Her father Leo Evaristus Cash, a salesman, had been active in the 1930s New Theatre movement in Melbourne, while her mother Valerie (née Walsh) was an operetta singer.
On 4 February 1948, she married Michael Damian Blackall, a law student, but left her husband and young son to earn a living as a torch singer and teacher of ballroom dancing in Melbourne.
In 1989 the book was turned into a teenage cult film, directed by Chris Thomson and starring Kylie Minogue and Charlie Schlatter.
[1] According to a recent literary history of Queensland, the novel was "of a tradition of critical social realism... largely absent from 'home-grown' Brisbane writing in the postwar decades."
She died of colonic carcinoma in Melbourne on 11 March 1963, aged 38, leaving a husband, a daughter by her second marriage, and a son by her first.