Robert Gray was born in Australia in 1945 and grew up in a small port on the coast of New South Wales, where his father owned a banana plantation. He left school early and became a cadet journalist on a country newspaper. He moved to Sydney at nineteen and has lived there since, working as a journalist, advertising copywriter and buyer for bookshops. Since the 1970s he has been the recipient of many government grants for his poetry, which is now taught widely in secondary schools in Australia. He has also taught creative writing classes.

His previous collections of poems include Creek Water Journal (1974), Grass Script (1978) and Piano (1988). Selections of his poems have appeared in Holland, Germany and China. He has published art criticism and is an avid amateur painter.