During her time there Auchterlonie became a member of an elite group that included the brilliant and flamboyant[2] poet James McAuley, Joan Fraser (who wrote under the pseudonym Amy Witting), Harold Stewart, Oliver Somerville, Alan Crawford and Ronald Dunlop.
During her academic career (1961–1987) she threw herself into championing Australian literature and publishing literary criticism to re establish authors she felt were undervalued, notably Martin Boyd, E. L. Grant Watson,[6] Patrick White, 'Henry Handel Richardson', Christopher Brennan, Christina Stead and Kylie Tennant.
In 1963, after publisher Angus & Robertson had approached her for an abridgement suitable for students, she began to revise her husband H. M. Green's massive History of Australian Literature, republished in two volumes in 1985.
[7] In 1970, she began researching a major biography of writer and biologist E. L. Grant Watson, which led to the publication of Descent of Spirit in 1990, but at her death in 1991 the project remained uncompleted.
Along with supporting environmental causes and volunteer work for the Australian Council of Churches, she was prominent in campaigning with an ADFA colleague, David Headon, in speeches and writing against nuclear arms.