When Darwin was bombed by the Japanese, Cyril Coaby was evacuated to Balaklava, South Australia. He was later placed in a boy's home, St John's Boys Town, Brooklyn Park, where he was educated to Year 10.. His father was a Spanish-Filipino sailor, who married his mother when she left the convent at Bathurst Island, Northern Territory and Coaby's grandmother on his mother's side was from the Alawa clan, Arnhem Land.
Coaby went back to the Northern Territory working as a cattle drover, railway fettler and a shearing shed hand, eventually returning to live on Koonibba Mission on the west coast of South Australia where he learnt to speak the Kokatha Aboriginal language. In 1970, Coaby became an Aboriginal health worker in the area of drug and alcohol programs for Indigenous people He was a founding member of the Aboriginal Sobriety Group and has worked with the Aboriginal Drug and Alcohol Council (SA) Inc. and other health related organisations.
