Author Colleen McCullough was born on June 1, 1937 in Wellington, Australia. She wrote a highly regarded series on Rome; she taught and did research at Yale’s Medical School Dept. of Neurology. And while she was working at Yale – because neurology and a position at an Ivy League university somehow didn’t take up all her time – she wrote The Thorn Birds. In her honor I give you the post I wrote after visiting the Outback. —Jadi
In The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough vividly depicts a turn of the century sheep ranch in the Australian Outback. The hardships of working an unforgiving landscape, conditions that seem too extreme to be real, and the isolation are all accurately portrayed.
You’re already yawning, right?
All right then, how about this? In The Thorn Birds, young heroine Meggie and the priest Father Ralph de Bricassart, many years her senior, fall in love. Their life long passion is both forefront and backdrop to the fates of a family in the Outback.
That caught your attention!
I’m not usually one for the guilty pleasure of romance novels, but this one works on so many levels that it’s irresistible. Whether as romance, family saga, or historical portrayal, The Thorn Birds is a great read. It’s also accurate to a fault. As you read this book, you experience Australia’s hard climate along with McCullough’s characters.
Uwe and I drove through a small portion of the Western Australia Outback. Our goal was the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie-Boulder and we had a long, stop-every-3-hours to stretch our legs drive to do. The Coolgardie-Esperance Highway goes on with no bends or turns (and very few trees).
We halted briefly in Norseman
and purchased sandwiches and drinks for a planned picnic stop. But there was a problem: no picnic tables anywhere. We drove and drove. Why, on such an endless highway, were there were no facilities?
We finally gave up and pulled over to the side of the road.
I got out of the car and spread lunch on the hood. I was too hungry to wait for Uwe, so I unwrapped my sandwich and yummy cake, and gazed out into the endless empty brush.
Every fly in the endless empty brush left wherever they’d been snoozing. Within seconds my eyes and mouth, my hands and arms, and my lunch were engulfed with fat hungry insects. My sandwich was rendered way beyond salvaging; it had vanished under layers of crawling flies. I wrapped everything back into a bag to throw away later and contented myself with a piece of fruit (eaten in the car, with the windows all closed).
In case you’re eating your own lunch as you read this I won’t tell you what it is in The Thorn Birds that’s covered in flies. But man, that McCullough sure can write!
In memory of Colleen McCullough, June 1, 1937 to January 29, 2015
NOTES: Copyright © 2013 Jadi Campbell. Previously published as The Outback.
I am a Best American Essays-nominated writer. My award-listed books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, The Trail Back Out, and The Taste of Your Name. My most recent book,
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They carry yellow stickers. Return to Sender. Not Deliverable as Addressed. Unable to Forward.
My own, less clever Christmas cards are a way to remain connected to my mom’s tradition. And the cards are my way to remain connected, if I can, even if just one day out of the year, with the people who were in my life in various places at various times. Each of them helped me with their friendships more than they’ll ever know. Each year a few cards come back, and another friend has dropped from my life.
There are issues to deal with – the loss of domestic animals to predators. The way elephants eat or trample crops. The complicated cross-country agreements. But, as their website states, “Local communities participate with enthusiasm in management of the TFCA through the Transboundary Natural Resources Managment Forum. The aim of this forum is to maximize skills and resources to promote sustainable land use, conservation of wildlife and landscapes, and rural development.”
Johnny Hartman was born July 3, 1923 in Houma, Louisiana. As a jazz singer Johnny Hartman is most famous for his 1963 collaboration with saxophonist John Coltrane on the sublime album 
For twenty-five years (minus a day) I had a memory of rose-colored glass. Uwe and I got married over a quarter of a century ago. Aside from thinking Yikes, how did that happen?!, I have sighed Awwww. Not many things last this long, especially when we’re talking about human beans….
We wanted to return to the little town in Alsace where it all began. We booked the same hotel and both of us think we may even have been given the same room. We drove over a day before our anniversary and checked in as it began to rain. The sight of the rain on the windows was get outta here romantic.
I took some pictures. But later, checking to make sure my photos turned out, I was puzzled. The views of the village outside the windows had stayed pretty. But, wait a second: where were the colored panes of glass both of us are sure we remember?
The mystery was solved by a friend who reminded me that hotels – especially old ones – spend money on renovations. So, along with the elevator that was not there when we checked in 25 years ago, the windows were probably recent too. The glass in the windows is now textured, maybe ‘pebbled’ is the word I want. The view is still ever so slightly wavy and distorted…
The feeling came to me as a revelation. When I climbed shakily out of what I considered a toy tin helicopter after our ride over the Okavango Delta, I was startled to realize I was feeling something unfamiliar: