The Ladies of Missalonghi (1987) was the work that McCullough was
accused of plagiarising from The Blue Castle (1926) written by the Canadian
novelist L.M. Montgomery and, as DeMarr points out, the parallels are clear
(DeMarr, 1996:132). I t is essentially the story of Missy Hurlingford and of how she
finds freedom, love and wealth through marriage to a stranger, John Smith; it is the
archetypal Cinderella story. Set in the fictitious village of Byron, which the reader
must assume is located somewhere in the Blue Mountains of NSW, with its bizarre
urban nomenclature (McCullough, 1987:20), McCullough names the village for the
poet of Childe Harold and bears Byronic names for its locales such as George Street,
Gordon Road, Noel Street and Byron Road, ironically, Caroline Lamb Place where
the town’s brothel is located (DeMarr, 1996:138).
(d) Religious Allusions
I n The Thorn Birds, the plot and structure are relatively simple with the
theme being developed gradually with strong religious allusions. The I rish-Catholic
family milieu is clear from the beginning, although we learn later that Fee, the wife,
is actually from an old and prominent New Zealand family. Padraic (Paddy) Cleary,
the patriarch of the clan, is liked and respected by all around him. His wife, Fiona
(Fee), is a woman with a past who loves her children, respects her husband but is
living in a world that she did not want, but accepted, as her only possible way of
life, again to some degree, mirroring the complacent Biblical Adam and the
questioning Eve. Then there are Fee and Paddy’s children, Frank, Meggie, Hughie,
Jack, Stuart, Bob, and the twins, Jims and Patsy, but the story revolves almost
entirely around the life of Meggie. I n a reverse of the Biblical Edenic story
throughout, in this narrative the theme is that women suffer because men, through
thoughtlessness, cause their pain.
The work in the McCullough corpus that is undeniably a biblical allegory is A
Creed for the Third Millennium (1985). I n the dystopian genre of Huxley’s Brave
New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this work imagines what the United
States of America might come to be in the early years of the twenty-first century,
the beginning of the third period of a thousand years on our calendar. Washington
DC remains the seat of political power, with a key department, the Department of
the Environment, depicted as ‘utterly soulless’ (McCullough, 1985:37). The story
echoes the anticipation that seemed to occur at the beginning of the second