Cirrus@Austlit

Elisabeth MacIntyre grew up in rural New South Wales. She was deafened at age fifteen by an accident involving horses. She worked first as a commercial artist, then began experimenting with writing and illustrating children's books in the period 1937-1942, first having her work published in the United States. She aimed among other things to provide Australian children with books about things they could relate to.

She worked in the Land Army during the war, afterwards beginning to write 'documentary strips' to communicate information in mainly graphic style. Among these was her Willie's Woollies: The Story of Australian Wool (1951). She turned her popular kangaroo character, Ambrose, into a comic strip which appeared regularly in a Sydney Sunday paper.

She married landscape artist John Ray Eldershaw in 1961. When her marriage broke up she had to stop writing for children for a while, and supported herself and her daughter by writing and drawing television cartoons.

From the 1970s she wrote novels for older readers. Her other writing included TV stories, articles, and radio serials.

MacIntyre received a Children's Literature Fellowship from 1974 to 1976 to research and write novels for the young adult age group, and an Australia-Japan Foundation grant in 1976.