On emigrating to Australia from England in the 1960s, she took whatever work she could find, becoming a waitress in the snowfields, a clerk in a motorbike shop and a cashier at Luna Park. She enrolled in a typing and shorthand course and studied for her HSC at night, paying for her room in a boarding house by cleaning everyone else’s. She found work as a typist at the ABC, which she left to attend University, before returning with a double degree in psychology and in politics.

At this point she became a researcher with the ABC’s TV Science Unit, and then with BBC documentaries on location in Australia. With that experience she secured work as a researcher/reporter in TV current affairs, and later as a producer for Radio Australia.

A report on the Melbourne artist Clifton Pugh for This Day Tonight led to a biography, further books, further study, and over twenty years of radio interviews on art for ABC radio. At the same time, she wrote on art for journals, news outlets and galleries and produced and presented a series of videos on art history for schools across the country. 

She has lectured in visual culture at RMIT, and at Monash University where she established the first Australian course on Contemporary Art of the Asia-Pacific. As Dr. Allen, she is currently an affiliate with the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.