Colleen McCullough (; 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.
Early life
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. 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.
Writing career
While working at Yale, McCullough wrote her first novel Tim in an attempt to supplement her income. The paperback rights to the novel were sold at auction to Avon Books for a record-setting US$1.9 million () 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.
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 United States, 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.
After McCullough's death, a legal dispute was launched over her estate. Her friend and executor Selwa Anthony argued that McCullough intended to leave her $2.1 million estate to the University of Oklahoma Foundation, while her husband presented a later document signed by McCullough leaving her estate to him. In 2018, the New South Wales Supreme Court ruled that McCullough had not been coerced into signing the later document and awarded her estate to her husband.
Writing and reception
McCullough wrote a total of 25 novels spanning multiple genres, including romance, dystopia, mystery, and historical fiction.