An Improbable Life

"I have already told how, in an idle hour, I made a list of the men who had made love to me and found they numbered sixty-four. That list, however, was inaccurate. It should have numbered sixty-five."

An Improbable Life is the first volume in the absorbing autobiography of Betty Roland, one of Australia's first women playwrights.

Born in the small Mallee town of Kaniva, in Victoria, Roland at eighty-five writes with refreshing candour of her life in Melbourne and her attempts at making writting a career. Her play The Touch of Slik was hailed in 1928 as 'the first Australian play written by a real dramatist', and Roland went on to write the script for Australia's first talkie.

Fleeing an unhappy marriage she ran away to England in 1932 with Guido Baracchi, the founder of the Australian Communist Party, only to find herself in an equally complex web of deceit and personal intrigue. An Improbable Life is a unique excursion into a life of risk-taking, by a woman whose life and work spans the century.