Mary Garden was born and raised in New Zealand, but has lived in Australia for much of her adult life. She also spent several years in India, on a spiritual quest. Her experiences in that country were the subject of her first memoir The Serpent Rising: a journey of spiritual seduction. She moved to Maleny in 1989 and has had strong connections to the town ever since.

Her new book, Sundowner of the Skies, is a memoir/biography of her father, a famous aviator who achieved notoriety when he became the youngest and most inexperienced pilot to fly solo from England to Australia. Fellow pilots ranked his 1930 flight along with the achievements of Charles Kingsford Smith and Amy Johnson. Writing the book was a journey of discovery for Mary. Until she started her research she knew little of his life and his extraordinary history.