Hall began her working life as a cadet at the afternoon tabloid, The Sun, studying Arts at Sydney University at night. She wrote a few movie reviews for The Sun, then in 1964, she left Sydney for Canberra to join the staff of Rupert Murdoch's new national daily, The Australian. The following year, she went to London, where she worked on the magazine, Woman's Own, returning in 1966 to work on Network Ten's current affairs programme, Telescope, before becoming a contributor to The Bulletin, edited by Donald Horne, and The Australian, where she was a television critic for a time. In 1971, she became The Bulletin 's film reviewer and in 1973, she won a $6,000 Fellowship from the Literature Board[2] to write a history of Australian television. Entitled Supertoy: 20 Years of Australian Television, it was published in 1976 by Sun Books. In 1978 she was awarded a $10,000 fellowship for a year, to write fiction.[3]
Her first novel, A Thousand Small Wishes, was published in 1995 by Allen & Unwin. Other books: Turning On Turning Off: Australian Television in the Eighties, Cassell Australia (1981), Critical Business: The New Australian Cinema in Review, Rigby Ltd (1985), Beyond the Break, a novel, 4th Estate (2006), Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton, 4th Estate (2008).
In 1994, she won the Pascall Prize for critical writing on film and in 1996, she became a film reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald.[4]
^"Who's Doing What". Filmnews. Vol. 8, no. 2. New South Wales, Australia. 1 February 1978. p. 5. Retrieved 4 August 2023 – via National Library of Australia.
