Betty Roland

Betty Roland (22 July 1903 – 12 February 1996) was an Australian writer of plays, screenplays, novels, children's books and comics.

Early years Betty Roland was born Mary Isobel Maclean at Kaniva, Victoria, the daughter of Roland and Matilda Maclean. She left school at sixteen to work as a journalist for Table Talk and the Sun News-Pictorial, and married Ellis Harvey Davies in 1923.

Drama and theatre work Roland wrote plays from the mid-1920s. Her best known play, The Touch of Silk, was first performed in 1928 by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre company, and hailed as "The first Australian play written by a real dramatist". A moving study of the alienation felt by a young French woman who marries an Australian soldier who she meets during World War One and moves with him to a narrow-minded country town. The play was performed in amateur theatres regularly between 1928 and the 1940s and on radio. Roland revised it in 1955. It received its first professional production in 1976 at the Independent Theatre, Sydney, produced by John Tasker and starring Fay Kelton. Currency Press published it in 1974, and again in 1986 with another of Roland's plays Granite Peak. Most recently, A Touch of Silk was broadcast on Australia's ABC Radio National on Sunday 2 January 2011 as part of the Playing the 20th Century series.

Other plays of the 1920s included Feet of Clay, a modern take on the Pygmalion myth, and the Gates of Bronze: a fantasy in four scenes.

Roland's early writing for theatre is mostly romantic drama or comedy. Her later work was agit prop and highly political.

She also wrote the screenplay for what is claimed as the first Australian "talkie", Spur of the Moment, in 1932, credited as Betty M. Davies.

Guido Baracchi and the Communist Party Roland met the wealthy Marxist intellectual Guido Baracchi, one of the founders of the Australian Communist Party, in the late 1920s. Having left her husband, she booked a passage to the UK in 1933 and discovered Baracchi, also recently separated, was a passenger on the same voyage. They began a relationship, and travelled together to the USSR, where Baracchi was to deliver documents to the Kremlin. Their daughter, Gilda, was born in 1937.

She separated from Baracchi in 1942, and for the rest of the 1940s supported herself and her daughter by writing radio plays, including The First Gentleman, Daddy Was Asleep, The White Cockade, A Woman Scorned, The Drums of Manalao and In His Steps.

From 1948 to 1950 she lived in the Montsalvat artists' colony at Eltham, Victoria. Produced as a radio play under title New Day in 1945. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (serial for commercial radio) A Woman Scored (play for commercial radio) Granite Peak (1952 play) The Touch of Silk and Granite Peak Currency Press The Touch of Silk (with notes by author) Currency Methuen, Sydney 1974 Novels and Children's Fiction: Beyond Capricorn HarperCollins 1976 The Bush Bandits Penguin Australia 1966 The Bush Bandits ill. Genevieve Melrose, Follett Pub. Forbidden Bridge Scholastic Australia 1961 Forbidden Bridge and Jamie's Discovery ill. Geraldine Spence, Random House 1963 Jamie's Other Grandmother w/ Prudence Seward Random House 1970 Jamie's Summer Visitor Scholastic Australia 1964 No Ordinary Man Fontana The Other Side of Sunset Harlequin Mills & Boon Autobiographical: Lesbos the Pagan Island Cheshire 1963 Caviar For Breakfast HarperCollins 1979 The Eye of the Beholder Hale & Iremonger 1984 An Improbable Life HarperCollins 1989 The Devious Being HarperCollins 1990

Filmography (as Betty M Davies): Spur of the Moment (1931) (claimed to be Australia's first talking movie) Heights of Danger (1953)