Ron Tullipan was born at Murwillimbah into a family of travelling showmen. After his parents' divorce in 1929 he lived for several years in St Vincent's Orphanage, Brisbane, before working in Warwick on farms and in Brisbane on building sites. He married 14-year-old Kathrine Mary Power in 1937 with whom he had four children. In 1941 he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, serving at home and in Bougainville before being wounded in action in May 1945.
While in the army Tullipan acted on an urge to write, learning his craft through close study of other writers. After divorcing his wife in 1947, he moved to Sydney to establish himself as a writer. He achieved limited success by writing popular stories for the Australian Journal and placing his first novel, The Glass Jaw, in Frank Johnson's Magpie Series in that late 1940s.
In the early 1950s he moved to Cairns with his partner, Vi Murray, and her son. In Cairns he worked on the wharfs and became involved in union affairs. Tullipan continued to place stories with the Australian Journal and he also earned money as a commercial artist. In the late 1950s the couple travelled overseas, visiting the Soviet Union and running a confectionary shop in London while Tullipan received art lessons.
On their return to Australia, Tullipan published three novels in quick succession, winning the Dame Mary Gilmore Award for the autobiographical Vision (1961) and March into Morning (1962). Tullipan's earlier novel, Follow the Sun (1960), was based on his observations of the waterfront. In the 1960s he became involved with the Sydney Realist Writers' Group and was elected president in 1967. He also served on the editorial board of the Realist from 1967-70.
Tullipan had been living in the Blue Mountains at Springwood and lost most of his possessions in a 1968 bushfire, but he manged to complete his last novel, Daylight Robbery, by 1970, drawing on his research into bushranger history. In 1970 he was awarded a $3000 Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship. But his writing and artwork were not selling and in 1973 he moved to Brisbane where he became vice-president of the Queensland branch of the Artists' Guild of Australia. He died in Brisbane of a cerebral haemorrhage in November 1975.
