Born in Adelaide, she took up academic positions and was at the end of her career emeritus professor at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia.
After migrating to Australia, they were brought together during World War II by their shared experiences and German accents, being treated as aliens.
[1] Brock initially became a high school teacher, but was led to leave teaching after a student asked her why they were studying Henry VIII and she found that she could not answer that question.
[2] Moving to Perth, she approached the recently-established Edith Cowan University, which at the time had few staff for their new Department of Aboriginal and Intercultural Studies.
[1] Yura and Udnyu: A History of the Adnyamathanha of the North Flinders Ranges [Wakefield Press, 1985 and 2023] This research led to another another major publication, Women Rites & Sites.
Aboriginal Women's Cultural Knowledge,[6] an edited collection of referenced essays based on original reports to the Aboriginal Heritage Unit by herself and seven other non-Aboriginal women expert in this area (Catherine Berndt, Catherine J. Ellis, Linda Barwick, Helen Payne, Jen Gibson, Jane M. Jacobs, and Luise Hercus), with an additional concluding chapter on the southern region of South Australia written by Fay Gale, a long-established academic researcher of Aboriginal people, to complete an overview of the whole State.
[11] She spent 15 years researching, transcribing, and writing a major work published in 2011, The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast.
[2] In the 2021 Queen's Birthday Honours Brock was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for "significant service to tertiary education, and to Indigenous history".
[1] She contributed much to the body of knowledge of colonial and Indigenous history in Australia, the Pacific, and parts of Canada and Africa, particularly Aboriginal women.