The second of three children and an only daughter, Appleton did a five-year diploma course in drawing and illustration at the East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School).

[4][5][6] After she observed impressionist prints lying in an Anthony Hordern & Sons department store, she became preoccupied about venturing to Europe and studying modern art to which her father objected.

Appleton shared and worked in a studio in Quay with fellow painter Dorothy Thornhill,[4] and earned capital by creating textile patterns.

[4][5] Appleton found affordable accommodation and enrolled at the Westminster School of Art's morning and evening classes over the next three years from 1936.

[1] She was part of a team of Australian artists (William Dobell, Donald Friend, Arthur Murch and Eric Wilson) that produced a 45 m (148 ft) mural and a gilded ram to erect it for the International Wool Secretariat at Glasgow's British Empire Exhibition in 1938.

[4]- In that era, teaching was a venture that allowed artists to continue working;[4] Appleton taught at the Canberra Girls Grammar School in 1940 and had her maiden solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney that same year.

[4][7][3] After an exhibition of her work to the conclusion of the Second World War at the Sturt Gallery in Mittagong in 2000,[7] Appleton died in hospital in Bowral on 11 June 2003.

[4] She was described as an individual who was admired professionally; according to the painter Elizabeth Cummings, Appleton was not didactic and had an interest in exploration to enough of an extent that her "thinking was always moving.

"[4] The interviewer Willi Carney calls her "self-reliant" and an "assured yet modest lady who deserves to be recognised as one of our most significant living artists.

[3] In 1942, Appleton went away from rounded geometric forms that she learnt during her time in London to an increasingly decorative and schematic cubist style and experienced with a lighter colour scheme.