author
Herbert Pitts
Remembered for writing from firsthand experience, this early 20th-century author drew on years spent in northwestern Australia to introduce young readers to Aboriginal life. His surviving books offer a vivid, now clearly historical window into the missionary world and attitudes of 1914.
1 Audiobook
Children of Wild Australia
by Herbert Pitts
About the author
Herbert Pitts was a writer and Anglican clergyman whose published work is closely tied to his time in northwestern Australia. The strongest biographical detail that can be confirmed from his 1914 book The Australian Aboriginal and the Christian Church is that he was an assistant curate at St. Matthew's in Douglas, Isle of Man, and had previously served as an S.P.G. missionary in North West Australia.
His best-known surviving book is Children of Wild Australia (1914), a short work for younger readers. In its introduction, Pitts says he had spent eight years in Australia and wrote from memories of the Aboriginal children he had known there. He also authored The Australian Aboriginal and the Christian Church, another 1914 book, which reflects the missionary perspective and language of its era.
Because so little dependable biographical information is easy to verify today, Pitts remains a somewhat elusive figure. What is clear is that his books preserve a firsthand, historically revealing record of how one early 20th-century missionary writer tried to describe Aboriginal Australia to readers back in Britain.