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Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough AO (born 1 June 1937) is an internationally acclaimed Australian author. Colleen was born in Wellington in central west New South Wales to James and Laurie McCullough.

Life

She grew up during World War II. 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 in Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In 1963 she moved to the United Kingdom where she met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University at the Great Ormond Street hospital in London, who offered her a research associate job at Yale. McCullough spent ten years researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. In the late 1970s she settled on Norfolk Island in the Pacific, where she met her husband, Ric Robinson, to whom she has been married since 1983. She now lives in Sydney.

Writing career

Her writing career began with the novel Tim (which was made into a movie starring Mel Gibson and Piper Laurie), followed by The Thorn Birds (1977), An Indecent Obsession, A Creed for the Third Millennium, The Ladies of Missalonghi, Morgan's Run, and the seven-part Masters of Rome series. The depth of historical research in the Roman novels led to her being conferred a Doctor of Letters by Macquarie University in 1993. She has also written a biography, Roden Cutler, V.C.

In 1984 a portrait of Colleen McCullough, painted by Wesley Walters, was a finalist in the Archibald Prize. The prize is awarded for the "best portrait painting preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics".

McCullough is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Controversy

McCullough engendered criticism for controversial statements made during the Pitcairn sexual assault trial of 2004. McCullough asserted that the rapes committed by the defendants (all but one of whom were ultimately found guilty of at least some of the charges they faced) were "indigenous customs" and that "[i]t's Polynesian to break your girls in at 12.