No regrets for Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough sits in her wheelchair outside a Pyrmont cafe in inner Sydney with her metal cigarette case and asks if it is all right to smoke.

The blockbuster author of The Thorn Birds, the highest selling novel in Australia, is unapologetic about her habit.

"When I was young you were ostracised if you didn't smoke, so you really can't blame my generation," she says.

Despite failing eyesight and increasing difficulty walking, McCullough isn't a person who indulges in regrets.

Currently, the 70-year-old is doing publicity rounds for the latest and final book in her Masters of Rome series, Antony and Cleopatra.

The 606-page epic is set in the time between the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 41 BC and the ascension of Octavian to Caesar Augustus 14 years later.

She orders a sparkling water and a tuna tortilla wrap before launching into the interview, starting with her own life.

Growing up in a "jock-strap" family, McCullough was a self-taught reader who devoured anything in print from the age of three.

"My sole refuge was reading. I didn't care what I read because it was World War II, paper was scarce and nobody was publishing books," she says.

Her childhood dream of being a doctor was dashed in her first year of medical studies when she suffered dermatitis from surgical soap.

"The doctors said to me, 'you'll never be able to scrub so you won't be able to do medicine.'

"I suppose I just moved on, you can't live on regrets."

Trained as a neuroscientist, McCullough left Royal North Shore Hospital and headed to England in 1963.

She met Gilbert Glaser, the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University, at the Great Ormond Street hospital in London, who offered her a research associate job.

It was while she was in New Haven, Connecticut, that she penned her first two novels, Tim and The Thorn Birds.

In the late 1970s McCullough settled on Norfolk Island, an Australian territory and former penal colony resettled by the descendants of the Bounty mutineers.

"It was close enough to keep an eye on my family, my mother and (two) uncles, without living on the same continent," she laughs.

Her mother, Laura McCullough died blind and deaf, aged 98, in 2005 - but not before making life a misery for everyone, McCullough says.

"Hung onto life like grim death, a vegetable by the time she died because she would not keep her brain stimulated."

Her mother's legacy to Colleen was haemorrhagic macular degeneration, a condition which affects the retinas, and which has left her with no central vision in her left eye and only around five-eighths in her right, making reading difficult.

The nerves in her spine are also crushed, making it difficult to walk. She can still manage it, but says it causes her great discomfort.

"I find myself more and more inclined to use a wheelchair because I get so terribly tired," she says.

But unlike her mother, McCullough's brain keeps fizzing.

"My body is ratshit but at least what's inside my head, knock on wood, isn't," she says.

McCullough's move to the Pacific island, a two-and-a-half hour flight north-east from Sydney, was made sight unseen.

"I was told it was a nice place and indeed it was. Then I met my husband (Ric Robinson) there, so now it's home."

Although she is now based in Sydney, Norfolk will always be a special place for McCullough.

She is riled by the press coverage of the murder of Sydney woman Janelle Patton, for which New Zealander Brendan McNeil was recently sentenced to jail.

She describes the case as a "misfortune" involving people who weren't part of local life, and maintains that the island is safe.

"There still hasn't been a murder there committed by a local, so it's safe as houses," she says.

"I blame the press for concentrating on it."

Her new book, Antony and Cleopatra, is the book-end of her Masters of Rome series. But it was almost never written.

"(I thought) I will never write another book that I need to do heavy research for," she says.

"Then I thought, well I should while I've still got the eyesight, because I have done the notes and the Roman series is not fully rounded without it."

McCullough says she does her research in "big blocks", consulting her own library of about 2,000 books on Roman times.

After taking hand-written notes and retyping them twice, "it's in there" she says, pointing to her head, "and I remember it."

The 18 months it took to write Antony and Cleopatra was double her normal writing time because of the difficulty she had reading and typing.

"I miss-see the words, I think 'than' is 'that', and that pulls you up and you think 'that doesn't make sense'."

She still writes on a typewriter, a technology that suits her style.

"I'm not a cut and paste writer ... the sequence of events, I never switch paragraphs or stuff like that. I just need new vistas and polishing the prose," she says.

"I know some writers who actually start a novel without knowing how it ends. I know the last paragraph better than I know the rest of the book."

The Rome series grew out of a love affair with Italy that began with her first visit in the mid 1960s.

Rome, she says, was "magic".

"It wasn't just another European city in modern times with aluminium sided buildings and skyscrapers and the all the rest.

"Rome on its hills, with its narrow alleys, its wonderful old buildings, its ruins, it was unique and I really liked that very much."

McCullough is currently working on a new book which she describes as being "much ... more light hearted".

But don't expect her to give anything away just yet.

"Even my publisher doesn't know (what it's about), it drives them mad," she laughs.

"They had to sign a contract with me not knowing what the next book is about."

One thing she'll guarantee is that it won't be Son of Thorn Birds, the book she's been asked for since 1977.

"They haven't got it and they're never going to," she says.

©AAP 2007