Patricia Wrightson has said that readers will find her biography much duller than her stories, but the setting of her own life is fairly exotic to American readers. She was born in Lismore, New South Wales, in 1921, and grew up in the sparsely-settled North River country area of Australia.

Although she attended a district primary school, most of her secondary schooling was taken by correspondence, in a program for students living in isolated areas. She did much reading as a child, and she remembers gradually noticing that none of the books she read and loved were written by Australians, or about Australia. A few years later she began to remedy this lack through her own writing.

Meanwhile, World War II intervened. After graduating from high school she went to Sydney, where she took a job in a munitions factory. She also married, had two...