Margaret grew up in SE England, mainly in Orpington. Living on the outskirts of London, she had WW II as a very real backdrop to her teenage years. She left school at 18, at a time when school leavers were required to enlist or get work in a job of "national importance", and became a laboratory assistant testing optical lenses. She married Ronald Galbreath, an optical designer, in 1946. In 1949 they came to Australia on assisted passage, living first at Gympie, Queensland, then in Heathmont, Victoria . They later lived in Tasmania (1955-8) and Canberra (1958-61) before moving to SA where Ronald was employed in the Weapons Research Establishment.
When her children were all at school Margaret began to work in the Elizabeth South Library. She had always been interested in writing, but had felt for a long time that she didn't know how to get started. She found that having children (four sons and two daughters) used up a lot of her creative urge, and she didn't write at all when the children were small. Later, when the youngest was getting towards school age, she joined the Writers' Fellowship, and started attending the poetry workshops started by Nancy Gordon (qv). The publication of her first poem in Poetry Australia provided enormous encouragement, and she has since won second prize in the annual John Shaw Neilson poetry competition, and won the Charles Meekin Award (1981) for her poem 'Visiting the Old Country'. She, Ann Odgers and Beth Jardine used to enjoy writing together, although none of their composite creations have been published. She had a children's story published in a Victorian education magazine, and in 1982 she published (with Gillian Pearson) Elizabeth the Garden City. She is very fond of music and plays the recorder, and these days is more often engaged in embroidery than writing.
