[1] Gaskin was born in Dundalk Bay, County Louth, Ireland in 1929.
When she was only three months old, her parents moved to Australia, settling in Coogee, a suburb of Sydney, where she grew up.
It sold more than 2 million copies, was translated into a number of other languages, and was made into a television mini-series in Australia in 1982.
[4] Gaskin moved to Manhattan for ten years, after marrying a United States citizen.
She then returned to Sydney, where she died in September 2009, aged 80, from ovarian cancer.