Daughter of Robert Vernon Stuart Hutchison and his wife Elizabeth Mary (Cavalier), Mary Hutchison attended Unley High School, going on to further study at Flinders, Monash and Adelaide Universities, and graduating with a PhD from the University of New England, exploring the politics and poetics of imaginative writing in different settings and by authors who are not mainstream writers. She has always been interested in applying creative writing in a wide variety of contexts and stretching its traditional boundaries.
Another interest is in drawing her background in sociology and history together with the practice of creative writing. As a social historian she co-authored with Margaret Allen and Alison McKinnon a SA women's history source book, Fresh Evidence, New Witnesses: Finding Women's History (1989).
Her initial professional writing work, during the 1980s, was in radio and theatre. As well as the unpublished plays listed here she wrote a radio documentary on Edith Hubbe for ABC's Coming Out Show in 1983. She became involved in writing for community theatre and then moved into working more directly with community groups in writing and publishing. Her direction and interest here were strongly influenced by the British community writing and publishing movement, and in 1994 she took up an honorary visiting fellowship at the University of Sussex which enabled her to meet and exchange ideas with member groups of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. In the early 1990s she took up the position of Community Literature Officer in the ACT on a job-share basis with Annie Bolitho. Together they published Out of the Ordinary: Inventive Ways of Bringing Communities, their Stories and Audiences to Light.
She continues her creative writing, as a practice which is not bound by genre or context. She is interested in imaginative critical writing and in imaginative approaches to interpretive text in public places sush as museums and public artwork.
She feels that the list of her creative writing for this database gives more a sense of her "apprenticeship" than of her current practice.
