Daughter of the Rev'd Cedric Lyon Noon and his wife Violet (Bennett), Nancy was educated at Lyndoch Primary School, Oakbank Area School and St Peter's Collegiate Girls' School.
After leaving school she worked in the school broadcasts section of the ABC, and then as a governess. In 1951 she married and went to live on her husband's property in the north of SA, where she lived for the next 27 years, and "reared two daughters and countless animals". During this time she continued to correspond for the ABC News Service, and to contribute whimsy, folk observations and verse to national programmes. She also contributed to magazines and newspapers and wrote regular columns in various national journals. Because her mother-in-law did not approve of this, she used pseudonyms for most of her writing until 1971, when her first book, Change on Change: a History of the Northern Highlands of SA, was published under her own name. Over the next six years she continued writing and editing books, received a Literature Board Grant, presented regular magazine programmes for a commercial radio station in Adelaide and formed a small publishing firm, Nadjuri.
In 1977 her marriage broke down, and she had to leave the family property, moving to Adelaide and supplementing her income by tutoring for the College of Open Education. She married Alick Whittle in 1979, and they lived at Stansbury on Yorke Peninsula for two years before returning to Adelaide to live. During this time she worked as administrative assistant to her husband, a consultant mineralogist, until he became critically ill in 1982. She was a foundation Trustee of the Northern Cultural Centre at Port Pirie 1978-1983 and was member of the State Heritage Committee in Adelaide 1981-1986. From 1984-1990 she worked intermittently at 5DN Adelaide and at the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, on archival consultancies. Her husband died in 1987, and in 1989 she enrolled in a short course on the history of architecture at Oxford University. On her return to Adelaide she met Ian Flannery, and married him in 1990. During 1991 and 1992 she was engaged as a valuer for the Mawson Collection at the University of Adelaide. Since then she has edited several books including This Everlasting Silence: The Love Letters of Paquita Delprat and Douglas Mawson 1911-1914. As well as the creative writing listed here and her first book, Change on Change (1972), Nancy Robinson Flannery has also written Sweet Breathes the Breast: A Masectomy Rehabilitation Handbook (1974) and Reluctant Harbour: The Romance of Pirie (1977), both as Nancy Robinson.
