[4]: p i She published her first book with University of Queensland Press in 1978, titled East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, which was written during her Young Writers Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council.
She was a correspondent for Nation Review, Reuters, UPI, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the BBC.
[6] Jolliffe also directed her first television documentary The Pandora Trail in 1992 which exposed European prostitution rackets and Spanish, Portuguese and third world women enslavement.
[8] She covered wars in Angola and Western Sahara, and was banned from entering Indonesia because of her criticisms of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and its aftermath.
[4] The book, researched by the author for over twenty years, "is as much an investigation of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor as it is a case study of the Balibo killings".