 In 1935, at the age of 18, Anderson left her Brisbane home to live in Sydney. Despite the fact that she spent her childhood in Queensland, she stated in interviews that she felt more affinity with Sydney, the city where she was to spend the bulk of her adult life. There she subsisted on wages from a number of sources, including a slide-painting job, and a job designing electric signs, where she was able to make use of her art school training, and later from work in shops and factories. She and her friends lived at Potts Point in "big seedy decaying mansions with gardens running right down to the harbour." In a city still recovering from the ravages of The Great Depression, life for Anderson was not altogether easy: "Times were very hard," she recalled; "People were poor, but very free. We had a good life."
