Everyone of a certain generation would have read or watched The Thorn Birds . Written by Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds sold over 30 million copies worldwide and was made into an enormously successful television miniseries. Tim , the story of the relationship between an older woman and a young developmentally challenged man, was Mel Gibson’s first starring role. An Indecent Obsession , Morgan’s Run and The Ladies of Missalonghi set her firmly on everyone’s must-read list; Masters of Rome , her seven-book historical series, won applause from political luminaries and the general reading public alike. Bittersweet , published in 2013, was as successful as her earlier novels and merited a sequel. But even as she worked on that, Colleen McCullough died on January 29, 2015, at the age of 77 in a hospital on Norfolk Island.
She had been ailing for some years, losing her vision and dealing with failing kidneys, apart from a number of other health issues. In fact, in 2007 she joked in an interview, “From the waist down, I don’t work too well at all. And I’ve got a sort of very painful tic in my face and the eyes aren’t working too well and the ears aren’t working too well. But the most important thing is that what’s inside there — knock on wood — still works.”
That wry, often self-deprecating, sense of humour helped her get through a lot; from a difficult childhood to an unfortunate panoply of ailments as she aged. Born in Wellington, New South Wales, on June 1, 1937, she grew up in Sydney — her mother was of Maori ancestry and her father an Irish immigrant who was often away working as a cane cutter. Her only sibling, younger brother Carl, drowned in Crete in 1965. In modern terms, the way the children were treated by their parents could be a case of child abuse, but the author has often spoken of it with laughter instead of grief. “When you’re young, you’re angry. But the older you get…after a while there’s only so much coal you can put on the fire. And slowly the embers die until there isn’t a fire any more.” And life was indeed eventful — as she said in Life Without the Boring Bits , her 2011 autobiography, “Things happen to me, and there doesn’t seem to be a way out of it. Birds crap on my head, dogs hump my leg, rats laugh at me... and don’t say rats can’t laugh, because they can.” And life seems to have done some laughing too — her father once told her, “You’ll never get a husband, you’re too fat and ugly.” The fat came from a hormonal disorder and ugly, she knew she wasn’t. Loss of vision, a fragile back, kidney problems…everything added up to make her an uncommon soul. She knew exactly what was happening to her; after all, she was a trained doctor, a neurophysiologist who worked in hospitals in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. But she dealt with it with a smile and continued writing.
Love, too, played a big role in her life. She was happy being a doctor, being single — she did not want to live through a marriage as disturbed as her parents’ — but “I didn’t want to be a 70-year-old spinster in a cold water, walk-up flat with one 60-watt bulb, which is what I could see as my future.” She started exploring options, first as a painter, then as a writer. When Tim and The Thorn Birds gave her a future, she moved to Norfolk Island. There she found love in the form of planter Ric Ion-Robinson, whose ancestors had been mutineers on the Bounty . She once described him as “an interesting man and a stoic”, and even though she would dearly have loved to move to the U.S. for good, she decided she could never leave him, or force him to leave his beloved island, even though she was willing to take breaks into a more hustle-hurry world. “He would just pine away and die. He’s so Polynesian,” she said in an interview.
But she did indeed leave her Ric, first to go into hospital and then for good. But even in that she had to induce a giggle. When asked about her health, she told her interviewer, “I wear Chanel No. 5 to bed…I don’t have night clothes. I was having terrible muscle cramps in both hands, so the only thing that helped was a pair of long black kit gloves up to there. I had instructions to my housekeepers — if I’m found dead in bed, take the gloves off me before…”
We know the nurses at the small hospital on Norfolk Island would have made sure the gloves were off when Colleen McCullough left.
