Frank Atha Westbury (5 May 1838 – 24 September 1901), who wrote under the pen names of "Atha" and "Atha Westbury", was a popular and prolific author of mystery adventure novels, children's stories and poetry in late 19th century Australia and New Zealand. Most of his fiction was serialised in newspapers and journals between 1879 and 1905. His two major works were: The Shadow of Hilton Fernbrook, A Romance of Maoriland (1896) and Australian Fairy Tales (1897), which won him a place as one of the better-known writers for children in Victorian-era Australia. Many of his novels were adventure romances set in New Zealand at the time of the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, which the author experienced as a soldier in the British Army. Biography Frank Westbury was born under the name James Bleasby in Hunslet, an industrial suburb of Leeds, England on 5 May 1838. His mother was Martha Bleasby and his father was a weaver from Holbeck named Benjamin Atha. He grew up in the home of his grandfather, William Bleasby and might have attended Tadcaster Grammar School near Leeds, under a scholarship. At the age of 16, he enlisted in the British Army's 68th (Durham) Regiment of Foot serving in the Crimea, Burma and New Zealand during the Second Taranaki War (1863–66). During this last deployment, he fought in the Battle of Gate Pa, which resulted in major losses for the British. He later claimed that he filed reports on the New Zealand Wars for The Manchester Guardian. After his discharge from the Army in 1866, he went to Melbourne, Australia where he adopted the name Frank Atha Westbury and continued honing his writing skills. There he fell in with a literary crowd that included the poets, Henry Kendall, George Gordon McCrae and Adam Lindsay Gordon, as well as Marcus Clarke, author of the Australian classic novel, For the Term of His Natural Life. He married three times in Australia and had six children, although three died in infancy. Apart from his career as an author, Westbury also worked as a clerk in Sydney, a secretary for Melbourne's Homeopathic Hospital and as a land agent in Adelaide, where he became friends with George Loyau, the influential editor of The Pictorial Australian, who published much of his work. He spent the last decade of his life in Hawthorn, Melbourne and died of a stroke on 24