Neither of her parents had a science background but her love of plants was likely fostered by visits to nearby salt-marshes, her grandmother's garden and in nature study classes.

[3] After graduation she returned to her old primary school as a junior teacher while at night studying zoology and geology at Austral Coaching College.

As a student, attending field-trips with the McCoy Society for Field Investigation and Research[4] proved to be a harbinger for decades of her subsequent professional life.

[12] In 1940, Carr was appointed the secretary of the committee to award the Isabella D. Marshall scholarship to enable a female student to live away from home in order to study at the University of Melbourne.

Carr was the first research officer of the Soil Conservation Board and was responsible for establishing exclusion fencing on reference plots in Bogong High Plains.

Much of this early taxonomy work was undertaken while she was employed at University of Melbourne (beginning in 1949) in the Botany Department headed at the time by Prof. J. S. Turner.

Together with Professor John Stewart Turner she published academic reports of the results of the exclusion fencing experiments and more broadly the destructive impact of grazing on the ecology (of plant life as well as soil degradation) of the Victorian alpine region.

Published phylogenetic analyses (based on DNA sequences and morphology) would later show that Eucalyptus was not a particularly uniform genus and that the classification needed to be revised.