She composed over 150 works for piano, 50 songs, other instrumental and orchestral works and performed as a concert pianist with eminent conductors including Sir Malcolm Sargent, Constant Lambert, Georg Schnéevoigt, Sir Bernard Heinze and Geoffrey Simon.
[2] Her teachers were R. O. Morris and Gordon Jacob for composition, and Howard Hadley and Arthur Benjamin for piano.
[4] She saw many of the great musicians of the time, including Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Yehudi Menuhin and Elisabeth Schumann.
[4] She returned to Adelaide in 1936 and soon after moved to Sydney,[5] where she worked for several decades as a composer, recitalist, teacher, examiner and lecturer.
Her activities included examining, mentoring, demonstrations and workshops, setting/reviewing/marking exam papers, advising on syllabus content.
From the mid-1990s onwards, continuing after her death in 2005, The Keys Press (Perth) and Wirripang Pty Ltd (Wollongong) published more than 100 of her manuscripts for piano, chamber music and voice.
She wrote in an early 20th-century pastoral style,[9] achieving a highly effective combination of impressionism with post-romanticism.
One of her lesser known pieces is the mystical Reflected Reeds (1956) with its rippling chords sketching the Sydney landscape on a brooding afternoon.
[17] Three selections of her poetry were published by the Economy Press, Adelaide: The Bliss of Solitude (1941), A Few Poems (1942) and Dawn to Dusk (1947?).
[4][18] She also wrote her autobiography, Complete Accord (1991, Currency Press) and donated the royalties to the Elder Scholarship that she won in 1931.