Ron Davidson was born into a newspaper family in Perth. He has worked as a journalist in Australia and overseas, writing on politics and sports for Western Press and News Ltd. He was a cadet at the Perth Sunday Times when Rupert Murdoch as a young man arrived from Adelaide on his first takeover mission.

Ron then completed a Psychology degree at the University of Western Australia, and taught social and political psychology there for over twenty years before taking early retirement and switching to full-time writing.

Ron's interest in John Curtin flows from talks with his father, Frank Davidson, a veteran journalist and newspaper editor, who was a long-time friend of the war-time prime minister. Frank was Curtin's choice to be Officer in Charge of the Department of Information in Western Australia during World War II. Ron remembers being present, as a six-year-old, when the PM and Frank used to discuss wartime matters at length in the Davidson family car.

Ron has written several works on social history and biography, most of which - The Divided Kingdom, High Jinks at the Hot Pool and Anything But Ordinary The Nine Lives of Cecile - have been published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press. The Divided Kingdom was shortlisted for the WA Premier's Award. He has also contributed a significant chapter on 'Papers, People and Propaganda' for On the Homefront - Western Australia in World War II (UWA Press) - which was short-listed for the NSW Premier's Award.

High Jinks at the Hot Pool is particularly relevant to the story of John Curtin the journalist, as it tells of the spectacular, no-cliches-barred dispute between two Perth newspaper owners (who happened to employ Frank Davidson) and John Curtin when he was editor of the Westralian Worker, conducted on the front pages of their respective papers. The battle of words is re-told in the 'Westralian Worker Editor' section of From Revolutionary Firebrand to Journalist in Spirit.

At the time of writing John Curtin: From Revolutionary Firebrand to Journalist in Spirit , Ron was an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Cultural Studies at Curtin University of Technology.

Ron lives in Curtin's old electorate of Fremantle with wife Dianne who, as Dianne Sholl, in 1975 wrote the seminal thesis 'John Curtin at the Westralian Worker 1917-1928'.