the thorn birds colleen mccullough

washed ashore on the wild west coast of New Zealand's South
Island, Roderick Armstrong and two other men were still alive. He
never spoke of that incredible journey, but it was whispered that the
three had survived by killing and eating their weaker companions.
That was just nine years after he had been transported from
England. He was yet a young man, but he looked sixty. By the time
the first officially sanctioned settlers arrived in New Zealand in
1840, he had hewn lands for himself in the rich Canterbury district
of the South Island, "married" a Maori woman and sired a brood of
thirteen handsome half-Polynesian children. And by 1860 the
Armstrongs were colonial aristocrats, sent their male offspring to
exclusive schools back in England, and amply proved by their
cunning and acquisitiveness that they were indeed true descendants
of a remarkable, formidable man. Roderick's grandson James had
fathered Fiona in 1880, the only daughter among a total of fifteen
children. If Fee missed the more austere Protestant rites of her
childhood, she never said so. She tolerated Paddy's religious
convictions and attended Mass with him, saw to it that her children
worshipped an exclusively Catholic God. But because she had never
converted, the little touches were missing, like grace before meals
and prayers before bed, an everyday holiness.
Aside from that one trip into Wahine eighteen months before,
Meggie had never been farther from home than the barn and smithy
in the hollow. On the morning of her first day at school she was so
excited she vomited her breakfast, and had to be bundled back into
her bedroom to be washed and changed. Off came the lovely new
costume of navy blue with a big white sailor collar, on went her