[3] As a young girl, she travelled all over Australia with her parents, whilst her father prospected for gold, broke horses and worked in the outback.
[1][5] In 1942, the editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Cyril Pearl, was looking for a new strip to replace Mary and Elizabeth Durack's Nungulla and Jungalla.
I spent days and nights sketching girls before I was satisfied I had found a true type of real Australian girl.Wanda was a tough independent[6] young, long-legged curveous redhead,[1] whose series of adventures had her encountering Japanese soldiers and German spies.
[12] O'Brien basing her storylines on books by Ashton Wolfe, the head of the French Sûreté, combining methods he detailed with current newspaper stories, thus Wanda was involved in struggles with black-marketeers, foreign spies and smugglers.
[13][14][15] At the same time, O'Brien worked as a commercial artist and book illustrator,[3] illustrating twelve books, including Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid (1943), Australia's first unabridged version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1943), Ella Greenway's Peter Cat (1950)[16] and Nourma Handford's Carloola Backstage: A Career Novel for Girls' (1956).