Colleen McCullough
Colleen McCullough was born in Wellington, central NSW, in 1937. As a child she had a precocious talent for learning and reading, and possessed a sharp mind. She was educated at Holy Cross College and then at Sydney University and the University of NSW. She began her professional life not as a writer but as a neurophysiologist, working in hospitals in Sydney and England before spending a decade as a research associate in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in the US. It was during her time at Yale that she began writing, there authoring both Tim (1974) and The Thorn Birds (1977). Tim was a modest commercial success; The Thorn Birds a huge success, and has sold more than 100 million copies in hardcover and paperback in more than 40 languages.
Of McCullough's 20 novels The Thorn Birds is the novel for which she is best known. When the paperback rights to the book were sold, Avon paid US$1.9 million, which was at the time the highest price ever to have been paid for such rights. In the early 1980s it was made into a miniseries in America, where, at the height of this TV format's popularity, it was then the second-highest rating miniseries.
It's the sort of thing you never think is going to happen to you. I'm just amazed that I'm going to go all over the world on a stamp – at least I hope I do.
Her work has ranged over a number of genres, beginning with psychological and family saga in the early novels to historical fiction in the Masters of Rome series (seven novels), in which she chronicles the lives of the ancient Romans; crime-thriller fiction with On, Off, a book with its roots in her own science background; and a kind of postmodern re-imagining with The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, in which she retrieves the marginalised Mary from literary obscurity. Although her books have been very popular, none so much as The Thorn Birds, she has been largely ignored by literary critics in Australia. However, in 2000 she won the Italian Premio Scanno for The Song of Troy, and she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Macquarie University for her scrupulous research into ancient history for her Roman series.
Since the late 1970s McCullough has lived on Norfolk Island, where, for the last 25 years, she has been married to Mr Ric Robinson, a direct descendant of the mutiny of the Bounty and the First Fleet. In 2006 she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for service to the arts as an author and to the community through roles supporting national and international educational programs, medico-scientific disciplines and charitable organisations and causes. In 1997 she became a National Living Treasure. She is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and serves on several American academic boards dealing with subjects as diverse as politics and neurosurgery.
