K. Langloh (Katie Langloh) Parker

Born Catherine Eliza Somerville Field in 1856, she became widely known as K. Langloh Parker, and also published under the name Katie Langloh Parker. She is remembered as an Australian writer and folklorist whose best-known books include Australian Legendary Tales and The Euahlayi Tribe.

Living for a time in northwestern New South Wales, she gathered stories and cultural material connected with the Euahlayi people and published them for readers in Britain and Australia. Her writing introduced many non-Indigenous readers to Aboriginal storytelling traditions, and it is still cited as an important early source, even as modern readers approach such work with care and historical context.

Parker died in 1940. Today she is mainly known for preserving stories that might otherwise have been lost to many later readers, and for the complicated place her books hold in the history of Australian literature, folklore, and cross-cultural recordkeeping.