Vivienne Wallington was one of three children, with a brother three years older and another five years younger. She grew up in a two-storey house designed by her architect father in the foothills of Adelaide, with an air-raid shelter under the stairs, and had a number of pets including a kangaroo, a turtle, two Chinese bantams, two white rabbits and a stumpy-tailed lizard. She went to Girton Girls' School (now Pembroke) from kindergarten to matriculation. She has always written, and by the time she left school she had written many short stories (illustrating most of them), plays, poems, full-length children's novels and a couple of long-running serials written in weekly instalments for her friends. She studied music for many years, and trained as a librarian at the Public Library of SA.
She married John Wallington and moved to Melbourne, where his company had transferred him for his work, and she has lived there ever since. After a break to have children she resumed work as a librarian, working in special, public and school libraries before becoming a medical librarian. After 15 years in hospital libraries she retired from library work to write full-time. Her books have been translated into a number of languages, including Japanese, Greek, Spanish, French and Hungarian.
As well as the books listed below, she is the author of the children's non-fiction work, Names are Fun (1990). Her interests are reading, classical music, her family, and travel, both in Australia and overseas, gathering inspiration for her books.
