Harriet Anne Patchett Martin was married to the Victorian journalist and writer Arthur Patchett Martin. According to the biographical notes in Sladen's Australian Poets (1888), she was born in England and educated in France. Sladen also states that she spoke French fluently. Further research suggests that Martin spent part of her earlier life in the French Channel port of Boulogne-sur-Mer (her father, Dr. John Moore Cookesley, practiced medicine there for a number of years, and her mother died there in 1845). Martin married her first husband, Henry Bullen (an officer in the 37th Regiment), in London in 1867, however he appears to have died by the time of the 1881 British census, which lists Harriette Bullen (sic), then a widow, living in Hammersmith, London. She married Arthur Patchett Martin, at St. Stephen's, Westbourne Park (London), on 11 January, 1886. In addition to her Australian anthologies, she published two French translations, and also contributed poetry to English magazines. During the later 1890s she and Arthur Patchett Martin moved to the Isle of Wight, where she died in 1908.
Harriet Patchett Martin and her first husband Henry Bullen arrived in Brisbane from London on the ship Queen of the Colonies in December 1867, and departed for London on the ship Storm King in April 1870. Press reports of an action brought by Henry Bullen against the Queensland Government over a land order, indicate that whilst in Queensland, Bullen was employed for some two years in the Lands Department. Although not entirely conclusive, this material is consistent with Martin's semi-autobiographical short story 'Cross-Currents', which suggests that she came to Queensland soon after her marriage to Henry Bullen, and that she was in the colony during, or soon after, Sir George Bowen's term as Governor (Bowen departed for New Zealand in early 1868).
Martin edited two collections of Australian short stories, Under the Gum Tree: Australian Bush Stories (1890) and Coo-ee: Tales of Australian Bush Life by Australian Ladies
(1891). Coo-ee contained one of Martin's stories, 'The Tragedy in the Studio', which she later expanded into the romantic novella Cross Currents, which is set in Queensland and, as Cheryl Taylor indicates, emphasises the strangeness of Queensland and portrays North Queensland as a place of 'danger and forbidden passion'.
