Born 19 June 1921, at Lismore on the North Coast of New South Wales; Australia and lived in Bonalbo a township in the Clarence Valley . Daughter of a country solicitor, she was the third of a family of six. Attended several State schools including the State Correspondence School for children isolated in the country (the one she most admired), also boarded at a private school. Educated by her father in literature, philosophy and wonder; and by her mother in the social sciences. All her schools assumed she would take up writing seriously but on leaving school during the war she became a clerk at a munitions works in Sydney.

She returned to Bonalbo and spent some twenty years as a hospital administrator before joining the staff of the NSW Department of Education's School Magazine which she edited from 1970 to 1975. Only after she had married and divorced and had two children (Jenny and Peter) did she begin writing. Her first published book, The Crooked Snake, received the Australian Book of the Year Award in 1956, as did The Nargun and the Stars in 1974. In 1973, with Lilith Norman she instituted the Writers' Award in the belief that 'any country should express more than one view of its children's literature'.