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Betty Roland

Terri-Ann White reviews 'Trouble in Lotus Land' by Charmian Clift, 'The Devious Being' by Betty Roland, and 'Eat My Words' by Marion Halligan

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December 1990–January 1991, no. 127

The task of reading these three books together provided more than I was anticipating. Their perspectives of decades of Australian society and writing practices cover the past, the personal and the politics. The writers come from three different generations (born 1903, 1923, 1940), and represent particular writing intentions or schools, certainly different genres. The connecting thread, probably the only one, is that each of the books is written form such a particularised stance. Each is written in the first person, and flirts to varying degrees with the confessional mode. The tensions between restraint and letting it all hang out, what gets said and what comes out in the not-saying, interested me.

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Caviar for Breakfast by Betty Roland

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February–March 1980, no. 18
Dymphna Cusack reviews 'Caviar for Breakfast' by Betty Roland

The publisher did scant service to the author by putting a ‘blurb’ before the book, emphasising ideas that are neither implicit nor explicit in it. Betty Roland does not claim to be a prophet.

The old cliché ‘I couldn’t put it down’ was literally true when I read her Caviar for Breakfast, the account of her year in the Soviet Union in 1934.

We all do silly things when we are young!

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