In the course of his career, he worked at various jobs in the media industry in England, Germany, India, the Pacific and Australia.
[2] Hugh Atkinson's first novel, The Pink and the Brown, was published in 1957 and duly acclaimed as a critical success.
One of his later novels, The Longest Wire, recounted the story of the Overland Telegraph, one of the most ambitious projects attempted in 19th-century Australia.
He wrote several other novels set in Outback Australia, notably Billy Two-Toes' Rainbow, which partly examines the lives of the Pitjantjatjara, an Aboriginal people of the Central Australian desert.
It was a fictional recounting of the famous Pyjama Girl Case involving an apparently sordid murder which remained unsolved for many years.