During a roving childhood spent on sheep stations in New South Wales watching her parents row and cheat, Colleen McCullough vowed she would never depend on a man for a penny. And she did not. In her early 40s, she became a multimillionaire author, writing her novels from the splendid isolation of her estate on a South Pacific island.
Her bestseller The Thorn Birds, published in 1977, sold 30 million copies around the world. Germaine Greer called it: “The best bad book I have ever read.” The sprawling, cassock-ripping saga of a Catholic priest’s doomed love affair with a strong-willed country girl, set on remote Australian farmsteads, became a hit with British TV viewers when it was turned into a mini-series in the 1980s. With