[3] She was ahead of her time in studying at the University of Sydney in a period when few women received a tertiary education.

However, she was suspended in 1923 for a poem appearing in the literary magazine Hermes, which describes post-coital bliss.

[4] Her future husband, poet and journalist Bert Birtles, was expelled for a still more explicit poem in the same issue of Hermes describing their tryst on the roof of the university quadrangle.

[5][6][7] Dora Birtles returned to Sydney University to take a degree in Oriental history and a diploma of education,[3] and then taught in Newcastle, New South Wales for a short time before travelling to Europe.

[11][12] Birtles wrote an account of a sea voyage from Newcastle to Singapore, North-West by North (1935) which became one of her most popular works.