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Meggie Cleary is the main character of The Thorn Birds, a 1977 best selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. The book was turned into a 1983 television mini-series starring Rachel Ward as Meggie.

The novel is set at a sheep station in the Australian outback between the years 1920 and 1962. The story focuses on Meggie's forbidden love for the priest Father Ralph de Bricassart, who fathers her son but remains in the priesthood. Throughout the story, Meggie Cleary remains obsessed with him, the one love of her life.

Meggie embodies the title of The Thorn Birds. Father Ralph de Bricassart describes to Meggie that the nightingale, in seeking the beauty of life as a thorn bird, sets upon a rose tree laden with thorns; as it is pierced through, it sings the most beautiful song as it dies.

A central story of The Thorn Birds is that Meggie perceives her life to be destined for heartache and pain as she loses those the most dear to her heart. During the story, two of her brothers, her father, and her son die, and she feels that the Catholic church has stolen her chance of being with her beloved Ralph, a ruddy country gentleman with tremendous gusto and a gift for energetic doggerel.

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