Born in 1857 to Sophia Harriet (née Adcock) and William Carmalt Clifton (1820–1885) in Middlesex, England, her father's occupation as an agent of P&O had the family located to Mauritius in 1859 then the Western Australian port of Albany in 1861.
Ethel Clifton and her elder sisters were placed among an elite of P&O officials in Albany society, and commercial rivals to the family of Albert Young Hassell, whom she eventually married on June 22, 1878 at a church in Perth.
She closely associated with the people of the area for an extended period in the late nineteenth century, recording their beliefs and creation stories on flora, fauna, and the landscape in a diary that was published as My Dusky Friends in 1975.
[3] She corresponded with D. S. Davidson on a manuscript (c. 1930) submitted to Macmillan Publishers toward the end of her life,[4] research that he edited for publication as 'Notes on the ethnology of the Wheelman Tribe of south-western Australia' (1936).
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.