[1] The daughter of Archibald Carmichael, a miner from Perthshire, Scotland[1] and Margaret Jennings, née Clark, from Cornwall.

[2] Carmichael joined the Buonarottii Club before 1887,[3] and was a member of the Austral Salon in the 1890s giving a public lecture on "The Spirit of the Bush" in September 1895 at the Masonic Hall in Melbourne with Alfred Deakin as chairman.

Having qualified as a nurse she obtained a position on a station near Geelong, and subsequently married Francis Mullis.

[5][6][7] Carmichael lived for a time in South Australia and then went to London, where she died of pneumonia in poor circumstances in 1904.

[8] In 1910 a small selection of her poems was published, in 1937 a plaque to her memory was unveiled at Orbost, and a year later a replica was placed in the public library at Ballarat.