Mary Hannay Foott

Mary Hannay Foott (26 September 1846 – 12 October 1918), was an Australian poet and editor. Born in Scotland in 1846, she moved to Australia with her family as a child. She trained as a teacher and worked at schools in Melbourne beginning in her teenage years. Around 1869 she resigned from her teaching position and began training as an artist at the National Gallery School, supporting herself by publishing poetry and articles in newspapers. She married in 1874 and moved to a farming property in rural Queensland. After her husband's death in 1884, she moved to Brisbane and became the editor of the women's page for The Queenslander. She became a well-known writer of poetry, short stories, plays, and columns, some of which she published under the pseudonym "La Quenouille".

Foott is best known for her poem "Where the Pelican Builds", which was the title poem of her 1895 collection Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems. The poem is a bush ballad about two horsemen who set out in search of land on which to settle and never return. She published a second poetry collection titled Morna Lee and Other Poems in 1890, as well as two plays.