Robyn Annear was born in Melbourne in 1960. Her first book, Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne (1995), won the A A Philips Prize for Australian Studies in the 1995 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the 1995 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year.
Nothing but Gold: The Diggers of 1852 (Text Publishing, 1999) Robyn Annear's lively history of an astonishing year describes in detail the diggers' life: the mud of winter and dust of summer, the pluckiness of the women and children, the grog shanties, the flies, the mania of mining, the despair and the delirium, and the much hated licensing system which was to culminate in the Eureka Stockade.
Robyn Annear's latest, The Man Who Lost Himself: The Unbelievable Story of the Tichborne Claimant, was released by Text Publishing in August, 2002. It is a truly excellent work and anyone familiar with the saga would realise the amount of research that has been done.