Colleen McCullough
| Colleen McCullough | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
1 June 1937 Wellington, New South Wales, Australia |
| Died | 29 January 2015 (aged 77) Norfolk Island, Australia |
| Occupation | Novelist, neuroscientist |
| Genre | Fiction, fantasy, drama |
| Spouse | Cedric Newton Ion-Robinson (later Ric Robinson; legally changed to Ric Newton Ion Robinson in 2002); m. 1984-2015 (her death) |
Colleen Margaretta McCullough AO (/məˈkʌlə/; married name Robinson, previously Ion-Robinson; 1 June 1937 – 29 January 2015) was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds.
McCullough was born in 1937 in Wellington, in the Central West region of New South Wales, to James and Laurie McCullough. Her father was of Irish descent and her mother was a New Zealander of part-Māori descent. During her childhood, the family moved around a great deal and she was also "a voracious reader".
Her family eventually settled in Sydney where she attended Holy Cross College, Woollahra, having a strong interest in both science and the humanities.
She had a younger brother, Carl, who drowned off the coast of Crete when he was 25 while trying to rescue tourists in difficulty. She based a character in The Thorn Birds on him, and also wrote about him in Life Without the Boring Bits.
Before her tertiary education, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist. In her first year of medical studies at the University of Sydney she suffered dermatitis from surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of becoming a medical doctor. Instead, she switched to neuroscience and worked at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney.
In 1963, McCullough moved for four years to the United Kingdom; at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London she met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University who offered her a research associate job at Yale. She spent 10 years (April 1967 to 1976) researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. While at Yale she wrote her first two books. One of these, The Thorn Birds, became an international best seller that in 1983 inspired one of the most-watched television miniseries of all time.
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