‘I wanted to do something useful’: the teenager who drew edible maps for Australia’s wartime pilots

Not long after she finished school, Cecily Sandercock found herself working in Queensland for the US army as a cartographer. Photograph: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

At 18, Cecily Sandercock found herself on a high stool in front of a drawing desk in the office of the United States Army Services of Supply in Victoria Park, Queensland.

“The drawers in my desk contained all kinds of pens and drafting shapes including several I had never seen nor handled before,” she wrote in her journal.