Keys was born in
Mount Perry, a small town in the
Wide Bay–Burnett region of
Queensland, the seventh child of Irish immigrant
James Keys, a schoolteacher and
botanist, and his wife Margaret. Trained at the
Brisbane General Hospital as a nurse, she enlisted in the
Australian Imperial Force in September 1914 and was posted to the
Australian Army Nursing Service. She was sent first to Egypt, later travelling onto Britain and then to France. She married Lionel Hugh Kemp-Pennefather on 3 December 1921, and was the mother of Australian
naturalist and
conservationist Margaret Thorsborne. ==References==