Richard Parker began writing for children during World War II. He worked in the British Royal Signals Corps in the Mediterranean during the war and while in Egypt wrote a number of stories in letters to his daughters. His wife had these stories published as Escape From the Zoo which became his first children's book.
At the end of the 1950s, Parker and his wife accepted teaching jobs in Tasmania and lived there from 1959 to 1961. During these two years, Parker listened to the stories the children told. He adapted those stories and combined them with both real and imagined events in the five children's books he wrote with Australian settings.
Parker continued to write children's books after his return to the United Kingdom, although none of these had significant Australian content.
(Source: Stella Lees and Pam Macintyre The Oxford Companion to Australian Children's
Literature (1993): 333-334).
