Tributes for Australian author Colleen McCullough, whose romantic saga The Thorn Birds sold more than 30 million copies, poured in yesterday from the publishing world to politics, following her death at the age of 77.
The best-selling writer, known for her wit and warmth, passed away in hospital on Norfolk Island — where she lived for most of the last four decades — after suffering a series of small strokes.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said she was as “a unique Australian personality and Norfolk Island’s most famous resident,” adding that “she enthralled readers for decades and she will be missed.”
McCullough wrote 25 novels and her first, Tim, was made into a 1979 film starring Mel Gibson. The last, Bittersweet, was published in 2013. The paperback rights for the 1977 novel The Thorn Birds, her second book set on a fictional sheep station, were auctioned for US$1.9 million, reportedly a record at the time.
In 1983, it became a top-rating TV mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward, but an unimpressed McCullough told the Daily Mail it was “instant vomit.”
The Australian newspaper described her as a “true national treasure” who “told a good story — usually peppered with profanities — about the most intimate details of her life.”
“RIP Colleen McCullough. I can’t think of anyone who took such a miserable childhood and turned into a life of such luminous achievement,” 702 ABC Sydney presenter Richard Glover said in a Twitter post.
In interviews, she spoke of growing up amid warring parents, with a mother she once called “deliberately cruel” and an itinerant worker father who was found out after his death to have had at least two other wives.
In her first career she set up the neurophysiology department at Sydney’s prestigious Royal North Shore Hospital before heading to England and then spending a decade at Yale Medical School in the US. It was there that she decided to write Tim, which was an instant success.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including