Linda Jackson was born on 15 September 1950 in Beaumaris, a bayside suburb of Melbourne, to parents who were ballroom dancers and who encouraged her creativity. She studied fashion and design at the Emily McPherson College (now part of RMIT) and photography in Melbourne, then in 1966 set out to travel, through Papua New Guinea and Asia to Europe and England, a period she called her "university of life".
She worked as a dressmaker in London and studied the work of the Parisian couturiers, learning bias cutting, draping and the hand-finishing of couture, including hand-rolled silk hems. Vionnet and Paul Poiret were her favourites, and she favoured fine fabrics: taffeta, crêpe de Chine, chiffon and silk georgette.
Returning to Sydney in 1972, she met Jenny Kee at an exhibition opening at the Bonython Gallery in 1973. The two opened Flamingo Park Frock Salon in the Strand Arcade that year and set about creating clothes that expressed Australia: its colour, flora, fauna and landscape. Artists including David McDiarmid, Peter Tully, Bruce Gould and Deborah Leser hand-painted fabrics and made jewellery to accompany her dresses. In 1977 Jackson and Kee were joint winners of the Innovators category at the Fashion Industry of Australia Lyre Bird Awards.
In 1982 she left the partnership to create her own labels, Bush Couture and Bush Kids. In 1989 she designed an accessories range for Oroton built on the motifs she had long favoured: desert pea, waratah, gum leaves, scribbly gum and birds of the bush. Vogue Australia's editor June McCallum described her clothes as "wonderfully witty, beautiful pieces that are imaginative, inventive and exciting to wear".
In the 1990s she lived and worked with Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land and with artists at Mossman Gorge in Queensland, creating hand-painted silk scarves, while exhibiting as a painter and photographer.
After leaving Flamingo Park she set up her Bush Couture studio in Kings Cross, producing hand-printed textiles, among them opal designs drawn from her travels. She is often named as an influence by younger Australian designers, Romance Was Born among them. In 2018 she published Rainbow Menagerie, a picture book of her native-animal designs, which she called her greatest achievement: "It's been 60 years in the making." Asked by the Guardian how she would like to be remembered, she answered: "As an artist who brought a bit of colour and happiness to life."
In 2025 the National Gallery of Australia acquired her personal fashion collection, together with Kee's, including many previously unseen early works. She had kept them carefully, she said, some packed in boxes with tissue, "with a knowledge that possibility, as time went on, something like this could happen". Shown with the work of Sonia Delaunay, the collection made the lineage plain. "Clearly you can see how earlier women inspired us," Jackson said.
Her work has been shown at the National Gallery of Australia (1985–86 and, with Kee and Sonia Delaunay, in Know My Name in 2025), the Victoria and Albert Museum (1989), the National Gallery of Victoria (Bush Couture, 2012) and the Powerhouse Museum (Step Into Paradise, 2019). In 2018 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to the fashion industry.