Caviar for breakfast

In 1933 Betty Roland went to Moscow with her lover Guido Baracchi, originally for 21 days but the pair stayed for over a year, Betty working on the Moscow Daily News, sharing a room with Katherine Susannah Pritchard, and smuggling literature into Nazi Germany; her diaries from this period became the basis for her first volume of autobiography, Caviar For Breakfast (1979). She returned to Australia in 1935 and immersed herself in left-wing politics, writing numerous agit-prop plays depicting the workers' struggle for Communist Review. She lived in Melbourne for two years before moving to Sydney, buying land and building a house in Castlecrag in living with Baracchi until their relationship broke down in 1942. She established the New Theatre League and began writing regularly for Australian radio, her plays including The First Gentleman, Daddy Was Asleep, The White Cockade, A Woman Scorned, The Drums of Manalao and In His Steps, broadcast in 1942-49. In 1951, she legally changed her name to Betty Roland and, in 1952, moved to London with her daughter (by Baracchi), Gilda. She wrote for various magazines including Harper's Bazaar, Girl, Swift, Woman's Own and Women's Weekly as well as writing the screenplay for Heights of Danger (1953) and the TV play 'Granite Peak' (1957). Roland journeyed to the Greek island of Lesbos before returning to Australia in 1961, where she up an artists' community at Montsalvat, outside Melbourne. She continued to write for Australian radio and a number of well-received children's novels. She was a founder member of the Australian Society of Authors and was a member of the ASA management committee and treasurer. In 1993 she was made an honorary life member. Betty Roland wrote a number of novels in the early 1970s and the first volume of her autobiography at the end of the decade; this was followed by The Eye of the Beholder (1984), An Improbable Life (1989) and The Devious Being (1990). She died in Sydney, Australia, on 12 February 1996.