The youngest of her family, Merna Cichon spent her early years in Kalgoorlie. With the threatened invasion of Australia in 1941 her father, Colin Matheson, joined the RAAF, and the family packed suitcases and followed him to various bases in WA, Victoria and SA. In 1943 he was killed in a training flight over Gulf St Vincent, and his body was never recovered.
Merna's family settled in Unley. She attended Unley Primary School and Unley High School to Leaving Certificate. She says of this time, "Books and music had always been a part of our home life, Mother reciting narrative poetry out under the stars on hot nights, my sister and I always involved in school dramas and concerts. We read widely..." (private correspondence). She took part in the first opera to be put on by a SA high school, "Dido and Aeneas", in 1947.
Leaving school she worked as a secretary for five years at the Legacy Club, then married and helped raise four sons. She did little writing at this time. In the late 1970s she and her family moved to Lobethal, and she began publishing in the Mount Barker Courier. By the 1980s she was sending work to the NSW School Magazine, and having a succession of poems and short plays published. Responding to a renewed urge to write, she engaged in a correspondence course and joined the Country and City Writers. Later she joined the Society of Women Writers, SA Branch and was President of the Society in 1983/84. She started writing short stories at about this time, then started work on a novel, which has only been published in abridged form. In 1994 she resigned from the Society of Women Writers and joined the Paddocks Writing Group.
