Maureen Meadows was the daughter of engineer Hugo Eklund and his wife Kathleen, and was the middle child of a family of seven. She spent most of her childhood in Brisbane, attending West End state School and then the State Commercial High School. On leaving school she worked as a clerk-typist until her marriage to Alan Meadows in May 1939. During World War II she worked at the United States Army Headquarters in Brisbane. This became the inspiration for her book I Loved Those Yanks, which remains as one of the few published accounts of life in Australia during World War II to have been written by a woman. Meadows continued writing throughout her life, and at various points contributed verse to the Australian Women's Weekly and a number of other magazines. In the early 1950s she also a wrote the script for a children's serial which was broadcast on Brisbane radio station 4KQ. At the time of her death she was working on the manuscript of a fantasy novel titled 'Peter Stormwind'.
