Elizabeth Auld was the great-grand-daughter of Patrick Auld (1811-1886), one of SA's pioneer winegrowers, who came to SA in 1842. As a child Elizabeth said she wanted to be a spy, but in fact she spent her entire 50-year career as a Murdoch journalist. Her education began at Miss Hibby's school at Knightsbridge, but after a clash with her teacher she was taken out of school for a year "for health reasons". She suspects, in retrospect, that she was expelled. During her twelve months at home, aged eleven or twelve, she started writing. She was allowed to choose where she would do her secondary schooling, and chose St Peter's Collegiate Girls' School because of their "gem hats" - which they abolished the year after she went there - and so she could play hockey.
With the encouragement of her godfather, Lionel Gee, she began work on The Register in 1918 when she left school. Her first work at The Register was on the sunny top floor, proof-reading. When William Sowden left, she moved downstairs, spent two weeks on the switchboard, and then was appointed secretary to the Editor, Robert Burns. Her work was to do research for the leaders, and to write them down as the Editor dictated them. She also handled the Letters to the Editor.
At the end of a year she went on the reporting staff. With the help of Sir Trent De Crespigny, the leading physician, she compiled and edited one of the first medical columns in Australian journalism. When The Register closed in 1931 she found work writing weekly four-line verses for the furniture firm, Haines Hunkin, trying desperately, she said, to find rhymes for Hunkin. In 1931 she gave this up and moved to Melbourne. It was a hard time to get work as a journalist; people were being laid off. However, she wrote two small pieces about wine and sent them to the Herald, and on the strength of one of these was offered a job on the paper. There was a certain amount of ill feeling that she had been taken on when others were losing their jobs, and for a while no-one spoke to her much; "The charlady showed me where the toilets were!" She was employed as a general reporter, in a day when women journalists were often restricted to women's and social pages.
She became engaged to marry Peter Tivey, a Melbourne stockbroker, but he died of wounds received at El Alamein, and Elizabeth never married. She was appointed to the Herald's London office in 1945, leaving on the first ship to go after the war. She was four years on Fleet Street, and here she "learned how to dress".
When she returned to Melbourne the Herald was setting up the Woman's Day magazine and she was employed there for a while. She was sacked from the Woman's Day after speaking her mind on an issue, but was later re-employed. In 1952 she went to Woomera, the only woman journalist to get to the Rocket Range at this time. The article she wrote on this was published on the front page of the London Daily Mail. She later worked on the Martin Collins column of The Australian, and retired in 1974.
She had her first book, a children's detective story, published at the age of 94. Looking back, she said she did not find it difficult to be a woman in what was once, apart from the Women's Pages staff, largely a man's world, and found only one man who showed any jealousy.
