Meehan was born and grew up in Bourke, New South Wales, Australia, in 1933. She was the elder daughter of Francis Owen and Olive Jane Meehan. She attended high school in Bourke and trained as a specialist infants' teacher at Bathurst Teachers College, teaching in Bourke, Darwin, Sydney, and Canberra. Meehan travelled with her first husband, Lester Hiatt, to the remote Northern Territory town of Maningrida, in East Arnhem Land, arriving in 1958 on a pearling lugger to find the Aboriginal community had set up camp on the beach and sent out a dugout canoe to bring them ashore.[1] There she set up the first school for Aboriginal children at Maningrida, returning in the 1970s to undertake her PhD fieldwork with her second husband, Rhys Jones.[2] In 1977, Meehan visited North Arnhem Land to observe the Anbarra people's daily behaviour living on the coast.[3][4]
She focused her research on the subsistence regimes of an Arnhem Land Aboriginal community.[7] In 2007 she co-authored an article about this region and the confluence of human culture and the environment.[8]
^Meehan, Betty (May 1977). "Hunters by the seashore". Journal of Human Evolution. 6 (4): 363–370. doi:10.1016/S0047-2484(77)80005-5.
^Hiatt, Les (5 October 2001). "Obituary - Rhys Jones". Obituaries Australia. Retrieved 13 April 2020.
^Bowler, Sandra; Clune, Genevieve (June 2000). "That Shadowy Band: The Role of Women in the Development of Australian Archaeology". Australian Archaeology (50): 32.
^Meehan, Betty; Jones, Rhys; Australian Archaeological Association (1988), Archaeology with ethnography: an Australian perspective, Dept. of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, ISBN978-0-7315-0283-7
^Bourke, Patricia; Brockwell, Sally; Faulkner, Patrick; Meehan, Betty (October 2007). "Climate variability in the mid to late Holocene Arnhem Land Region, North Australia: Archaeological archives of environmental and cultural change". Archaeology in Oceania. 42 (3): 91–101. doi:10.1002/j.1834-4453.2007.tb00022.x.