Cirrus@Austlit

Betty McLean left school at sixteen to pursue a career in journalism and worked for at both Table Talk and Sun News-Pictorial. In 1923 she married Ellis Harvey Davies and over the next ten years wrote a number of works under the name Betty M. Davies. One of her best known works, and also her first play, was The Touch of Silk. Produced by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre in 1928, it was later performed by several repertory companies and published by Melbourne University Press in 1942 (under the name Betty Roland). It was revised in 1955 and published by Currency Press in 1988, demonstrating its continuing appeal. Another early play, the one act drama, Morning was written in the late 1920s but was not staged until 1932. As such it was one of the first Australian plays to be produced by the Melbourne Little Theatre. It too was credited to Betty M. Davies.

While overseas Davies adopted the personal and professional name Betty Roland. After returning from Russia in 1935, she wrote a number of political plays under her new name. These were often performed as street theatre. She also delivered talks on both the stage and on radio during the mid-1930s, with the topics including the state of theatre in Russia, and her recollections of the country and other places she visited during her time abroad.

In 1939, disillusioned with the Communist Party and separated from the well-known communist Guido Baracchi, she began writing for radio. One of her serials, A Woman Scorned (broadcast in the 1950s), was the inspiration for the television series Return to Eden (1985). She also has the distinction of scripting Australia's first talking feature film, The Spur of the Moment (1931). During the 1940s, she lived for some time at an artistic community at Montsalvat, Victoria, before working as a freelance writer in London for most of the 1950s. After returning to Australia in 1961, she wrote a number of highly regarded children's novels. She was a founding member of the Australian Society of Authors in 1963. In 1972, she was invited back to Montsalvat to write its history, published in 1984 as The Eye of the Beholder.

Roland also wrote a number of novels during the 1970s, but she is most-admired for the three volumes of autobiography that begin with Caviar for Breakfast (1979). She published the third volume, The Devious Being, in 1990. The year before she died, Roland saw one of her early plays, 'Feet of Clay' (1928), published in the selected work, Playing the Past: Three Plays by Australian Women (1995).