Roland, Betty (1903–1996)

Australian dramatist and writer. Name variations: Elizabeth Maclean. Born Elizabeth Maclean in Kaniva, Victoria, Australia, on July 22, 1903; died in 1996; daughter of Roland Maclean (a physician) and Matilda (Blayney) Maclean; attended Church of England girls' grammar school in Melbourne, Australia; marriedEllis H. Davies, in 1923 (divorced 1934); married Guido Baracchi (a journalist), in the 1930s (died 1975); children: (first marriage) Peter Ellis Davies; (second marriage) Gilda Baracchi.

Selected writings:

(plays) The Touch of Silk (produced 1928, published 1942), Morning (produced 1932, published 1937), Granite Peak (televised 1952); (children's books) The Forbidden Bridge (1961), Jamie's Discovery (1963), Jamie's Summer Visitor (1964), The Bush Bandits (1966), Jamie's Other Grandmother (1970); (travelogue) Sydney in Colour and Black and White (1965); (memoirs) Lesbos, the Pagan Island (1963), Caviar for Breakfast (1979); (novels) The Other Side of Sunset (1972), No Ordinary Man (1974), Beyond Capricorn (1976).

Betty Roland was born Elizabeth Maclean in the town of Kaniva in 1903, and spent her early years in the Australian bush. She took the surname "Roland"—her father's given name—in 1951. Her formal education ended relatively early, as she dropped out of school at the age of 16 and started her writing career as a journalist for Table Talk and the Sun News-Pictorial. Roland demonstrated a talent for drama with her first full-length play, The Touch of Silk, produced by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre in 1928. The production was a significant accomplishment for the young writer, given the fact that theaters rarely staged Australian drama at the time. Her next play, Morning, was produced in 1932, and was subsequently published in a 1937 anthology.

After Roland's ten-year marriage to Ellis Davies ended in the early 1930s, she became involved with Guido Baracchi, a journalist and well-known Australian Communist. In 1933, they eloped to Russia, where she worked as a journalist for 15 months and developed her own Communist beliefs. Her return to Australia in 1935 and subsequent membership in the Communist Party caused Roland to write a series of political sketches, many of them performed as street theater. Her only full-length political play, Are You Ready, Comrade?, won the Western Australian Drama Competition in 1938.

By 1939, Roland's disillusionment with Communism prompted her to abandon political theater for radio plays, at which she proved adept. Her best-known radio presentation, "Daddy Was Asleep," aired in 1945, and her three-act play Granite Peak was successful enough to be televised in England in 1952. She spent a number of these years outside of Australia, traveling and living in England and other countries, but returned permanently to Australia in 1971. There, one of her radio programs, the serial "A Woman Scorned," found new life on television in 1983, as the basis for the popular series "Return to Eden." Roland wrote several books for children as well as three novels, The Other Side of Sunset (1972), No Ordinary Man (1974) and Beyond Capricorn (1976). Caviar for Breakfast (1979), a memoir, concerns her experiences in Russia during the 1930s.

sources:

Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. NY: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Contemporary Authors. Vol. 103. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1982.

Wilde, William H., Joy Hooten, and Barry Andrews. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Susan J. Walton , freelance writer, Berea, Ohio