The Sheep Station Saga That Ruined Priests For Me

A hundred years of Australia, one very inconvenient priest

Here’s the setup, and I promise it’s wilder than it sounds from a distance. The Cleary family, dirt poor New Zealanders, get summoned to Australia by a rich, dying relative to work her enormous sheep station, Drogheda. Among them is Meggie, a little girl with a brother problem and a father who barely speaks to her, and pretty early on a young priest named Ralph de Bricassart shows up and takes a shine to her. Not in a creepy way, at first. He’s kind to her when nobody else is. He buys her a doll. It’s actually sweet.

Then the book does the thing where you watch a kid grow up over hundreds of pages while a grown man’s feelings about her slowly curdle into something the book insists is love and I insist is a genuine problem, and to McCullough’s credit she seems to know it’s a problem too. Ralph is ambitious, he wants the Church, he wants Rome, he wants power, and Meggie is the one temptation that could take all of that away from him. So he does what ambitious men in doomed romances always do: he leaves, he comes back, he leaves again, across decades, across a marriage Meggie enters basically to spite him, across a world war, across the birth of a son who is very obviously his even though nobody says it out loud for what feels like forever.

It’s a plot that spans essentially the entire twentieth century and about three generations of Clearys, and the sheep station itself becomes almost a character, this vast, punishing, beautiful land that swallows people whole. Fires happen. Floods happen. People die in ways that are shockingly brutal for how gently they’re written.

Why I still think about the fire scene at 2am sometimes

Look, I need to be honest about the two very different books living inside this one book. The first is a genuinely great, sweeping piece of storytelling about land, family, and the particular cruelty of the Australian outback. The second is a romance that has not aged well and honestly wasn’t even that comfortable in 1977.

Let’s start with what works, because a lot does. McCullough writes Drogheda itself better than she writes most of her human characters. The heat, the drought, the way a grass fire can turn a horizon into hell in twenty minutes, the way the men go out to fight it knowing some of them won’t come back. There’s a fire scene involving Meggie’s father and brother that I read curled up on my college dorm floor with my roommate asleep six feet away, and I had to put the book down and just breathe for a minute. It’s genuinely one of the most brutal death scenes I’ve read in commercial fiction, and it lands precisely because McCullough has spent two hundred pages making you love these unglamorous, hardworking, quietly funny men.

Fee, Meggie’s mother, is the character I think about the most on rereads, more than Meggie honestly. A woman who loved one man her whole life, married another, and simply closed a door inside herself and never really opened it again. McCullough writes her coldness with so much restraint that when Fee finally, decades later, says something tender to Meggie, it hits like a freight train.

Now the part I can’t just wave away. The Ralph and Meggie relationship starts when Meggie is a child and he’s a grown man, and even once she’s an adult, the power imbalance never fully evens out, he’s still her priest, her confessor, the person who baptized her, and the book asks you to read decades of this as swoony and tragic rather than, at points, uncomfortable. I don’t think McCullough was oblivious to this. I think she wanted you to feel conflicted. But I also think a lot of readers in 1977 read it as pure romantic tragedy without blinking, and that gap between then and now is worth naming instead of pretending it isn’t there.

And it is long. There is a chunk in the middle, once the story shifts to Meggie’s daughter Justine and her opera career in London, where the momentum just drops out from under you. I skimmed some of it on my reread, and I don’t feel bad about that.

A quick tangent: this is the book that made me understand why my mom’s generation was so obsessed with the miniseries, Richard Chamberlain in that collar, the whole cultural moment of it. I watched twenty minutes of it once and turned it off, but I get it now. This was appointment television built entirely on the tension of a man who is not allowed to want someone.

Am I sure this book deserves the reverence it still gets from people who grew up with it? Honestly, some days I’m not. There are stretches where I wonder if nostalgia is doing more work than the prose. But then I think about Fee, and the fire, and Meggie standing on that beach at the very end having the conversation that breaks the whole book open, and I come back around.

The whole book is really about what people are willing to sacrifice on the altar of the thing they’ve decided matters most, whether that thing is God, ambition, or a man who was never fully theirs to begin with.

About Colleen McCullough

McCullough was a neuroscientist before she was a novelist, which honestly explains a lot about how clinically she can dissect her characters’ worst impulses even while writing them sympathetically. She was Australian, blunt, famously uninterested in being precious about her own fame, and reportedly once responded to a comment about her looks with a joke so dry it became more famous than the interview itself. She wrote across wildly different genres afterward, including a whole Rome series, because apparently writing the best known Australian novel of the century wasn’t enough of a flex. She lived on Norfolk Island for much of her later life and by all accounts had zero patience for literary snobbery about commercial fiction, which, respect.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, for another sprawling saga about land, war, and a love that never quite works out the way anyone wants
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, if you want the family-and-fate scale of tragedy without the romance framing
• The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery, for a gentler, kinder take on a woman finding an unexpected life far from where she started
• Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, if the tangle of faith and desire is what actually pulled you in

For your book club

1. Does the book ask you to root for Ralph and Meggie, or does it want you to see the relationship as a slow-motion tragedy neither of them can stop
2. Fee barely speaks about her own heartbreak for most of the book. Did that restraint make her more sympathetic to you or less
3. How does the Australian setting function as more than backdrop, does the land itself feel like it’s punishing or shaping these characters
4. Would this book get published the same way today, and should it
5. Whose ending did you find more devastating, Meggie’s or Justine’s, and why