Cirrus@Austlit

Don Charlwood grew up in Frankston, Victoria, and began writing while he was still at school. He worked on a sheep property at Nareen, western Victoria, during the depression years of the 1930s, and in 1941 joined the RAAF and went to England as a navigator on Lancasters with Bomber Command. After the war, Charlwood worked as an air traffic controller for thirty years before his retirement.

The setting of his novel All the Green Year, Kananook, was based on the Frankston Charlwood had known as a child, which was then little more than a village. It was filmed as an ABC television serial in 1980. He wrote two collections of short stories, An Afternoon of Time, which reflects to some extent his time at Nareen, and Flight and Time, based on his experiences of wartime and civil flying. As well as his short stories and novels, Charlwood wrote a book for children on air traffic control, Take-Off to Touchdown (1981), researched and wrote about Australia's early shipping and shipwrecks, and from the diaries of early settlers, wrote The Long Farewell: Settlers Under Sail (1981).