Alice was the daughter of Nathaniel Hailes (public servant, auctioneer, agent, journalist and poet) and his wife Eliza. Her father, author of The Soul's Journey: A Metrical Fantasy (Adelaide, 1856), wrote articles for The Register under the pseudonym "Timothy Short".
The family lived for a while at Port Lincoln. On 31 Jan 1861, when she was 17, Alice married Benjamin Holroyd, a man about 20 years her senior, who had come to SA from Sheepscar, a suburb of Leeds, Yorkshire, England. He was a pastoral pioneer who, with his brother Henry, established the Duck Ponds station west of Port Lincoln. He later worked in the Chief Secretary's Office, and the year before his death of heart disease was an Inspector with the Central Board of Health. They had three children, Bertram Ben (born 1864 at Pt Lincoln), Mabel (born 1866 at Duck Ponds) and Ellen (born 1868 at Burnside).
After the death of her husband in 1875 Alice lived in George St, Norwood, then in Burnside, Rose Park and again Norwood (36 Coke St) from 1912-1919. She probably died in 1919. Her occupation is given in the Biographical Index of South Australians 1836-1885 as "teacher" although it is not clear when she taught.
