Mary Roberts was educated at the Glennie School in Toowoomba. After her B.A. from the University of Queensland in 1955, she returned to the bush where she has lived ever since. A community writer, she edited Morven : The Story of Its Development Compiled on the Occasion of the Centenary of the State School and Railway (1986), and wrote Uncle Peter, the Life of Edwin Peter Roberts C.M.G. (1989), and Victoria Downs : A Century of Challenge and Change (2006).