Patricia Wrightson is a significant writer in Australian children's literature of the twentieth century. Her novels show a deep understanding for what it has meant to be an Australian child growing up in a country of conflicting mythologies where the wonder of the natural world may be found for every child. Her provocative and complex re-creations of Aboriginal people, their stories and beliefs, have delighted both child and adult readers.

Alice Patricia Wrightson was born 19 June 1921 at Lismore, northern New South Wales, a country town surrounded by farming land and lush rain forest. Her parents, Charles Radcliff Furlonger and Alice Dyer Furlonger, were country people born about the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father worked as a solicitor. Wrightson re-created this environment in the settings of her early books. She was educated in country state schools and, for a time, was...