Politics & Power Quote by Colleen McCullough

You can hear the historical clock ticking in McCullough's blunt practicality: she "stopped" a book not because the muse failed, but because the calendar of nationhood demanded a better entry point. "Two months before federation" isn’t just a date; it’s a narrative lever. Start too early and you risk writing prelude. Start too late and you miss the messy bargaining where a country’s ideals get drafted alongside its exclusions.

Her real tell is "more political" - a phrase that reads like a corrective, even a self-challenge. McCullough was never shy about big canvases, but here she’s naming an intent to move from saga to system: from personalities and period texture to the machinery of power. That shift matters because federation gets packaged, in civic mythology, as a clean birth story. She’s signaling interest in the unclean parts: policy as the true founding drama.

Then she lands the phrase that makes the temperature drop: "white Australian policy". No euphemism, no soft focus. The subtext is that Australia’s national identity wasn’t merely imagined; it was legislated. By framing it as "formation" she implies deliberation and design, not accidental prejudice - the kind of choice that can be traced, argued over, and therefore judged.

McCullough’s context as a bestselling historical novelist is crucial. She’s not announcing a dissertation; she’s telegraphing a cultural intervention, smuggling political history into popular narrative where it can’t be politely ignored. The sentence is almost workmanlike, which is precisely why it hits: the exclusionary spine of the nation described as just another plot problem to solve, because that’s how it was treated at the time.