To meet with Colleen McCullough one generally must take a 13-hour nonstop flight from Los Angeles to New Zealand, then board another plane to Norfolk Island, in the South Pacific Ocean, a three-by-five-mile bit of land that she calls "a remote speck at the end of the world." Small wonder, then, that PW sought out the author at the recent ABA in Las Vegas. The reason was not contiguity alone: McCullough's name will be much bandied about this fall, as Morrow issues the first of her five-volume series of historical novels set in the waning days of the Roman Republic. The First Man in Rome: Marius would be an achievement on any terms; running 896 pages, with copious notes, a chatty glossary, maps and illustrations all provided by the author, it is yet another departure for the writer who made her name with The Thorn Birds and has surprised her readers each time out with a novel quite different from the one before.

As advance readers of The First Man in Rome have discovered, it is not frivolous stuff. Exhaustively researched for historical accuracy and humanized through a plethora of small, telling details that bring Roman politics and society vividly to life, this is a complex story that requires respectful attention. Although she pronounces the book "not daunting for your average novel reader," McCullough admits that "a certain kind of Thorn Bird fan won't hack it." On the other hand, she crows, "at least I've written something that men won't be ashamed to be caught reading on the subway."

Nor does she feel that readers will be put off by the characters' cumbersome names, with their similar or identical praenomens and strings of cognomens. "Latin is the major root of out English language," McCullough says firmly. "Metullus is easier to pronounce than Raskolnikov." As for such monikers as Quintus Caecilius Metullus Numidicus and Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, two characters prominent in the first book, McCullough is confident that their sharply delineated personalities will make them spring off the page.

McCullough has never been shy of taking chances. Having dreamed about this saga for 30 years and having researched for a decade, she is confident that it will find an audience commensurate with its 300,000 prepublication printing and status as a Book of the Month Club selection. So determined was she to do these books that she left Harper & Row, her longtime publisher, because of its reluctance to guarantee the entire five-book series.

Her fascination with the Roman Republic dates back to her college years in Australia. According to McCullough, she and her five best friends—all boys—had been "brilliant in high school, and when we got to first-year university we were bored dry. We'd all been science-streamed so we decided we'd embark on a program of culture. Amongst other things, we read the Penguin translations of the Greek and Roman classics. I always wanted to read them again, and after Thorn Birds I did. I came to the letters and speeches of Cicero and the Commentaries of Julius Caesar. And I was fascinated." McCullough pronounces the last word portentously, emphasizing each syllable. She lights another of a chain of cigarettes, smooths her hair, pulled back in a no-nonsense bun.

"One glaring fact hit me square between the eyes. For the first and last time in the history of the world until very recently, these were words written by the men who ran the joint. Not some historian scribbling away after the fact. I was awed! Reading Cicero's letters as he wavers between loyalty to Pompey and the temptation to turn to Caesar, and his glancing references to Cleopatra—whom he loathed—I suddenly saw a world that I wanted to enter as a novelist, desperately. At no other time in the history of the world did so many truly intelligent and talented men walk across a political stage at one time. And the Roman Republic gave us our law, our political systems, our engineering—so much! I thought, it's germane, it's relevant to modern living."

Determined to render the era with exactitude, McCullough assembled in her home on Norfolk Island "the best private library on Republican Rome in private hands anywhere in the world." She enlisted the aid of a full-time researcher, Sheelah Hidden, who was fluent in four languages and who interviewed experts in many countries. Hidden also located portrait busts of the characters, so that McCullough, who had decided that she was "fed up with people thinking that Cleopatra looked like Elizabeth Taylor," could draw the novel's illustrations.

"I did all this research and I put two million words on paper and of course, being me, I drafted it. Three drafts. This was all nonfiction preparation for the book—a monograph of each of the major characters. Next, I got continuous computer paper, and I made a chronological list of every single thing that happened. I did all that before I started writing the first volume. And I did it for the lot; it is done!"

To her surprise, however, Harper & Row was less than eager for the enormous project. "Fred [Mason, her agent] and I couldn't get a contract out of them. They dickered. Money was never at the root of it because we weren't asking for a lot of money. This hemming and hawing went on for six months."

McCullough finally wrote out a precis of each of the five books she contemplated: Marius, Sulla, Pompey the Great, Caesar, Augustus—and sent it to Harper along with a monograph on Cleopatra, so that they would see "how important the women in the books were going to be." The upshot was that Harper pressed her to abandon the first two books and start directly with the events involving Pompey. "When they informed me of this I was 55,000 words into Marius. I was crushed," McCullough intones dolefully. Though she is recalling a bad time, she is also indulging the raconteur's gift of spinning out a tale.

Convinced that the series should appear as planned, that "in order to understand what happened to the Roman Republic, one must start with Marius," McCullough recalls her anger at Harper's unwillingness to go along with the plan. "A creative artist can't work in that kind of atmosphere. You can't work for a publisher who doesn't want you. Money has never mattered to me, but by God, my work does!"

It was at this point that Carolyn Reidy, president of Avon, which had published all of McCullough's works in paperback, ventured to Norfolk Island to urge the author not to cut Avon out of reprint rights for the projected saga. McCullough, who had always enjoyed working with Reidy, sensed the time was ripe to jump ship to Morrow, and stipulated that Reidy edit all five books. She now professes herself "hugely pleased" at the arrangement.

Quite a lot about McCullough is outsize: her big, comfortable frame, clothed in a muumuu and absent of feminine adornment; her booming, uninhibited laugh; her open friendliness and large, unrestrained smile; her storytelling, delivered with gusto; her ego. But if she doesn't suffer for undue modesty, she is matter-of-fact about her accomplishments.

Born in Australia's outback, she says that she and her brother, who died 25 years ago, were both gifted children of a mean-spirited father and a mother determined to guarantee her children's education: McCullough attended Holy Cross College and the University of Sydney. Possessing what she calls "amazing mathematic and artistic and scientific gifts," as a child of the Depression McCullough decided to opt for security and "do science." An allergy to soap kept her from being a surgeon ("I couldn't scrub, you see"), so she became a medical scientist. Having earned an appointment at Yale as a research assistant in the department of neurophysiology, she arrived in New Haven on April Fools' Day 1967. She loved her job but was very poor, so she decided to write a novel at night to earn extra money. The result was Tim, "my bucket of tears book."

McCullough sent Tim to agent Freida Fishbein, then "a very ancient lady of 87, who placed the novel with Harper & Row. Fishbein had died by the time McCullough started The Thorn Birds, which was "very loosely based" on her family's history in Australia, so she herself delivered the manuscript to editor Ann Harris at Harper. "It was about four times the length of Tim, which had earned me $50,000. I thought, with any luck, maybe it would earn me four times that amount."

McCullough then went off to England, where she was due to start nurse's training at London's ancient St. Bartholomew's Hospital, to get background for the hospital novel she was "desperate" to write. "I didn't tell them I wrote books, of course. I was looking forward to some really hard physical labor because I am a workhorse."

Training was due to start on April 11, 1977. On February 2, The Thorn Birds made a record sale in paperback auction, and, McCullough recalls, "I hit the headlines everywhere. My cover was sprung. It was manifestly impossible that I go on to nursing. Can you imagine: a millionairess author carrying a bedpan!"

Other major changes in her lifestyle soon proved necessary. "When I became rich and famous, life became very complicated. It was unsafe for me to live on my own on any major landmass; you become prey to all sorts of nuts and bolts in the community." Hearing about tiny Norfolk Island, with its controlled population, she applied to live there. And, soon after, at the age of 46, married an island native, Ric Robinson, a descendant not only of one of the Bounty mutineers (as are many of the island's residents) but also of a Samoan princess and Isaac Newton.

Robinson, who is some years her junior, is "a colonial aristocrat in every way," according to McCullough a planter of the kentia palm ("it's the very hardy plant you see in all the hotel foyers"), Robinson modeled a reconstructed toga for his wife, providing irrefutable evidence that Romans did not sport underwear when wearing the garment. "It would have been impossible to pee in a toga if you wore anything underneath, you see. There's your left arm, weighted down by an immensity of toga: it's 16' by 9'. You can't possibly lower that hand …" McCullough rises from our table in a Las Vegas coffee shop, pantomimes the situation. PW is convinced.

On Norfolk Island, McCullough wrote Indecent Obsession, which she calls "my whodunit"; Creed for the Third Millennium, "my pessimistic novel of the future"; and the novella Ladies of Missalonghi, "my fairy tale."

The Roman series is her "bash at the historical novel." Happily embarked on the second volume, she is confident that she will produce the books at the rate of one a year. "The first one's always the hardest, and I got it out in less than a year, from go to whoa. It's not hard to do if you're well organized and well ordered. I'm not short of words. Maybe it's my scientific training, but my feeling is that for a writer, words are tools.

"Nobody expects a neurosurgeon to lay down his tools. I'm good with my tools. I don't mislay them. I'm a fluent writer. I do multiple drafts. Once I start, I'm consumed to finish. I work at a pace a lot of writers couldn't cope with."

McCullough slows her rapid-fire recital. She smiles broadly. "I'm such a nitpicker. I love the little details. If you're going to make it sing, it's the little details that will do it. I found one small detail in Caesar's Commentaries. Before a major battle, all the men sit down and make their wills. That's it, you see; that sort of detail makes it a world, and makes the world very real." To McCullough, writing feverishly on her remote island, that world is very real indeed.