Colleen McCullough

Colleen Margaretta McCullough (; 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 and The Ladies of Missalonghi, the latter of which was involved in a plagiarism controversy. 2Life 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 Sydne