Cataldi (née Sonnino) was born in Sydney during World War II when, owing to her father’s Italian heritage, she was technically an 'enemy alien'.
She won the University Medal, publishing her thesis as A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric (by Lee A. Sonnino).
Since returning to Australia in the 1970s Cataldi has worked as a teacher and a linguist, on Indigenous Australian languages in Halls Creek, Alice Springs and Balgo.
In the late sixties she travelled to Italy and England where she became a socialist, inspired by the May 1968 uprising in France.
[citation needed] Cataldi's first book of poems, Invitation to a Marxist lesbian party, was published in 1978, winning the Anne Elder Memorial Prize in that year.