Roy Easton was born in 1904 into a family which had lived for several generations in Clarendon in the Adelaide Hills, and who were mainly occupied with woodcarting and seasonal work. Roy went to school locally and began full-time work aged fourteen, first seasonal, then seven years as the Clarendon butcher's assistant (his father was also a butcher when the work was available) followed by twenty years as the Clarendon General Storekeeper's man. He married a local girl of similar background in 1928, by which time he had already bought his own home on two and a half acres in Clarendon. His was a circumscribed life of work and family; he saw little of Adelaide (and cared less!) and before 1930 his honeymoon trip to Victor Harbor was the furthest he had been from home.