Kathleen Ussher was a journalist and illustrator. She was educated in Sydney at the Shirley School, Edgecliff, a progressive school for girls. In 1914 she travelled to the United States, where she briefly studied at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. It was in this period she met Miles Franklin, who became a lifelong friend. With the outbreak of World War I, Ussher moved to London where she became involved in war work, later serving as an orderly at an Allied hospital in Salonika, before joining the Women's Royal Naval Service. At war's end she returned to the United States, where she lived in Hollywood. By this point her elder sister Lorna, an accomplished violinist, had married and settled in Los Angeles. In the later 1920s, Ussher returned to Sydney, however she appears to have lived in London from ca. 1930.
During the 1920s, Ussher wrote a regular movie column for the Sydney Mail, titled 'Behind the Silver Sheet'. She also wrote The Cities of Australia (1928).
