An only child of parents who divorced when she was fifteen, Patricia Austin moved to Sydney with her mother at the age of eight. She attended Wenona School in North Sydney, leaving there at fifteen years of age to go to a secretarial college.
She met and married Colin Russell Austin in 1941, and they had two sons. In 1954 they left Australia for Mill Hill in London, where her husband worked at the National Institute for Medical Research. They spent three years in Covington, Louisiana in the 1960s before her husband accepted the offer of the Charles Darwin Professorship of Animal Embryology Biology at Cambridge University, England..
They returned to Australia in 1984 to live in Buderim, Queensland,