Flynn was born in 1881 at Powell Creek Telegraph Station, just south of Elliott, and was the daughter of Maggie and Lindsay Crawford; her mother was an Aboriginal woman and her father was Māori.

Flynn said that they were well looked after during this period and that the closest they came to seeing anything of the bombing was when the petrol dump at Batchelor was destroyed and the impact threw Tom against the kitchen stove.

She also remembered the Army sergeant who told them to never look at the night sky as their faces would reflect the moonlight, and the Japanese would spot them and machine-gun them.

[4] In 1961, at the age of 80 and in a sparkly gold ankle-length dress, she famously walked 25 km for the NT News Walkabout, a fundraiser organised by Jim Bowditch Despite trailing behind others she vowed: "I'll knock 'em off...

[3] After the death of her husband, who had become blind many years before, Flynn moved to Darwin and was living in Rapid Creek when Cyclone Tracy hit.

After the disaster, Flynn refused to evacuate and hid for three days under some scraps of canvas in her roofless home; she feared that she would never survive the flight south.