Adele Hulse was raised on a farm near Mansfield, in the foothills of the Victorian Alps. She was expelled from a convent boarding school. After studying at university, she travelled the hippie route to Afghanistan and Nepal. In 1974 she met a Buddhist guru and devoted herself to Tibetan Buddhism. She subsequently contributed to water and sanitation programs in Tibetan settlements in India and Nepal for some 18 years.

Adele’s guru encouraged her to become a writer and she did so, writing a column in The Age for 25 years under the name of Sharon Gray. She has also spent 18 years writing a biography of Lama Thubten Yeshe. In 2000 Adele joined the Write Your Story program at Melbourne’s Lamm Jewish Library (formerly Makor), devoting herself to facilitate the publication of Holocaust survivor memoirs. The library has since published 137 memoirs.