Xavier Herbert was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, on 15 May 1901. When he was twelve his family moved to Fremantle. He trained as a pharmacist and worked and lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin and then England, where he met Sarah (Sadie) Cohen, née Norden, and wrote his first novel Capricornia, which was published by P.R. Stephensen in 1938. Herbert returned to Australia in 1932. During World War Two he served with the Australian Imperial Force in the Pacific Theatre from 1942 to 1944. In 1951 he settled with Sadie at Redlynch, near Cairns, Queensland, and they married on 26 June 1953.

Herbert's other works include the autobiographical Disturbing element (1963), the novel Soldiers' women (1961), the novella Seven emus (1959) and the short story collection Larger than life (1963), as well as short stories and many articles expressing his strongly held opinions on various aspects of Australian life. His last work Poor fellow my country was published in 1975 and won the Miles Franklin Award that year. Since his death two collections of Herbert's writings have been published: Xavier Herbert (1992), edited by Peter Pierce and Frances De Groen, which includes extracts from novels with other fiction, nonfiction and correspondence, and South of Capricornia (1990), edited by Russell McDougall, with reprints of stories written before 1934 and often published under pseudonyms. Xavier Herbert was awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Queensland and Newcastle. He died on 10 November 1984 in Alice Springs and was buried in a local cemetery.

Nancy Bonnin (née Crowe) worked at University of Queensland Library first in the 1940s and then from 1960-1982. While Fryer Librarian from 1965 to 1976, she oversaw the acquisition of the Father Leo Hayes Collection. She recorded oral histories with former University staff and students between 1979-1983 in preparation for the 1985 publication A place of light and learning: the University of Queensland’s first seventy-five years by Malcolm Thomis. In the same year her book, Katie Hume on the Darling Downs: a colonial marriage was published, drawing on Fryer Library’s 19th century collection of photographs and personal correspondence of Katie Hume and her husband Walter Cunningham Hume (1840–1921) surveyor and Chief Commissioner of Lands for Queensland.