[2] Rawson was born in Innisfail, Queensland, and grew up in a small town nearby where her father was the schoolteacher.
She won a full state government scholarship to the University of Queensland, where she excelled in classics and graduated with first-class honours.
She accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to the United States and completed a doctorate at Bryn Mawr College, under Lily Ross Taylor.
[5] On 13 December 2010, Vice-Chancellor of ANU, Professor Ian Chubb officially recognised the naming of the Beryl Rawson Building in her honour.
[6] In the late 1970s she began using computers to analyse "the mass of funerary inscriptions commemorating slaves and freedmen, their spouses and children" and to better understand the lives of the lower classes in the early Roman Empire.