Nettie's family moved from Bendigo to Armadale, Melbourne, in the early 1890s. Her education began at home with her strict Baptist mother and was continued at Miss Rudd's Seminary at Malvern then Presbyterian Ladies College 1900-04. She attended Melbourne University 1905-12, gaining her B.A. in 1909 and her M.A. in 1912. She was awarded the exhibition and first class honours in first year English and gained honours in modern languages. Her parents restricted her social activities but she participated in student affairs. Her uncle Henry Bournes Higgins introduced her to the political events of the day and in 1905 to the Literature Society of Melbourne. She met Vance Palmer in 1909.

In 1910-11 she studied for the diploma of the International Phonetics Association in Germany, France and England. Returning to Melbourne in 1912, she taught modern languages at P.L.C. and began to write cultural criticism for the socialist press. In 1914 she revisited London and married Vance Palmer. They were on their honeymoon in Brittany when war broke out so returned to London where their daughter Aileen was born. Nettie published two slim volumes of poetry in London, SOUTH WIND (1914) and SHADOWY PATHS (1915).

The Palmers returned to Melbourne in 1915 and moved to Katharine Prichard's cottage at Emerald. Their second daughter Helen was born in 1917. Nettie began a regular column in the Argus and with Christian Jollie Smith edited a collection of essays by the socialist E.J. Villiers. While Vance was away with the AIF in 1918-19, she lived with her aunt Ina Higgins and taught privately. Her relationship with her brother Esmonde became tense after he became a committed Marxist.

On Vance's return the family again lived at Emerald where Nettie taught her daughters. A series in the Argus was later published as THE DANDENONGS (1952). They moved to Caloundra, Queensland in 1925, returning in 1929.

In the 1920s Nettie emerged as possibly the most important literary critic in Australia. After her MODERN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE 1900-1923 (1924) won the Lothian essay prize she had many more regular outlets, notably her weekly literary causerie in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail (212 articles in five and a half years), the Brisbane Courier, All About Books and the Bulletin Red Page. She published essays in Talking It Over (1932), an anthology of short stories AN AUSTRALIAN STORY-BOOK (1928) a biography of her uncle HENRY BOURNES HIGGINS (1931). Active in the Australian Literature Society, the Verse Speaking Association and, later, the Fellowship of Australian Writers, she lectured and broadcasted.

In 1935 in Paris she attended the first International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture. After living in Spain in 1936, she improved her Spanish, largely in order to grasp South American literature. On her return to Melbourne the fight against fascism became her major concern. She was a member of the Spanish Relief Committee, with whom she published several booklets, and of the Joint Spanish Aid Council. She spoke about Spain, notably in a notorious debate at Melbourne University in 1937. She was Melbourne editor of a Sydney anti-Fascist journal for women, a member of the Victorian branch of the International Refugee Emergency Committee and taught English to migrants.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Nettie's self-professed role was largely that of 'a liaison officer in literary life'; she edited memoirs, collections of poems and short stories, wrote introductions and translated. While continuing to encourage younger wrters and to publish in journals such as Meanjin, she no longer reviewed regularly. She lectured for the Commonwealth Literary Fund and the university extension board and was a member of the Goethe Society. In 1948 Meanjin Press published FOURTEEN YEARS- EXTRACTS FROM A PRIVATE JOURNAL 1925-1939, often seen as her most important work. She published the first major study of Henry Handel Richardson in 1950 and BERNARD O'DOWD, a thorough revision of Victor Kennedy's manuscript in 1954.

In uncertain health from the 1940s, Nettie spent much time caring for ill and elderly relations. She actively continued her championship of Australian writers.