AustLit

Jean Galbraith was a second generation Australian, whose Scottish grandparents emigrated to Australia in the mid nineteenth century. She was born in Tyers in central Gippsland, and was a Gippslander for all of her 93 years.

Jean Galbraith was a noted author and botanist. At the age of sixteen she met H. B. Williamson, a noted botanist of his time who for the next ten years taught her botany. She joined the Field Naturalists' Club in 1923, and had a long association with and membership of the Latrobe Valley Field Naturalists' Club.

Galbraith used the pseudonym 'Correa' for her early journalism and for 50 years contributed monthly to two magazines The Garden Lover and The Victorian Naturalist. Her best known book Wildflowers of Victoria was written in 1950 and she wrote the text A Field Guide to Wildflowers of South Eastern Australia in 1977. In addition to several other gardening and botanical books, she was a prolific writer of children's stories including Grandma Honeypot (1962) and of poetry including Poet's Spring (1990).

The deeply religious Galbraith never married, but had a wide circle of friends who were also passionate about the natural world.