Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up in the Australian bush before being sent to boarding school in Sydney.

Travers travelled to New York City during World War II while working for the British Ministry of Information.

After years of contact, which included visits to Travers at her home in London, Walt Disney obtained the rights and the film Mary Poppins premiered in 1964.

Her mother was known for giving Goff maxims and instructions and she loved "the memory of her father" and his stories of life in Ireland.

In Bowral she attended the local branch of the Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School as a day student.

[22] Goff had her first role in the troupe as Anne Page in a March 1921 performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

[23] Travers toured New South Wales beginning in early 1921 and returned to Wilkie's troupe in Sydney by April 1922.

Travers also had work accepted and published by publications including the Shakespeare Quarterly, Vision, and The Green Room.

In May 1923 she found employment at the Triad, where she was given the discretion to fill at least four pages of a women's section—titled "A Woman Hits Back"—every issue.

Travers wrote poetry, journalism, and prose for her section; Lawson notes that "erotic verse and coquetry" figured prominently.

Through Russell, whose kindness towards younger writers was legendary, Travers met W. B. Yeats, Oliver St. John Gogarty and other Irish poets who fostered her interest in and knowledge of world mythology.

[19] During the Second World War, Travers worked for the British Ministry of Information, spending five years in the US, publishing I Go by Sea, I Go by Land in 1941.

[19] At the invitation of her friend John Collier, the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Travers spent two summers living among the Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo peoples, studying their mythology and folklore.

[35] Travers's great aunt, Helen Morehead, who lived in Woollahra, Sydney, and used to say "Spit spot, into bed," is a likely inspiration for the character.

Primarily based on the original 1934 novel of the same name, it also lifted elements from the 1935 sequel Mary Poppins Comes Back.

[38] In 1961, Travers arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from London, her first-class ticket having been paid for by Disney, and finally agreed to sell the rights, in no small part because she was financially in dire straits.

[39] Travers was an adviser in the production, but she disapproved of the Poppins character in its Disney version; with harsher aspects diluted, she felt ambivalent about the music and she so hated the use of animation that she ruled out any further adaptations of the series.

Travers so disliked the Disney adaptation and the way she felt she had been treated during the production that when producer Cameron Mackintosh approached her years later about making the British stage musical, she acquiesced only on conditions that British writers alone and no one from the original film production were to be directly involved.

Thompson considered it the most challenging of her career because she had "never really played anyone quite so contradictory or difficult before",[48] but found the complicated character "a blissful joy to embody".

Travers was reluctant to share details about her personal life, saying she "most identified with Anonymous as a writer" and asked whether "biographies are of any use at all".

They shared a London flat from 1927 to 1934, then moved to Pound Cottage near Mayfield, East Sussex, where Travers published the first of the Mary Poppins books.

Camillus was unaware of his true parentage or the existence of any siblings until the age of 17, when Anthony Hone, his twin brother, came to London and knocked on the door of Travers's house at 50 Smith Street, Chelsea.

The investiture ceremony took place later that year at Buckingham Palace, with the Duke of Kent standing in for Queen Elizabeth II.

[56] Travers' birthplace and childhood home in Maryborough is now a museum dedicated to her legacy, called The Story Bank.