Ernest Bywater was born and bred in Sydney, Australia in the mid 1950s. He was the youngest of three children born to a local truck driver and a mother with a rare eye condition. She went totally blind before he started school. Thus he grew up in an environment where nothing was left near a table edge, and he spent a lot of time in an adult world as his mother's eyes while still a child.

After leaving school at 16 he's worked at everything from door-to-door sales to middle management while also earning many qualification through studies in his own time. At work he wrote many millions of words in reports, technical documents, and training documents. Since his retirement due to health issues he's written over 3 million words of fiction stories in over 100 stories as novels, novellas, and short stories.