After graduation she moved to London to work at Great Ormond Street hospital, then accepted a research post at Yale medical school in the US, where she worked for 10 years. “I saw a Blue Bird portable typewriter for five pounds so I bought that instead,” she said.Ĭol won a scholarship to the Holy Cross college in Woollahra, excelling in science and the humanities, before studying medicine at the University of Sydney. Col spoke of how she started writing, buying a typewriter with money given to her by her mother for an overcoat. The family moved around for many years, eventually settling in Sydney. She was born in Wellington, New South Wales, to James, an Irish immigrant who worked as a cane cutter, and Laurie, a New Zealander of Maori descent. It was her bookishness that saved Col from her background. She may have convinced herself, with some justification, that a repeat performance of The Thorn Birds was simply not possible. The Thorn Birds can be read as a fantasy autobiography, a hymn of repressed longing, electric with sexual tension, conceived and nurtured in the mind of a bookish teenager born of an unkind father and an uncaring mother and raised in the poverty and isolation of a rural backwater. But there was, perhaps, a deeper truth behind her decision.
This was, at least in part, because she rejected the idea of a sequel, which would have brought her a great deal of money, on the grounds that another such outing would typecast her as a writer of romantic novels for women or, as she put it, “chook books”. The book was turned into a popular UK television miniseries, with Richard Chamberlain playing Ralph and Rachel Ward as Meggie.Ĭol wrote 23 more books, but none came near the success of The Thorn Birds.
Described by Germaine Greer as “the best bad book I have ever read”, it was the tale of the doomed love affair between a country girl, Meggie Cleary, and a priest, Ralph de Bricassart, set in “a typical settlement on the very edge of the back of beyond”.
Colleen McCullough, who has died aged 77, found international fame as the author of The Thorn Birds, a 600-page romance that became the bestselling Australian novel of all time, with sales of 30m in dozens of languages.
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