Ethel Pedley

Who was Ethel Pedley?

Ethel Charlotte Pedley was an Australian author and musician.

Pedley's most well-known book is Dot and the Kangaroo, which featured a little girl named Dot who becomes lost in the Australian outback, and is helped to find her way back home by a friendly kangaroo. The illustrations were drawn by Frank P. Mahony.

Pedley was a believer in the conservation of the Australian flora and fauna, and usually wrote her books from this perspective, singling out 'man' as disconnected from nature and the rest of the animals.

Ethel's preface to Dot and the Kangaroo is as follows:

To the children of Australia

in the hope of enlisting their sympathies

for the many beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures

of their fair land,

whose extinction, through ruthless destruction,

is being surely accomplished