Janet Gertrude "Nettie" Palmer (née Higgins) (18 August 1885 – 19 October 1964) was an Australian poet, essayist and Australia's leading literary critic of her day.

Higgins, a leading Victorian radical political figure and later a federal minister and justice of the High Court of Australia,[1] and of H.B.

She was active in literary and socialist circles on her return to Melbourne and formed a deep and long term relationship with the visionary poet Bernard O'Dowd.

While her brother Esmonde Higgins was a prominent early Australian Communist,[2] Nettie never joined any political party: she was much more interested in broad social change.

Over the next few years, both spent time in Europe: Higgins studying for her diploma, Palmer establishing a career in journalism and writing in London.

They married in London in April 1914, intending to work there for a couple of years, but after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, militarism dominated journalism.

Nettie published The Memoirs of Alice Henry (1944) and Fourteen Years: Extracts from a Private Journal (1948), often considered her best work.

Vance and Nettie's last years were clouded by their own ill health and by worry about their daughter Aileen, who suffered a mental breakdown in 1948 and became an alcoholic.