The Thorn Birds, a novel by Australian writer Colleen McCullough, was published in the spring of 1977.
Set in the Australian outback, the book followed three generations of the Cleary family from the 1910s to the 1960s. It was primarily about the forbidden love between main character Meghann “Meggie” Cleary and Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart (who was nearly two decades Meggie’s senior).
The Thorn Birds became the best-selling book in Australian history. Curiously, though, it didn’t have a strong effect on Australian baby names.* (Neither Meghann nor Meggie has ever ranked among the top 100 girl names in either New South Wales or Queensland, for instance.)
In the U.S., on the other hand, the book wasn’t quite as popular — it was the second-best-selling book of 1977 after J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion — but Meghann debuted impressively in the U.S. baby name data the same year, and jumped into the girls’ top 1,000 one year later:
- 1979: 374 baby girls named Meghann [rank: 517th]
- 1978: 301 baby girls named Meghann [rank: 572nd]
- 1977: 53 baby girls named Meghann [debut]
- 1976: unlisted
- 1975: unlisted
No doubt the trendiness of Megan around that time primed expectant parents to see spelling variant Meghann as a fashionable option.
Six years later, the Australian book was made into an American TV miniseries. The four-episode, ten-hour show — which starred Rachel Ward as Meggie Cleary and Richard Chamberlain as Father de Bricassart — was broadcast on ABC in March of 1983.
The televised version of The Thorn Birds was extremely popular. An estimated 110 million people tuned in to watch at least some portion of the program, making it the second-highest-rated miniseries in television history (behind Roots). It also earned 6 Emmy Awards and 7 Golden Globe Awards.
As a result, the usage of both Meghann and Meggie (which had debuted in the data in 1980) saw a marked increase:
| Girls named Meghann | Girls named Meggie | |
| 1985 | 260 [rank: 688th] | 47† |
| 1984 | 236 [rank: 704th] | 24 |
| 1983 | 297 [rank: 601st] | 42 |
| 1982 | 166 [rank: 913th] | 9 |
| 1981 | 170 [rank: 889th] | . |
The show also re-ignited the rise of Megan, and inspired the one-hit wonder Meghaan.
Two characters featured predominantly in the final episode of the miniseries were Meggie Cleary’s adult children Justine (whose father was Meggie’s estranged husband Luke O’Neill) and Dane (whose father was de Bricassart).
The names Justine and Dane both saw increased in usage in 1983:
| Girls named Justine | Boys named Dane | |
| 1985 | 939 [rank: 266th] | 1,003 [rank: 230th] |
| 1984 | 665 [rank: 346th] | 638 [rank: 306th] |
| 1983 | 522 [rank: 413th] | 831 [rank: 252nd] |
| 1982 | 313 [rank: 583rd] | 398 [rank: 419th] |
| 1981 | 310 [rank: 594th] | 334 [rank: 453rd] |
In the case of Justine, however, the increase is only partially attributable to character Justine O’Neill; actress Justine Bateman of the popular sitcom Family Ties, which had premiered six months before The Thorn Birds aired, was also influencing baby names that year.
Finally, while neither the book nor the miniseries could reverse the decline of Ralph, we do know that Father de Bricassart had at least one namesake: football player D’Brickashaw Ferguson, born in New York in late 1983.
*We don’t have comprehensive historical baby name data for Australia — which, in terms of population, was about 15 times smaller than the U.S. in the late ’70s — so it’s hard to know exactly how much influence the publication of The Thorn Birds had on Australian baby names.
Sources:
- Wikipedia: The Thorn Birds (book), The Thorn Birds (miniseries), Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1970s, Demographic history of the United States
- Prial, Frank J. “‘Thorn Birds’ rating second only to ‘Roots’.” New York Times 2 Apr. 1983: 37.
- Popular baby names – NSW Government
- Top 100 Baby Names – Queensland Government
- Historical population, 2021 – Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Demasio, Nunyo. “D’Man Behind D’Name.” Sports Illustrated 10 Apr. 2006.
- SSA
Image: Screenshots of The Thorn Birds