The daughter of William David Hamilton, Jean Hamilton was born
in Victoria.
As an adult, she travelled extensively, including a solo
tour of Soviet Russia in the 1920s.
Hamilton's most famous journey, however, was her voyage to
Tierra del Fuego with anthropologist and zoologist Baldwin Spencer (q.v.) in 1929. Hamilton and Spencer may have met through Hamilton's brother-in-law, Dr Oscar Werner Tiegs, who had joined the University of Melbourne's Department of
Zoology in 1925: Spencer had retired from the department, as professor
emeritus, in 1919. According to D.J. Mulvaney's biography of Spencer (in the Australian Dictionary of Biography), Spencer and Hamilton had a 'discreet association' (beginning some time after Spencer's 1921 hospitalisation for a
combination of an old leg injury and alcoholism), and lived together in London
from 1927.
In February 1929, Hamilton and Spencer travelled to Tierra
del Fuego, to study the indigenous population. There, Spencer died after an
attack of angina pectoris, and Hamilton, after seeing him buried in Magallanes (Punta Arenas), Chile, returned to London with his museum materials. Her account of the journey was published extensively in Australian newspapers as 'Among
the Fuegians'.
In London, Hamilton assisted Mabel Singleton in her business and associated
closely with Miles Franklin, Mary Fullerton, and Mabel Singleton (qq.v.), including working as Franklin's literary agent in England for a period in the 1930s. Her life and movements between then and her death in 1961 are ambiguous.
