author

Herbert Pitts

A missionary writer who introduced young readers to Aboriginal life in Australia, he wrote from firsthand experience in the country’s northwest. His surviving books offer a vivid glimpse of early 20th-century religious and colonial views.

1 Audiobook

Children of Wild Australia

Children of Wild Australia

by Herbert Pitts

About the author

Herbert Pitts was an early 20th-century writer best known for Children of Wild Australia and The Australian Aboriginal and the Christian Church, both published in 1914. Contemporary title pages describe him as an assistant curate at St. Matthew's, Douglas, and a former S.P.G. missionary in North West Australia.

His books focus on Aboriginal communities in Australia and were written for readers in Britain and beyond, blending observation, storytelling, and missionary interpretation. Children of Wild Australia was presented as a book for younger readers, while The Australian Aboriginal and the Christian Church took a broader look at mission work and religious questions.

Today, Pitts is mostly encountered through digitized library collections rather than modern biographies. Because readily available sources are limited, many details of his life remain unclear, but his work still stands as a revealing document of its time and attitudes.