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Her work as an amateur ethnographer is rarely cited and largely unknown, although it contains an extensive and intimate record of the people and environment of Jarramungup, a remote part of a region lacking scientific research in the nineteenth century. In contrast to other women writing within the colonial settlements—Louisa Atkinson, Caroline Dexter, Eliza Dunlop—Hassell does not write of frontier history and conflict arising during colonisation, adopting a uncritical position that the historical events she studied and heard were inevitabilities of 'progress'; events such as the disposition of land entitlement in which the Hassell family were themselves involved. A later researcher (Izett, Ms. 2014) suggests the motive may have been a form of 'tactical advocacy' at a time when the traditional culture of Australia's inhabitants was poorly known if not misrepresented as propaganda. Ethel wrote of her friends,