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
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
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver