Louise Mack was born in Hobart, the seventh child in a family of thirteen born to Jemima and Hans Hamilton Mack. As her father was a Wesleyan minister, the family moved from state to state and were living in Sydney when Louise was ready for secondary education. She attended Sydney High School. Here she met Ethel Turner (q.v.) and worked with her on the girls' magazine, the Parthenon. Sydney High School provided the background to her best known books: Teens (1897), Girls Together (1898) and Teens Triumphant (1933). The last recounts to the London experiences of 'Lennie', the heroine, who had gone to England to seek a literary career. This mirrors Mack's own experiences and struggles in London as a fiction writer for the Daily Mail. Mack's love of Sydney Harbour was evident in The World Is Round (1896), Mack's first book, and found expression also in some of her poetry.
From 1898 until 1901, Mack wrote 'A Woman's Letter' for the Bulletin. From 1901 she lived for some years in England and Italy. She edited the Italian Gazette in Florence 1904-1907, and was in Belgium at the outbreak of the First World War. Writing for the Evening News and the Daily Mail, she was the first woman war correspondent to report from the front line during WWI, and she also published A Woman's Experiences in the Great War (1915). In her biography, The Romantic Lives of Louise Mack, Nancy Phelan (a niece of Mack's) claimed that 'All Louie's books, except her most fatuous novels, are heavily autobiographical' (238). An Australian Girl in London, according to Marcie Muir (q.v., 1992, Vol 1, 254), was autobiographical.
Mack returned to Australia in 1915 where she embarked on a lecture tour to raise money for the Red Cross. Following her marriage to John Percy Creed, Mack married Captain Allen Leyland in 1924 before being widowed (for the second time) in 1932. Mack's sisters included the writers Amy Eleanor Mack and Gertrude Mack (qq.v.); among her literary friends Louise Mack numbered George Lambert, Henry Lawson, J. F. Archibald and A. G. Stephens (qq.v.).
