Effie Pike was born in 1890, the daughter of English emigrants, George and Emily Francis. She grew up in New Zealand, but left for Australia in 1912 after her mother died. In Sydney she met her cousin Dorothy, with whom she was to spend the rest of her life. Both women worked in a number of poorly-paid jobs until Pike's health deteriorated and she and Dorothy returned to New Zealand. They came back to Australia in 1919 and travelled to Far North Queensland by a variety of means, including a horse and sulky, coastal steamer and Cobb & Co. coach, eventually settling in a rented cottage at Mt Molloy in the Mareeba area. Pike's records of their experiences later provided material for much of her writing.
In 1922 the women returned to New Zealand as Pike's father was ill, travelling back to Australia after his death. Charlie Pike, whom Pike had known since childhood and who had married her sister Alice, followed her to Australia after his first wife's death. They married and lived in Toowoomba, where their son, Glenville, was born in 1925.
With the onset of the Depression the family, including Dorothy, moved to Cairns where Charlie Pike obtained some manual work, but the family lived in extreme poverty. Charlie Pike went back to New Zealand and Pike moved to New South Wales for a brief period before returning to the Cairns area in 1932, living in Ravenshoe where she wrote for The Cairns Post.
Pike spent much of her life moving around northern Australia. She rented or purchased numerous rural properties, including a pastoral lease of 30 square miles in the Mareeba district. Nevertheless the family often lived in severely deprived circumstances. In his autobiographical account, My Yesterdays, Glenville Pike records how Pike supplemented the two pounds a week Charlie Pike sent from New Zealand with 'pin money' earned from writing paragraphs for The Australian Woman's Mirror and The World's News and the occasional article, such as one published in The Australian Women's Weekly relating her encounter with a wild boar. Her poetry was published in Bill Bowyang's column, 'On the Track', and later in Glenville Pike's 'Around the Campfire', both in The North Queensland Register. Glenville Pike asserts that Pike also published her work in English magazines and wrote two unpublished novels, and that the film rights to one of these was purchased by Universal Pictures, although the film was never made. She also wrote Christmas card verses for American soldiers during the war.
Effie Pike was hospitalised in Darwin for some years with dementia. Following Cyclone Tracey she was evacuated to Cairns, where she died in the Good Samaritan Methodist Church Home a few years later, aged 89.
