IT'S beginning to feel all autumnal—a time for soups and stews and turf burning fires that set your heart ablaze and bring heat to your kitchen. And let’s face it we’ve not had much of a summer to speak have we? We must’ve had more rain than the rainiest place on earth this year, which is Mawsynram in India by the way in case you’re interested. So I’m glad to see the back of it and welcome days when the cold nips your nose and ears and you’re having to wear geansaís and gloves—I just love it. I love the days when the darkness falls early and you draw your curtains and settle down with a good book or a Netflix series that keeps you wanting to stay up late and watch just one more episode. When I think back on the days when we only had four TV channels and when we watched a series we had to wait a whole week to see the next episode. How in under God’s name did we survive? There was none of the instant gratification we have nowadays when we can watch an entire series in one binge sitting. Lying across the sofa till our arses are numb to get to end of Narcos or Succession or Bad Sisters or whatever the top watch is.
A fine example of one such series from back in the day, is The Thorn Birds. The first episode aired in 1983 and promised to have all the ingredients of an epic Irish/Australian drama. It was set on a sheep station called Drogheda, run by the Cleary family and headed up by the matriarchal figure that was, Barbara Stanwyck. Richard Chamberlain played the part of Fr Ralph de Bricassart, priest and family friend, and Rachael Ward played Megan Cleary, the youngest of the Cleary family who moved from Ireland to help run the sheep farm. It was possibly one of the most loved and successful novels of all time. A sweeping saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions and
forbidden love in the Australian outback, and I read it cover to cover—under the covers—and remember not being able to put it down.
My pal Deborah had managed to get her hands on a copy and promised me that once she’d finished it she would give it to me. We arranged to meet after Sunday night Mass so she could pass the book on. So she hid it inside her jacket, but had to put it down when she was going to Holy Communion, so slid it in between the hymn books. It wasn’t until she was half way down the road after Mass that she realised she’d forgotten the bloody book! So she turned around and bolted back to the chapel, her heart racing in fear that one of the pass keepers found it. They didn’t and she got it back. Anyone watching us that evening must’ve thought there was an illegal drug trade at play. Her mammy didn’t know she’d read it and I certainly didn’t want anyone finding out either. Thanks be to God neither the passkeepers nor the parish priest saw the copy of The Thorn Birds in the pew. Can you imagine the sermon that would’ve been given out the following Sunday if they’d found that? We howled about this at the time and still howl to this day at all the potential outcomes of that scenario.
Anyway, I read the book, long after watching the series on the telly I might add, and it was most definitely worth the wait. I’ll never forget the patience required in waiting from week to week to watch one episode of The Thorn Birds, which almost drove us insane as it was a staple talking point as we walked the corridors of Holyrood Secondary School during our breaks.
And I’ll bet every one of you reading this will remember it well, and the controversy surrounding this book which McCullough wrote in 1977. It created quite the hullaballoo back then, and I have to say with a firm hand on an honest heart that it really wasn’t that shocking.
Honestly, when I see some of the trash telly that we’re subjected to nowadays, The Thorn Birds was right up there with The Sound of Music wasn’t it? I think some episodes of Dallas were a lot racier. But it was the 1980s and the Church feared people’s faith would be impacted, or that they’d lose faith in their priests. Ireland banned the book and the TV programme, but, of course the Irish postal service was run ragged when relatives in the UK, the US and Australia sent copies across the Irish Sea and Colleen McCullough’s novel became a world’s best seller with sales of more than 30 million copies and a TV series that became the most watched of all time. Irish households would tape it from the BBC and share it with family and neighbours. And did it do us any harm? Not a bit of it. There’s been far worse books printed and trash telly before and since that could corrupt any soul.
Behind the book
According to McCullough, a thorn bird spends its entire life tirelessly searching for a thorn tree and once they find it, the bird impales itself onto a thorn and sings a beautiful song as it dies. Apparently this is the first and only time that the thorn bird will sing. What a premise for a story eh? Which I guess foreshadows the sadness behind most of the character’s lives, living with the knowledge that their search for something meaningful in life would come with inevitable suffering.
Colleen Margaret McCullough was born in Wellington, Australia to an Irish father, James McCullough and a New Zealander mother, Laurie, who was of Maori decent. During her childhood, the family moved around a great deal but she remained a voracious reader. Her family eventually settled in Sydney where she attended Holy Cross College, Woollahra and developed 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 only 25 while trying to rescue other tourists who got into 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 a journalist. In her first year of medical studies at the University of Sydney she suffered dermatitis from using the surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of becoming a doctor. So she switched to neuroscience and worked at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In 1963, she moved to the UK, working in Great Ormond Street Hospital, London where she met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University who offered her a research associate post at Yale. She spent 10 years (April 1967 to 1976) researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, and it was whilst she was here she wrote her first two books. One of these was The Thorn Birds.
Following The Thorn Birds, McCullough wrote her magnum opus: seven novels on the life and times of Julius Caesar, each a colossus weighing in at up to 1000 pages. The Masters of Rome series preoccupied her for almost 30 years, from the early 1980s to the publication of the final volume in 2007. The research was a monumental task—a library of several thousand books and monographs on every aspect of Roman history and civilisation accumulated on the shelves of her home. She drew maps of cities and battlefields, scoured the world’s museums for busts and inscriptions, consulted experts in a dozen universities and recorded every known fact about her subject and his times.
Colleen McCullough was a prolific writer, dedicated, forward thinking and must be admired for her sharp mind and attention to detail. I admire that. But for all her works, the one that she will be most admired, revered and remembered for is, The Thorn Birds. She died on January 29, 2015. Rest in literary peace Colleen, you enhanced my youth and love of books and I thank you.
L J Sexton, mum of four, returned to university to pursue her passion for the written word. She achieved her Honours Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and hasn't stopped writing since. Lyn is born of Irish parents and lived in Donegal for eight years. She is also the press officer for Irish Minstrels CCÉ music group based in St Roch’s Secondary School
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