[6] Lilias Fraser attended Somerville House, a Presbyterian and Methodist girls' secondary college[7][8] where she was school captain and became friends with future arts administrator Betty Churcher.
[9][10] In 1952, Fraser and Betty Churcher set off for London, at that time a key destination for artistic Australians, fleeing what they regarded as a difficult climate for the arts at home.
[14] Despite this promising beginning and encouraged by director John Heyer, she left the CFU to enrol in the French national film school, Institut des hautes etudes cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris.
[citation needed] By this time, Fraser had met her future husband Norman Castle, who resigned from his job in the public service and followed her to France.
In her oral history for the National Film & Sound Archive, she recalls that on occasion she did some of the photography herself, most notably for Waterbirds of the Inland (1965),[18] positioned in a bird hide at Lake Narran, far northwest NSW, resting her camera on her pregnant belly.
[14] Indeed, it was quite a transformation -- from the conventional society belle (and her gowns) as described in 1950 by The Brisbane-Courier Mail[23] to the activist educator appearing thirty years later in the pages of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative’s newspaper, Filmnews.
Significantly, Fraser worked at the Australian Film Television & Radio School as Coordinator of their Industry Training Scheme for Women with the aim of enabling assistants in camera, sound, directing and producing roles to move into higher positions.
Women of the Iron Ore Frontier was selected for screening at the prestigious French Documentary Festival Cinema du Reel, which celebrates the presence of the filmmaker’s point of view.
In her retirement, she helped her daughter Claudia with her grandchildren and between 1994 and 1996 co-produced the feminist documentary by Film Co-op associate Jeni Thornley, To the Other Shore.
Her death was the trigger for daughter Jane Castle’s documentary When the Camera Stopped Rolling, produced by former Film Co-op colleague Pat Fiske, OAM.