William Linklater (better known as Billy Miller) was a rebellious child who had tried to stow away on a ship in the Port Adelaide River before running away from home again, this time to the bush. He went to the Northern Territory in 1887, living mostly around the Top End and in the Kimberleys. He assumed the name Billy Miller to escape being traced by his father, a name adapted to 'Billamilla', meaning waterhole, by an Aboriginal group Yanta Wonta. They said he 'bin die and jump up white fella'. He established good relations with the Aborigines. During his fifty years in the Northern Territory, Miller worked on cattle stations now well-known. One of these was the Elsey Station, where Miller came to know Jeannie Gunn (q.v.) and the characters in her books, We of the Never-Never and The Little Black Princess.
Michael Sawtell, in a biographical note at the end of the posthumously published Gather No Moss (1968), wrote that 'Old Billy was a great reader of the classics'. Sawtell introduced Miller to the Fellowship of Australian Writers after he had come as a pensioner to live in Waterloo, Sydney, in 1938. According to the introduction to The Magic Snake, Miller wrote its first story, 'The Taboo of Silence', for a Sydney child, Dagma. When her mother, artist Mavis Mallinson, read the story, she suggested that Miller write some more that she would edit and illustrate. Miller was a friend of Bill Harney (q.v.) and Ernestine Hill (q.v.). Hill referred to him and retold some of his yarns in her book, The Territory (1951). Her story, 'Conquistador - Portrait of a Bushman', published in the Cornhill magazine, London, in 1939, and reprinted as a foreword to Gather No Moss, is about Miller. She found him to be 'a rare classic scholar, as many of the older bushmen are'.
Miller and an Aboriginal woman, Hollowjacks Alice, had a daughter Alice born in 1907. Miller's grave in Botany Cemetery, Sydney; bears the epitaph, 'A Conquistador of the North'.
