to prevent her daughter from leaving.
The Road from Coorain is more about the obstacles Jill faced than about a girl with a brilliant mind and strong will who overcomes adversity to succeed in the wider world.
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