SOURCE: "An Australian Ingredient in American Soap: The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 24, No. 4, Spring, 1991, pp. 59-69.

The Australian cartoonist Horner probably summed up the views of many Australians when he suggested Colleen McCullough be given the Order of Super Suds (O.S.S.) in the New Year's Honors list "for introducing an Australian ingredient into American soap."

While this assessment of The Thorn Birds, particularly of the television miniseries, contains more than a grain of truth, the book cannot be dismissed so lightly. It has set records for sales and popularity. Published in 1977, over half a million hardback copies of the book had been sold by 1979. Avon paid $1.9 million for the paperback rights, at that time the highest price ever paid for paperback rights of a book. It was on the top of the American best-seller lists for six months. In 1983 it was made into a very popular television miniseries. By 1985, 10.5 million copies of the book had been sold, 750,000 of them in Australia and New Zealand. An examination of the content of the book, therefore, is highly likely to reveal useful data on American popular culture, as well as something about the Australian ingredient.

The Australian Ingredient

The most obvious Australian ingredient is the setting. There is also a secret Australian ingredient which may not be recognized by Americans.

The story is set first in a rural area of New Zealand, and then in Australia, on a sheep station, Drogheda, in the plains country of New South Wales. There are occasional forays into other parts of the world, such as Britain and Rome, but most of the action takes place in Australia. The plains are described as "all brown and grey, even the trees!" "horrible, fenceless and vast, without a trace of green." The nearest town is "on the very edge of the Back of Beyond, a last outpost in a steadily diminishing rainfall belt; not far away westward began two thousand miles of the Never Never, the desert land where it could not rain."

Although this country is something of a fiction, it would not appear out of place to many Americans. Despite the lack of cactus, the setting evokes images of the sweeping dry plains and desert of the American western. The producer of the television series of The Thorn Birds said "We looked into shooting it on authentic Australian locations, but there's nothing in New South Wales that we couldn't match right here [California's Simi Valley, a dry, hilly area north of Los Angeles]."

An American Soap

Colleen McCullough was born in Wellington in western New South Wales, Australia in 1937. Her father was an Ulster Orangman who had immigrated to Australia in the 1920s. She had a link to New Zealand through her mother who was a New Zealander of Irish Catholic and Maori ancestry. In 1967 she went to the United States. She therefore had almost ten years' experience of American life to draw on when she wrote The Thorn Birds.

McCullough says that she has no literary pretensions. It pleases her to think that "Joe the Garbage Man" can read her books. When she decided to write The Thorn Birds she made a hard-headed decision to appeal to popular taste, particularly American popular taste, because that was where the money lay. She has described how she came to write The Thorn Birds:

And I suppose I was 32 or 33, single, living on my own because I hated—until I met my husband—living with anyone, when I looked at my pay cheque and thought 'you are going to be a 70-year-old spinster in a cold-water, walk-up flat with one 60 watt light bulb.' So I turned professional writer.

Having already written hundreds of books—I burnt them all except one—I turned professional writer for the money. I didn't set out to be a best-seller because I didn't want to be a best-seller. I just wanted to earn a nice little sum of pocketmoney from writing.

I thought I'd achieved that. Tim earned me $50,000 which was lovely. I thought Thorn Birds was three times as long so I'd probably earn $150,000 for that. That'll do fine. Of course, it didn't work out that way.

The three principal characters in The Thorn Birds are aristocratic. They are commonly encountered in the nineteenth century "sentimental novel," in modern light romances and soap operas. Father Ralph de Bricassart is a direct descendant of a baron in the court of William the Conqueror. Meggie Cleary and her mother, Fiona (Fee) are aristocratic by colonial standards, being descended from one of the first settlers of New Zealand, an escaped Australian convict named Armstrong who fathered "a brood of thirteen handsome half-Polynesian children." Through money and the best boarding schools, a new line of colonial aristocracy was formed.

The marriage of a pioneer to a beautiful Indian "princess" is a common American literary device. For some European Americans, having an Indian female ancestor is a matter of prestige. The marriage of a white woman to an Indian male, however, is not acceptable. By setting the first part of the book in New Zealand McCullough was able not only to draw on her own family history but to include a Maori equivalent of an Indian princess in the story. It is doubtful if a black Australian aboriginal female ancestor would be acceptable to the popular American imagination.

Meggie's father, Paddy, though "a penniless immigrant from the wrong side of the Pale," is a common character type of the American western from the nineteenth century until the present. He is "a small man, all steel and springs in build, legs bowed from a lifetime among horses, arms elongated from years shearing sheep;… His eyes were bright blue, crinkled up into a permanent squint like a sailor's from gazing into the far distance … His temper was fiery and he had killed a man once." Fee is forced to marry Paddy when her cultured, half-Maori, but married lover, the father of her child, refuses to consider divorce. As breadwinner and father of a large family, Paddy plays an essential supporting role in the book.

The Thorn Birds is long, spanning three generations from 1915 to 1969. The action and the language are often very melodramatic. The actors live a life remote from that of the book's readers. These are some of the ingredients of American soap.

A Sermon of Afflictions

The reason for the title of The Thorn Birds is explained in a note at the beginning of the book. The thorn bird spends its life looking for a thorn tree. Having succeeded in its search it impales itself "upon the longest, sharpest spine" and in death sings "One superlative song. Existence the price…. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain." This is almost an ornithological Crucifixion: death is sought willingly by an actor who is without guilt. As the story develops in The Thorn Birds, however, some of the actors are very guilty indeed. They gain happiness through sin. Then they (or someone they love) die. For these characters it is more accurate to say that the message of the book is the biblical statement that "the wages of sin is death." Fee pays for Frank, the son of her Maori lover, by his ruin, her husband's death, and finally her own. The death of Ralph's child, Dane is what Meggie receives for her sins. When he learns not only that he has a son (Dane), but that Dane has died, Ralph pays the price of his own death for his love of Meggie.

McCullough is very aware of the American feeling of national guilt:

I've never understood why Americans belabour themselves with guilt; why a generation that had nothing to do with slavery, and worked so terribly hard to integrate, blames itself so much for the sins of its ancestors.

The Thorn Birds is a modern sermon of afflictions, a Puritan jeremiad. The afflictions of American life are proof that the people have broken their covenant with God. By reciting the sins of the people some of the guilt can be relieved.

The Affliction of Race

Frank, the illegitimate son of Fiona and her half-Maori lover, is described as a dark and unstable force. He has a "vicious streak," there is something "wild and desperate" about him. He has an "alien" face, "black, black eyes" and "a dark heart, a spirit lacking inner light." His Maori "blood" is inescapable. His mother, says,

I have a trace of Maori blood in me, but Frank's father was half Maori. It showed in Frank because he got it from both of us. Oh, but I loved that man! Perhaps it was the call of our blood, I don't know!

He has some good traits. He helps his mother with the housework and he is the only one who hugs Meggie when she is a child, but he refuses to conform to family expectations. In popular American novels and films miscegenation almost always results in death, either of the alien wife, (rarely the husband) or of the resulting child or both. Frank must pay for Fee's sin. He leaves the family, kills a man, spends many years in jail and returns "a ruined man."

The Afflictions of Gender

McCullough says that the she set out in the book to illustrate "the martyr type of woman." The women are slaves to their men, to their children and to housework. The sons are forbidden to help.

The women are capable of doing "men's work"—Meggie is a good stockman, and Fee successfully manages the property after Paddy dies—but they see themselves as weak. Meggie says to her husband: "Oh Luke! I know I'm young and strong, but I'm a woman! I can't take the sort of physical punishment you can." Meggie sums up her attitude to life,

I'm just an ordinary sort of woman: I'm not ambitious or intelligent, or well educated … All I want is a husband, children, my own home. And a bit of love from someone.

Most of the men are also shown as martyrs. They are crippled by their inability to show emotion, by their ambitions to succeed in the world, or by both. McCullough has defended her depiction of males in The Thorn Birds—"It's not that the men are weak but they're hamstrung, for some good reason." Meggie's husband, Luke, however, is the archetypal, male, chauvinist pig. He treats her abominably, finally leaving to go cane cutting with his mates. He is possibly based on McCullough's own father who she described as "very, very good-looking … who used his good looks … He was a bastard. Tight as a fish's bum."

Relations between men and women are seen as a constant battle for power. Women succeed through subterfuge. Both Fee and Meggie consider they had tricked their lovers by having a permanent part of them—their children.

The Afflictions of Nature

The land makes the Cleary family rich, but it exacts a price. It is sometimes an Australian "howling wilderness." Paddy is burnt to death in a bushfire. Stuart, one of Fee's favorite sons, is charged by a wild pig and dies of suffocation when it falls on him. The other Cleary men (there are six sons) never marry. The land has taken away their manhood:

After all, what could you expect from the men? Stuck out here as shy as kangas, never meeting the girls to boot … And besides, the land's demanding in a neutered way. It takes just about all they've got to give, because I don't think they have a great deal. In a physical sense, I mean.

The Afflictions of the City

McCullough uses two other types of description of the land which are common in American literature, that of land as the connection with a time of innocence; and land as farmland tamed to man's agrarian needs. In New Zealand, for example, McCullough describes "an undulating plain as green as the emerald in Fiona Cleary's engagement ring, dotted with thousands of creamy bundles close proximity revealed as sheep." And in Australia,

Life went on in the rhythmic, endless cycle of the land; the following summer the rains came, not monsoonal but a by-product of them, filling the creek and the tanks, succoring the thirsting grass roots, sponging away the stealthy dust.

The Clearys (especially Meggie) are often portrayed as drawing their strength from this innocent land. When Meggie returns home to the plains from tropical Queensland, she comes,

Back to brown and silver, back to dust, back to that wonderful purity and spareness North Queensland so lacked. No profligate growth here, no hastening of decay to make room for more; only a slow, wheeling inevitability like the constellations.

The city, however is a decadent place. Frank finds his ruin in the city. Paddy says of city people,

Down in the city they don't know how the other half lives, and they can afford the luxury of doting on their animals as if they were children. Out here it's different. You'll never see man, woman or child in need of help go ignored out here, yet in the city those same people who dote on their pets will completely ignore a cry of help from a human being. Fee looked up. 'He's right … We all have contempt for whatever there's too many of. Out here, it's sheep, but in the city it's people.'

The Afflictions of Comfort

The Clearys are successful in worldly terms but their lives are full of tragedy. Although they are Catholic, they have achieved success through adhering to the values of American Protestantism. They are models of Calvinist Christianity. Their success is achieved through hard work, frugality, education and discipline. They are not fat—"No one carried a pound of superfluous flesh, in spite of the vast quantities of starchy food. They expended every ounce they ate in work and play." They spend large amounts of time reading and although they are poor, have several shelves of books behind the kitchen table. The children are strictly disciplined by their father and are sent to school, despite the cruelty of the teachers. The family goes to church regularly. Fiona gave up the Church of England for Paddy, but misses "the little touches" … like grace before meals and prayers before bed, an everyday holiness.

The "calvinistic, stoic upbringing" of the Clearys is contrasted with that of Meggie's schoolfriend, Teresa, whose family is Italian and very indulgent towards the children. Paddy distrusts Teresa's family and when he finds lice in Meg's hair, he horsewhips Teresa's father. After this, Meggie receives for her birthday the willow pattern tea set, like Teresa's, which she had coveted—another use of the "thorn bird" metaphor. She receives a gift at the price of losing a friend. As Ralph says, patting the dashboard of his new Daimler, "Nothing is given without a disadvantage in it." Success brings with it affliction.

Catholics are presented as comfort-loving and worldly, easily-swayed by temptation, and in the case of the nuns at the school attended by the Clearys, as sadistic. They also contrast strongly with the strict Cleary upbringing and system of morals.

McCullough believes in achievement through hard work and appears to discount good fortune as having any influence on success. She says,

… I earned my money and there's nothing in Marx that philosophically negates that … I remember one young man saying, 'Oh, all I can afford is one paperback at a time.' And I looked at him and said: 'Well, if you got off your butt'—he was a bright young man—'and did something about it, maybe you could afford to buy books by the carton. [as McCullough does] Because when I was your age I bought paperbacks too.'

Over the Counter Remedies

In The Thorn Birds McCullough also provides some simple prescriptions for curing the afflictions of the people. The formulae are as follows:

The afflictions of race: People from ethnic groups are inherently bad. They can't help themselves. For their own good, they must be made to conform.

The afflictions of gender: Men and women are a burden to each other. If a man really puts a woman down, she must retaliate by subterfuge.

The afflictions of nature: Whatever the cost, keep fighting nature until it is beaten into submission.

The afflictions of the city: Don't try to improve the city. It is an unnatural excrescence on the land. Retreat to the untouched countryside, if you can find any, as often as possible.

The afflictions of comfort: Everyone can become rich if they work hard. Good fortune has nothing to do with it. God is a very strict and success-oriented being. He watches for those who stray from the straight path of righteousness and become too complacent and happy. To keep people aware of their obligations to Him, He makes sure that every happiness is balanced by a tragedy. There is very little you can do to change this.

These formulae have the virtue of ethical simplicity. They involve no outlay of money and can be easily implemented by anyone. In providing simple answers to complex problems, McCullough is fulfilling a fundamental need of the American people.

Remedies in the Old; Remedies in the New

The remedies for the afflictions of the American people provided in The Thorn Birds are exactly like those which have been provided for them in American literature and life since the time of early settlement. Go back to the old is the message.

Another old message which can be found in The Thorn Birds is that of seeking salvation in the new. The story ends:

Meggie … stared wide-eyed through the window…. How beautiful the garden was, how alive. To see its small things grow big, change and wither; and new little things come again in the same endless, unceasing cycle. Time for Drogheda to stop. Yes, more than time. Let the cycle renew itself with unknown people …

Seeking salvation in a "New Israel" has preoccupied Americans for a long time. Part of the popularity of The Thorn Birds seems to rest on its portrayal of "new" lands in the same innocent state as the United States before it became an urban nation. The Thorn Birds shows Australia (and New Zealand) as unspoiled frontiers where Americans can live again their old dreams.

The Secret Australian Ingredient

For many Australians The Thorn Birds is an embarrassment as it presents a romantic and unrealistic view of Australian life, even of Australian life in the past. At least part of the story is based on McCullough's family history and many of the descriptions and dialogue ring true. Others are simply fanciful. It is irritating to have American customs and language transposed to the Australian bush. Meggie makes green fir tree cookies, for example, at Christmas time. Although many Americans make fancy cookies at Christmas time, Australians in general follow British customs, such as making Christmas puddings, pies and cakes, crammed full of dried fruit. This certainly would have been so between the years 1915–1969. In any case, the Australian word for "cookie" is "biscuit."

It is sometimes hard to resist the conclusion that McCullough is indulging in the old Australian pastime of the quiet, devastating joke and the tall story. Of her latest book, The Ladies of Missalonghi, she says:

I adored writing it. I've got a whole humorous side which you can't display in even an ordinary size novel because you just can't be irreverent about your characters for too long. The readers gets sated and starts to believe you're being smart—which, of course, you are. So, this was the first time I'd been able to do that.

Although she gets frustrated when she can't include her humorous side in something like The Thorn Birds, she says that she puts funny material in anyway. Then at the redrafting stage she takes it out.

The Thorn Birds is very funny at times. Even for an Australian, it is sometimes difficult to decide if there is any truth in some of the assertions in the book. Do shearers really get elongated arms as a result of prolonged shearing? Assuming that you are in the unenviable position of having a wild boar fall on you, how easy it is to die of suffocation as a result? Are there really any places in the deserts of Australia where it never rains? Do people in western New South Wales call kangaroos "kangas," or do they usually call them "roos?" Is it correct to call an Australian blue heeler dog a "Queensland blue" or should that name be reserved for a blue-gray skinned pumpkin? Did McCullough leave some of her funny passages in? Two of her favourite fiction writers are the Australian, Patrick Wright and the black American writer, Toni Morrison, both of whom write work which is often surreal. The Thorn Birds is sometimes so like a fantasy that it verges on the surreal.

There is an amoral, larrikin quality about the book which should alert an Australian that a good joke or a tall story is in the offing. But when many Americans do not know where Australia is, it is unlikely that they will be aware of the niceties of Australian humor.

In an interview with the Australian band, Men at Work, who made Vegemite an American household word with their song "Down Under," one of the band members said:

We managed to suck those people [Americans] in—a bunch of dags like us…. They don't know anything about us either…. They have a romantic view of Australia full of cuddly animals and pioneering men—or cuddly men and pioneering animals.

Australians love putting people on. The secret Australian ingredient in The Thorn Birds is Australian humor. McCullough presented the American public with a book which is an amalgam of American literary styles—a cross between a jeremiad, a western, a nineteenth century sentimental novel, and a light romance, in short, a classic American soap. She also provided remedies for the afflictions of American society, but these are nothing more than good old American snake oil, and out-of-date snake oil at that. Modern afflictions cannot be cured by a return to old, simplistic values. The old world is no more. Nor can a cure be found in new countries. Australia and New Zealand are not new, nor are they, unfortunately, unspoiled. If the American people swallow these remedies, their afflictions will not be cured, their sins will not go away. Colleen McCullough has fooled the American reading public. In The Thorn Birds she is quietly pulling the collective American leg.