Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough (1937–2015) was an Australian novelist whose working life began in science. She established a neurophysiology department at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital, then spent a decade researching and teaching at Yale Medical School. Her first novel, Tim, appeared in 1974; The Thorn Birds followed in 1977 and brought her an international readership.

McCullough moved freely among genres. Her Australian sagas examine family loyalties, ambition, faith and the pressures imposed by class and landscape. The seven-volume Masters of Rome sequence, beginning with The First Man in Rome, reconstructs the late Roman Republic on a much larger historical canvas. She also wrote the Carmine Delmonico crime novels, set in 1960s Connecticut.

The Thorn Birds follows the Cleary family across generations on the remote sheep station Drogheda, with Meggie Cleary’s forbidden love for the Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart at its centre. The novel was adapted as a major television miniseries in 1983. In 2006 McCullough was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for service to the arts and the community.

For a first encounter, choose The Thorn Birds. It offers McCullough’s characteristic scale while keeping its focus on an intimate conflict between desire, religious vocation and social expectation. Readers drawn more strongly to political history can continue with The First Man in Rome.