Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough AO (/məˈkʌlə/; 1 June 1937 – 29 January 2015) was an Australian author. Raised in Sydney, she trained as a neurophysiologist and spent her early career working at hospitals and universities in Australia and overseas. In 1974, while working as a research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine, she published her first novel Tim. Her second novel, The Thorn Birds, was published in 1977 and became an international bestseller. It sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a successful television miniseries.

Soon after the release of The Thorn Birds, McCullough moved to Norfolk Island where she spent the remainder of her life. McCullough wrote a total of 25 novels over the course of her career, in genres including romance, mystery, and historical fiction. A writer of popular fiction, her novels were commercially successful but attracted relatively little attention from literary scholars and critics. She was named one of Australia's 100 National Living Treasures in 1997 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006. She died on Norfolk Island in 2015.

McCullough was born on 1 June 1937 in Wellington, New South Wales, to James and Laurie McCullough. Her father was of Irish descent and worked as a sugarcane cutter, while her mother was a New Zealander of Māori descent. During her childhood, the family moved frequently. Colleen later described her childhood as unhappy, calling her father a "right bastard, a rogue and philanderer" and her mother "bitterly anti-intellectual". She had a younger brother, Carl, with whom she was close. Carl drowned at the age of 25 in 1965 after rescuing a pair of swimmers off the coast of Crete; while his death was ruled an accident, McCullough believed that it was a suicide.

The family eventually settled in Sydney, where Colleen attended Holy Cross College, Woollahra, on a scholarship. She enrolled to study medicine at the University of Sydney before switching to studying neurophysiology due to an allergy to hospital soap that prevented her from treating patients directly. After her graduation, she worked at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. She then spent the next ten years working as a research assistant at the Yale Medical School.

While working at Yale, McCullough wrote her first novel Tim in an attempt to supplement her income. McCullough initially struggled to find a publisher for the manuscript, but eventually persuaded the literary agent Frieda Fishbein to take on the work. Tim, published by Harper and Row in 1974, depicts the romance between a middle-aged woman and a younger intellectually disabled man. McCullough earned a total of US$50,000 (equivalent to $326,000 in 2025) from the book, which sold 10,000 hardcover copies and was adapted into a film starring Mel Gibson and Piper Laurie.

In 1977, McCullough published her second and best-known book, The Thorn Birds. It was a major commercial success, eventually selling more than 30 million copies, making it one of Australia's best-selling novels of all time. The paperback rights to the novel were sold at auction to Avon Books for a record-setting US$1.9 million (equivalent to $10,090,000 in 2025) in 1977. The novel tells the story of multiple generations of the Irish-Australian Cleary family on a sheep station in rural Australia, and centres on the romance between Meggie Cleary and a Catholic priest named Ralph de Bricassart. It was adapted into a successful television miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward in 1983, and has since been translated into 20 languages. McCullough later refused to write a sequel to the novel and described the television adaptation as "instant vomit", complaining that the adaptation stripped out the nuance of her novel and that the acting was poor.

Shortly after the publication of The Thorn Birds, McCullough moved to London to study nursing, but abandoned her plans of becoming a nurse due to the book's success. She returned to the USA, to Connecticut, and then to Norfolk Island, a remote South Pacific island with a population of around 2,000 people, to isolate herself from the pressures of her celebrity status. She married Ric Robinson, who was descended from Bounty mutineers, on 13 April 1984. McCullough was an advocate for Norfolk Island's Polynesian culture and self-governance. She sparked controversy in 2004 after criticising the conviction of Pitcairn Islands men for child sexual abuse, arguing that sex with minors was a custom on the island and that it was wrong for Britain to interfere with the Polynesian inhabitants' indigenous practices.

In 1981 McCullough published her next novel, An Indecent Obsession. While the novel did not achieve the same success as The Thorn Birds, it sold around 3 million copies over the next eight years. The book was more positively reviewed, with critics viewing it as a more "serious" work than her earlier romances. She followed this with A Creed for the Third Millennium in 1985, a dystopian work of science fiction that was less commercially successful and was poorly received by critics. In 1987, McCullough published a short romance novel titled The Ladies of Missalonghi. McCullough was accused of plagiarism due to its similarities with The Blue Castle, a 1926 novel by L. M. Montgomery; McCullough denied the plagiarism accusations and attributed the similarities to subconscious recollection.