Daughter of David John and Mary Ann Liston and one of five children, Ellen Liston was a delicate child, and was educated at home. She was 12 when the family sailed for South Australia on the Candahar, the same ship as the Harsletts, family friends (Caroline Harslett qv). After her parents died, Ellen and her brother alone were left living in the family home at Parkside, and she decided to go to work as a governess on Nilkerloo station near Bramfield on Eyre Peninsula from 1867. Here, she claimed, she worked for a period as the only female manager of a sheep station, in the absence of the leaseholder, John Hamp. It was here that she did her first published writing, having stories and verses published in the Adelaide Observer.
Five years later she was one of the first intake into the newly organized State Education system. Her first teaching appointment was at Wellington on Murray. As there was no house near the school she lived on the west side of the river, and as a result of this she had, in flood times, to wade through water on her way to and from school. This brought about an illness from which she never fully recovered. She resigned from teaching and worked as the first female telegraph operator in the GPO in Adelaide (possibly the first in Australia). She was later in charge of the Post Office at Watervale and then at Marrabel, where she did most of her writing. She was on the corresponding staff of the Kapunda Herald, where some of her stories and verses were published. She also contributed to the Observer.
In 1879 she won a prize offered by the Melbourne Leader for her serial 'Auckland Marston'. An unpublished novel existed in 1936, but if it still exists today its whereabouts is not known. The Eyre Peninsula Town, Elliston, is believed by some to have been named after her. She died at the early town of Harkness, near Kapunda, and is buried in the Kapunda cemetery.
