Art & Creativity Quote by Colleen McCullough

A fortune-teller who does it "for a living" is McCullough’s sly way of announcing the book’s real subject: survival in a world where women are expected to make do with whatever power they can plausibly claim. The detail is comic on its face - psychic work as payroll - but it also points to a class of female labor that’s tolerated because it’s easily dismissed. If men run the institutions, women run the unofficial economies: intuition as commerce, performance as leverage.

Calling the novel "wacky" and "great fun to write" is not just marketing breeziness; it’s a tactical framing. McCullough signals that the story will move through humor and eccentricity, a mode that lets her smuggle critique past the gatekeepers of taste. "Fun" becomes a permission slip to look closely at social constraint without sounding like a lecture. That’s especially pointed given McCullough’s own career: a formidable, high-selling novelist who nonetheless had to negotiate a literary culture eager to categorize women’s writing as domestic, lightweight, or merely entertaining.

The line about "what life was like for women in Australia in the 1960’s" positions the book as social memory, not nostalgia. The decade is often mythologized as liberation, but in Australia it was also an era of tight respectability, limited professional paths, and norms that trained women to be agreeable even when they were cornered. The fortune-teller becomes a perfect emblem: a woman paid to name possibilities in a society that rationed them.