Betty Roland

[2] She left school at sixteen to work as a journalist for Table Talk and the Sun News-Pictorial, and married Ellis Harvey Davies in 1923.

Most recently, A Touch of Silk was broadcast on Australia's ABC Radio National on Sunday 2 January 2011 as part of the Playing the 20th Century series.

[4] While there, Roland worked on the Moscow Daily News, shared a room with Katharine Susannah Prichard, and smuggled literature into Nazi Germany.

[4] In the late 1930s she wrote short, left-wing, agitprop plays, which she regarded as akin to political cartoons, for the New Theatre League in Sydney.

[10] She 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.

[4] In 1951 she legally changed her name to Betty Roland, and the following year moved to London with Gilda, where she wrote for television and women's magazines, as well as children's books and comic strips for Girl and Swift.