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.
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