Julia Masters arrived in Australia at the age of four. She was educated at Walford School, Adelaide, South Australia and at Adelaide University where she received an Honours Degree in French language. Masters travelled widely and taught foreign languages before returning to university to study Law. She briefly pursued a legal career before taking up farming and writing. She and her husband lived on a property in the south-east of South Australia. Masters wrote about the five years of her life spent in infertility treatment in her autobiography The Rollercoaster.