Patricia Sumerling is an Adelaide-based professional historian who believes some of the unresolved tales she comes across in her work are ripe for unravelling and for imaginative reconstruction as distinctively South Australian stories.
Patricia is a co-author of the landmark publication Heritage of the City of Adelaide: An illustrated guide (1990) and the author of The Adelaide Park Lands: A social history (2011). She is author of Elephants and Egotists: In search of Samorn of the Adelaide Zoo (2016) and debuted as a novelist in 2010 with the historical crime mystery The Noon Lady of Towitta. Patricia Sumerling’s first book about hotels, published in 1998, was Down at the Local: The history of hotels in Kensington, Norwood and Kent Town.