Betty Roland was an Australian writer of plays, screenplays, novels, children's books and comics.
12 Facts About Betty Roland
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Betty Roland was born Mary Isobel Maclean at Kaniva, Victoria, the daughter of Roland and Matilda Maclean.
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Betty Roland left school at sixteen to work as a journalist for Table Talk and the Sun News-Pictorial, and married Ellis Harvey Davies in 1923.
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Betty Roland's best known play, The Touch of Silk, was first performed in 1928 by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre company, and hailed as "The first Australian play written by a real dramatist".
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Betty Roland's early writing for theatre is mostly romantic drama or comedy.
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Betty Roland wrote the screenplay for what is claimed as the first Australian "talkie", Spur of the Moment, in 1932, credited as Betty M Davies.
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Betty Roland met the wealthy Marxist intellectual Guido Baracchi, one of the founders of the Australian Communist Party, in the late 1920s.
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Betty Roland separated from Baracchi in 1942, and for the rest of the 1940s supported herself and her daughter by writing radio plays, including The First Gentleman, Daddy Was Asleep, The White Cockade, A Woman Scorned, The Drums of Manalao and In His Steps.
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Betty Roland wrote a comic strip, The Conways, for the Sydney Morning Herald.
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Betty Roland returned to Australia in the early 1960s, continuing to write radio plays and children's books, and was a founding member of the Australian Society of Authors in 1963, serving on its management committee and becoming an honorary life member in 1993.
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Betty Roland moved back into Montsalvat from 1973 to 1979, and wrote her second volume of autobiography, The Eye of the Beholder, about her time there.
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Betty Roland published two more volumes of autobiography, An Improbable Life and The Devious Being.