[1] The sixth of seven siblings; Cora Harriet, Irene Selby, Hilda Elsie, Charles Edmund,[2] Harold Edgar, and Richard Harbison, she was also a direct descendant of John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century diarist and horticulturist.

Profiled in a magazine article in February 1927 after her return from overseas only weeks before, she is described as: a Melbourne girl who has made herself a place in the artistic world with her craftsmanship in stained wood.

Though now known chiefly for her stained wood bric-a-brac, of which she is the originator here, she is also painter, and her watercolor sketches of scenes in Italy were hung at the last art show of the year at the Athenæum Gallery.

[13] In a new venture the Cheyne run by Rene Monteath Roach showed enamelled wood alongside etchings by John Shirlow, paintings by Dora Wilson, and pottery of Merric Boyd.

[17] The same magazine also noted in September "fine examples of the inlaid woodwork of Elma Roach" in Margaret MacLean's studio and art salon,[18] but in July that year had dismissed her painting as:little above the standard of the good amateur.

They made rendezvous with Australian artist colleagues Norah Gurdon, Dora Wilson and Pegg Clarke, and later Madge Freeman and Margaret MacLean,[21] in London[22] where Roach was undertaking further study, and where her work had been accepted into the British Academy and the Women's International Art Club.

She sent work to Australia for showing in May 1930 in the Victorian Artists Society, where her watercolour, Fading Light was judged as "freshly and cleanly painted" by Melvyn Skipper of The Bulletin.

[27]  In 1938 she was represent in the first exhibition of the Australian Academy of Art in 1938 with her oil painting, priced at 10 guineas, Street, East Melbourne depicting Freeman's aforementioned studio.

[28] Both were featured in Art in Australia, with mention in an accompanying statement; "Then there are painters like Madge Freeman and Elma Roach, who have brought back with them from Paris still another aspect of contemporary European painting unfamiliar to Australian eyes.

[35]  Several of her works, and a portrait of her by Dora Wilson which "captures Miss Roach's smile, and is a fascinating study in greens and browns," were on display at an Independent Group exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne in September 1942.

[36][37][38] A memorial solo exhibition of forty-three works was held 9–20 March 1943[39] from which three of her pieces, including two oil paintings and one watercolour, were acquired by the Castlemaine Art Museum.

Despite the purchases made on the advice of Daryl Lindsay, James MacDonald, critic for The Age, ignored the memorial status of the show and delivered a withering review, writing that "these studies have a general monotony, owing to the absence from all of them of any personal conviction," and finding their "certain Cezanney cast...derivative and imitative.