[2] Her uncle, Kevin Cairns, was a Liberal minister and MP in the McMahon government, but the family was not inclined towards his conservative politics.

Martin's ancestry includes the Coughlin family, which also had NSW's first female statistician and the noted test cricketer Victor Trumper.

After attending Loreto Normanhurst, Martin graduated from the University of Sydney in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, in which her major study was Music.

[1] Having spent time in London and other overseas cities, she began working as a typist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney in 1978.

Martin worked hard to retain her seat at the 1997 election, and was successful, holding Fannie Bay despite a heavy defeat for the ALP.

She soon emerged as a vocal critic of the Burke government's policy of mandatory sentencing, and began preparing the ALP for the next election, which was then two years away.

[3] Although the CLP won a bare majority of the two-party vote, Labor's gains in Darwin were enough to make Martin the first ALP and first female Chief Minister in the history of the Northern Territory.

As Chief Minister, Martin immediately set about making changes, repealing the territory's controversial mandatory sentencing laws,[4] and introducing freedom of information legislation, which had been neglected during the CLP's 27-year rule.

A respected commentator in The Bulletin suggested that she had gone slow on Aboriginal issues because she feared a white backlash that could have resulted in her government being toppled.

[5] However, in 2006, Martin rejected accusations by John Howard and Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, that her government had been underfunding Aboriginal communities.

In response, the Federal Government rejected the Territory's argument, saying it was essential to remove artificial barriers to Aboriginal townships that prevent the measures needed to improve living conditions for Indigenous children[8] In the longer term, she oversaw the completion of the Adelaide-Darwin railway, which had begun under the Burke government, and vowed to resurrect the stalled statehood movement.

Labor won the second-largest majority government in the history of the Territory, bettered only by the CLP's near-sweep of the Legislative Assembly at the first elections, in 1974.

[12] In August 2010 she returned to the Northern Territory to become a Professorial Fellow in the Public and Social Policy Research Institute at Charles Darwin University.

[13] In June 2019, she was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the people and Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory, and as a community advocate.