Brenda Northeast came to Australia with her parents and her two brothers when she was two years old. Not long after they arrived, her parents separated and the children were sent to New Zealand to live with their grandparents. Northeast did not see her mother again until she was fourteen, when she visited her in Darwin. On returning to NZ after the visit she found that her father, now remarried, had sold her school uniform, so she started work, firstly in a Berlei factory and then a bacon factory, but found the noise level in both of these unbearable. She then worked as a telephonist for the PMG before marrying at the age of sixteen. Her first child was born the next year and she had three children by the time she was twenty-two. By then she and her husband had moved to Darwin. When her marriage ended she was a lone parent for ten years. In the mid-1980s she married Laurie Northeast, a widower with two children. They moved to South Australia in 1992. Between them they had a large family to support, and things were financially very difficult. Northeast knew she could draw, and had the idea of changing the masters' paintings into paintings of bears. She thought that this would be a way to introduce the paintings of the masters to children, and it might also provide her with some much-needed income. It did not succeed and in 1993 she began studies at the Para West Adult Campus.
In 1995 Northeast completed Year 12 Art, achieving a Merit certificate and a 20/20 score. She decided to try again at some Old Masters changes, and looked at the work of Vincent Van Gogh. Needing to know more about him, she began reading his life story. She was so impressed by what she read that she felt compelled to find a way to tell his story to children around the world, and this was the beginning of her first book, For the Love of Vincent. She did twenty-two paintings and constructed the story of a bear discovering the work of Van Gogh. Northeast has read on Channel 7's 'The Book Place' and has talked at schools, taking her costumes for the characters in her books.
