My mother married him to escape her family. My father was an Ulsterman, a sugar cane cutter and a terrible miser. The novel is a brilliant page-turner and into its 50-year time span McCullough poured much of her miserable childhood. Believe me, to them the Abo would have been invisible.' In the book I am painting a picture of life as it was for white people in the first half of the 20th Century. McCullough sighs: 'Poor old Germs! She's just currying favour with the politically correct. 'It's a brilliant show,' she says with an impressive lack of modesty considering it's her first fully staged musical.ĭespite having written 20 books, The Thorn Birds will remain her literary monument, although Australian feminist Germaine Greer recently took her to task for not including any Aboriginal people. It features Matthew Goodgame as Ralph, the priest, and West-End star Helen Anker as Meggie, his lover - and this time McCullough thoroughly approves of the cast. So disgusted was she with the series that McCullough is about to launch a corrective musical version on which she has been working for 15 years. 'The filming was done in Hawaii, there was only one kangaroo on set and everyone sounded American except Bryan Brown, whose Oz accent stuck out like a dingo's bits.' 'Ward couldn't act her way out of a paper bag and Chamberlain wandered about all wet and wide-eyed. 'It was instant vomit!' she shrieks through a cloud of smoke. The stars of that series, Richard Chamberlain as Father Ralph de Bricassart and Rachel Ward as Meggie, were adored by the viewing public. The 1983 television series - globally the most watched mini-series of all time - is today as well remembered as the book. And the land itself: stark, relentless in its demands, brilliant in its flowering, prey to gigantic cycles of drought and flood, rich when nature is bountiful, surreal like no other place on earth.Forbidden love: Rachel Ward and Richard Chamberlain in the 1983 mini-series The Thorn Birds Wonderful characters people this book: strong and gentle Paddy, hiding a private memory dutiful Fiona, holding back love because it once betrayed her violent, tormented Frank and the other hardworking Cleary sons who give the boundless lands of Drogheda the energy and devotion most men save for women Meggie Ralph and Meggie's children, Justine and Dane. It begins in the early part of the 20th century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station owned by his autocratic and childless older sister and it ends more than half a century later, when the only survivor of the third generation, the brilliant actress Justine O'Neill, sets a course of life and love halfway around the world from her roots. The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys.

The thorn birds paperback