Cirrus@Austlit

Olive's father was a foundry worker in Sheffield for over fifty years, and her mother died at the age of 44. She was their fourth child. When she was three her sister taught her to read, and from then there was no holding her back from books. She left school at the age of thirteen and went to work for a milliner, and when war broke out she went into the Women's Land Army.

In 1957 she joined her sister and her family in South Australia, and worked in a gift retail store for 20 years. She started the Southern Writers Group in 1981, and has recently joined a Bush Poetry group at Willunga. She has written verse for the NSW Potato Board and for Masterfoods, and has had short stories read on Radio 5UV.