[1] Beverley Rhonda Kingston was born in Sydney, New South Wales in 1941,[2] but grew up in north Queensland where her father was a manager with the Commonwealth Bank.
[4] Kingston joined the University of New South Wales in 1969 and worked there for 30 years, retiring in 1999.
[3] She has been actively involved in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) since 1974, including as chair of the NSW advisory group (1994–) and as a member of the Editorial Board (1996–).
[5] Her thirty contributions to the ADB include biographies of feminist Maybanke Anderson,[6] poet Dorothea Mackellar[7] and editor Beatrice Deloitte Davis.
[8] Kingston was elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1994.