Florence Violet McKenzie: Australia’s First Female Electrical Engineer and the Architect of the WRANS

This interview is a dramatised reconstruction based on historical sources about Florence Violet McKenzie, not a real transcript – she died on 23rd May 1982. Key life events are drawn from the record, but the dialogue, reflections, and framing are imaginatively recreated to illuminate her work and legacy, so please treat any quoted “remarks” as interpretive rather than verbatim.

Florence Violet McKenzie (1890-1982) was a pioneering electrical engineer, radio specialist, and technical educator whose work fundamentally shaped Australia’s wartime communications infrastructure. She founded the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in 1939, trained over 12,000 servicemen and 3,000 women in Morse code and visual signalling, and was instrumental in creating the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service – Australia’s first women’s military service. Known affectionately as “Mrs Mac,” she proved through practical expertise that women could match or exceed men in technical fields, and she gave away her knowledge freely for decades, asking nothing in return but the chance to serve.

Mrs McKenzie – or may I call you Mrs Mac, as so many thousands of your students did?

Oh, do call me Mrs Mac. Everyone did, you know. The pilots, the sailors, the WRANS girls. It stuck from the very first days at Clarence Street. I never asked for it, but it suited me well enough.

It’s an extraordinary honour to speak with you today, in December 2025 – forty-three years after your passing, and yet your legacy has only grown. A Sydney Harbour ferry bears your name, a tunnel boring machine on the Snowy 2.0 project was christened “Florence” in your honour, and a park in Canberra was dedicated to you just two years ago. How does it feel to learn that recognition has come, even if slowly?

I never worked for recognition, you understand. I worked because there was work to be done. When I closed the school in the 1950s, I said to a friend: “It is finished, and I have proved to them all that women can be as good as, or better than, men.” That was enough for me. But I won’t pretend it doesn’t please me to know the WRANS haven’t forgotten their old teacher. They kept my memory alive when others let it slip.

Let’s begin at the beginning. You were born in Melbourne in 1890, though your family moved to Austinmer on the New South Wales coast when you were quite small. What sparked your fascination with electricity?

I used to play about with bells and buzzers and things around the house. My mother would sometimes say, “Oh, come and help me find something, it’s so dark in this cupboard” – she didn’t have very good eyesight, you see. So I’d get a battery and hook up a switch, and when she opened that cupboard door, a light would come on. I started playing with those things very young. My brother Walter studied electrical engineering in England, and I watched him with keen interest. But I think the trains were what truly caught my imagination – the signals near Austinmer Station, the way they communicated without words. There was something orderly and beautiful about it.

You attended Sydney Girls’ High School on a scholarship, and later trained as a mathematics teacher. What made you abandon teaching for engineering?

I was teaching in Armidale, up in the tablelands, and one Sunday at church I had what you might call a revelation. I was wasting my time. I’d always wanted to do engineering – not teaching – and I needed to stop pretending otherwise. So I went back to Sydney. But here’s the thing: when I asked to study engineering at the university, they told me I couldn’t unless I was apprenticed to a firm, and no firm would take on a woman. The rule was quite clear, you see.

And yet you found a way around it.

I went to the Head of Engineering at Sydney Technical College and asked him plainly: “Suppose I had an electrical engineering business and I’m working at it, would that be all right?” He said, “Yes, if you produce proof.” So I took over my brother’s struggling business, printed some cards with my name on them, scanned the newspapers for electrical jobs, and went out beyond Marrickville to bid on a contract for wiring a house. It was a fearfully hot day, about two miles from the end of the tram line. I got the job because I was the only contractor to arrive there. I employed a lad to help me, and there were no complaints when it was done. I took that contract back to the college, and they enrolled me. Simple as that.

You became Australia’s first woman to earn a Diploma of Electrical Engineering in December 1923. Your diploma is now held by the Powerhouse Museum.

Is it? Well, I hope it’s teaching someone something useful.

In 1922, the same year you opened your Wireless Shop in the Royal Arcade, you became the first Australian woman to hold an amateur radio operator’s licence – callsign 2GA, later VK2FV. What drew you to wireless?

Radio was magic, truly. To sit in a room in Sydney and communicate with someone on the other side of the world, using nothing but electrical impulses through the air – it captivated me entirely. The shop was cramped, just a small space in the Royal Arcade, but schoolboys would crowd in after class, penurious types looking for second-hand parts. I helped them when I could. It was the schoolboys who first introduced me to Morse code, actually. They taught me, and then I spent years teaching it to others. Funny how these things work.

You also helped found The Wireless Weekly magazine that same year.

Yes, with William Maclardy and Ron Marsden. We planned the first issue in Maclardy’s dark and dusty basement in Castlereagh Street. I wrote industry news, components notes, sometimes a short story or a wireless poem. The first issue went on sale from my shop at eight o’clock in the morning on the fourth of August 1922. Twelve pages, just a few hundred copies. It eventually became Electronics Australia and stayed in print until 2001. Not bad for a basement scheme.

By the 1930s, you’d also experimented with television. You wrote in 1931 that you had “a pronounced kink for television work” and were “working along those lines” with chemistry.

Yes, I had a deep-rooted conviction that chemistry would provide the solution to television. I was wrong about that, as it turned out. One can’t be right about everything. But the experimenting itself was worthwhile. You learn as much from failures as successes, perhaps more.

In 1934, you founded the Electrical Association for Women to educate women about electricity and modern appliances. Two years later, you published Australia’s first “all-electric cookbook,” which ran to seven editions and remained in print until 1954. What was the driving philosophy behind this work?

I believed – still believe – that electricity could save women from domestic drudgery. “To see every woman emancipated from the heavy work of the household by the aid of electricity is in itself a worthy object.” That’s what I wrote, and I meant it. The Association wasn’t commercial; it was educational. We gave cooking demonstrations in our kitchen, fitted out with show electrical appliances. Women needed to understand that electricity wasn’t mysterious or dangerous if handled properly. It was freedom.

You also wrote a children’s book, The Electric Imps, in 1937, teaching electrical safety to young people.

After the… after a tragedy near my home in Greenwich, I felt very strongly that children needed to understand electricity safely. I won’t say more about that. But the book presented the story of electricity simply, with illustrations, to educate youthful minds in its safe use. The School Magazine published parts of it. I hope it helped.

In July 1938, you joined the Australian Women’s Flying Club and became responsible for training women pilots in Morse code. The following year, after Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” declaration, you began preparing for war. Can you describe that moment?

When Chamberlain came back from Munich and said “peace in our time,” I began preparing for war. I knew what was coming. Any fool with a wireless could hear what was happening in Europe. I foresaw a military demand for people with skills in wireless communications, and I knew I could make a valuable contribution.

You established the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in March 1939, months before war was declared. What was your original intention?

My original idea was to train women in telegraphy so they could replace men working in civilian communications – post offices, shipping offices, that sort of thing – thereby freeing those skilled men to serve in the war. By the time war broke out, I’d trained 120 women to instructional standard. But then something happened that changed everything.

What happened?

Early in the war, a young man – a would-be pilot – tried to enlist but was refused because he didn’t know Morse code. By sheer coincidence, he walked past our rooms on Clarence Street and heard the sounds of Morse signalling through the window. It was just a room full of women, but he walked in and asked, “Will you teach me Morse code?” I heaved a big sigh, because I saw a whole world opening up in front of me. Then I knew what we could do. We could train girls to train the men. It was wonderful, because I’d thought we could only do things like relieving in the post office.

Let’s talk about your training methods. You trained over 12,000 servicemen and 3,000 women in Morse code, visual signalling, and the International Code of Signals. How did you approach the pedagogy of Morse code instruction?

The fundamental principle is rhythm. Morse code is not a visual code; it’s an auditory one. The letter V, for instance, is three dits and a dah: dit-dit-dit-dah. If you know your Beethoven, that’s the opening of his Fifth Symphony. Once students hear the rhythm, they never forget it. We used mnemonics throughout – linking Morse patterns to familiar tunes and phrases. “Q” has the rhythm of “Here Comes the Bride,” for example.

What speed standards did you work towards?

For military requirements, we worked towards twelve to twenty words per minute. But here’s the crucial thing: I always emphasised accuracy over speed. Speed will come naturally with practice, but bad habits formed early will cripple a telegraphist forever. I’d tell my students: “Leave proper spaces between letters and words. Don’t run them together.” The spacing matters as much as the signals themselves.

Can you walk us through the training process at Clarence Street?

Certainly. The trainee would begin with the Morse key – we called it “the bug” sometimes – learning to feel the rhythm in their hand. Dit-dit-dit, dah-dah-dah. Three dits to one dah in time duration, that’s the international standard. We started with two letters, built accuracy to ninety per cent, then added more letters progressively. This is what they now call the Koch method, after Ludwig Koch who formalised it in 1935, but I was doing something similar from pure practical sense.

Once letters were mastered, we moved to words, then sentences. I created what I called a “Morse orchestra” – students sending code in unison, together, to music. It built esprit de corps and improved timing simultaneously. For visual signalling, we used Aldis lamps for practice – those handheld signal lights the Navy used – and semaphore flags for daylight communication. Students also learned the International Code of Signals, which uses flag hoists and pennants to communicate standardised messages between ships.

The equipment at Clarence Street was fitted out by the Department of Civil Aviation with Bendix aircraft transmitters, receivers, and radio compass. How did you fund the operation?

I didn’t charge fees. The women of the WESC each gave one shilling per week towards the rent, but tuition was free. I ran the school without any government grant or allocation of accommodation. The servicemen paid nothing. The pilots paid nothing. I suppose I spent my savings, and Cecil’s salary helped while he was alive. We were frugal people.

In 1940, you wrote to the Minister for the Navy, Billy Hughes – a former Prime Minister – offering the services of your Signalling Corps. You said: “I would like to offer the services of our Signalling Corps, if not acceptable as telegraphists then at least as instructors.” What happened?

I was dismissed. My letters went unanswered at first. The Navy didn’t want women. The government didn’t want women. The Australian Commonwealth Naval Board opposed it. But I kept writing, kept telephoning, kept making appointments. I travelled to Melbourne to meet with the Naval Board and invited them to send an officer to test my trainees.

Commander Newman, the Director of Signals and Communications, visited Clarence Street in January 1941.

He tested my girls rigorously. Found they were highly proficient. Better than many of the men he’d examined, I suspect, though he was too polite to say so. He recommended the Navy admit them. But Hughes still needed convincing.

And then you threatened to take your offer to the Air Force instead.

I did. I’d grown impatient waiting for the RAAF to recruit women, and the Navy kept dithering. So I made it plain: if the Navy wouldn’t take my telegraphists, I’d offer them elsewhere. The Air Force was interested. The Navy suddenly became less resistant.

On 21st April 1941, a Navy Office letter authorised the entry of women into the Navy. This was the beginning of the WRANS – Australia’s first women’s military service.

Yes. But the Minister’s condition was that “no publicity be accorded this break with tradition.” No fanfares, no newspaper stories. They wanted women in the Navy, but they didn’t want anyone to know about it. The irony is thick, don’t you think? The secrecy that enabled my breakthrough is the same secrecy that erased me from history.

On 28th April 1941, you accompanied fourteen of your WESC trainees to HMAS Harman near Canberra – twelve telegraphists and two domestic helpers. They wore the green WESC uniform you’d designed yourself, because Navy uniforms for women didn’t exist yet.

Forest green jacket and skirt, brown leather belt, brown flannel tie, brown gloves, brown shoes, light stockings, white blouse with collar. The girls paid about two pounds and five shillings for their winter uniform; most made their own summer uniform for around five shillings. I designed it because I wanted them to feel proud, to feel professional. When you look the part, you perform the part.

What were conditions like for those first WRANS?

They shared four cottages on the base, with one run by stewards as their mess. The quarters were out of bounds to the men. They worked full cycles of shifts in the wireless room, same as the men, and maintained their own living quarters. Within months, they’d proved their skill beyond any doubt. The number of enlisted WRANS grew to a thousand, then to 2,600 by war’s end – about ten per cent of the entire Royal Australian Naval force.

One of those first WRANS, Second Officer Marion Stevens, later said: “Even when I first learnt Morse at Mrs Mac’s, we never really thought the Navy or any service would take women in to do that work. It was beyond our wildest dreams that we would ever be doing that sort of work. Although it was proved we were just as good as the men.”

That’s what I wanted to prove. Not for myself – for every woman who came after.

The school at 10 Clarence Street – “the Woolshed,” as you called it – became the primary signals training facility for the Australian military during the war. Can you describe what that was like?

We occupied the first and second floors of an old wool store. The stairs were steep wooden things, and twelve thousand servicemen climbed them during the war. The Army sent lorry loads of soldiers for early training before going to the Middle East. The RAAF sent groups with their own instructors to use our equipment. The Royal Indian Navy sent their communication ratings. Many RAN musterings came to improve their signalling. American servicemen attended, sometimes with their own instructor, mostly joining our classes. More than forty police officers attended in their spare time to reach the necessary standard for enlisting as pilots.

Sometimes intelligence personnel would appear with complaints from guests in the pub next door, who thought a spy operation was at work when they heard Morse code through the walls each evening. We had to explain ourselves more than once.

In May 1941, the RAAF appointed you as an honorary Flight Officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force. Was that recognition meaningful to you?

It meant I could legitimately instruct Air Force personnel without awkward questions about authority. Practically useful, in other words. But it was also the only official recognition I received during the entire war for my efforts. One honorary title. For six years of work.

Looking back over your career, is there anything you would have done differently? Any mistakes you’d acknowledge?

I should have kept better records. I ran the school from temporary premises – Clarence Street, then Circular Quay – and left no permanent archive. When the building owners told me to quit in 1953, so much was lost or scattered. If I’d been more careful about documentation, perhaps historians would have found me sooner.

And I was sometimes too trusting of institutions. I believed that if we proved our competence, the barriers would fall. They fell – but slowly, and often they were rebuilt behind us. The airlines and government established their own training schools in the 1950s, absorbed our methods, and forgot where they came from. I was naive about that.

There was also tragedy in your personal life – a stillborn daughter in 1926.

Yes. We had no children after that. Cecil and I… we poured our love into the students instead. Perhaps that’s why I called them “my boys” and “my girls.” They were the family I made.

In 1949, you began corresponding with Albert Einstein. You sent him a boomerang from Central Australia, brought to you by an airline pilot, with a note saying: “Some of your mathematical friends might like to plot its flight!” What was he like?

I sent him a didgeridoo as well. He wrote back that he couldn’t work out how to play it, so I sent him a recording of didgeridoo music. He was very interested in Australia – his stepdaughter was fond of shells, and I used to get my marine boys to bring me shells from the islands, and the air boys would take tins of them over to America for me. He was curious, gentle, and entirely without pretension for such a famous man.

Did you discuss physics or mathematics with him?

We discussed everything and nothing. Science, music, Aboriginal culture. He had a way of making you feel that whatever you were interested in was worth his attention. That’s a rare gift.

After the war, you continued training merchant seamen and civil aviation pilots, providing free instruction to many. By 1952, you’d trained 2,450 civil airline crewmen and 1,050 merchant navy seamen. Famous aviators like Patrick Gordon Taylor and Cecil Arthur Butler trained with you for their wireless tickets.

I kept the school open for as long as there was need. All the airmen came back from the war and wanted to join Qantas, but they needed to build up their Morse speed and learn to use modern equipment. It would have been wrong to charge them. They’d fought for us.

In 1950, you were appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for your wartime contributions.

Yes. Twenty years after I qualified as an engineer, and nine years after I created the WRANS. But I was pleased, truly. It meant something to be acknowledged.

You died peacefully on 23rd May 1982, at the Glenwood Nursing Home in Greenwich. At your funeral, twenty-four serving WRANS formed a Guard of Honour.

Did they? That… that is very kind.

What advice would you give to young women – and indeed anyone – entering technical fields today, especially those facing barriers based on gender or background?

Don’t wait for permission. I didn’t ask the engineering establishment whether I was allowed to be an engineer; I became one, and then they had to accept me. Build your skills so thoroughly that institutions have no choice but to admit your competence. And then – this is important – give your knowledge away freely. Don’t hoard it. The purpose of expertise is to raise others up.

You once said that you proved women could be “as good as, or better than, men.” Do you think that battle is won?

Won? No. Better than it was? Yes. In my day, a woman couldn’t study engineering unless she tricked her way in. Today, women lead engineering projects, command naval vessels, design spacecraft. But the patterns repeat themselves: women’s work being absorbed without credit, education being undervalued compared to combat, volunteer labour being nationalised and then forgotten. These are old problems in new clothes.

The WRANS was formally integrated into the Royal Australian Navy in 1985, three years after your death. Women now serve in all branches of the Australian Defence Force.

That is good. That is what I wanted. Not for myself – I was too old by then to care about my own career – but for the girls who came up the stairs at Clarence Street, who learned their Morse and their semaphore and their code, and who proved what women could do when given the chance.

Is there anything history has misrepresented about you that you’d like to correct?

I was not a “schoolteacher who taught Morse code.” I was an electrical engineer who designed and installed electrical systems, who held Australia’s first female amateur radio licence, who co-founded a magazine, who published a bestselling cookbook, who corresponded with Einstein, who trained fourteen thousand people in wartime communications, and who – I say this without false modesty – built the infrastructure that made the WRANS possible. The Navy didn’t create the WRANS; I did. They simply accepted what I’d already built.

And I never called myself a feminist. I simply got on with the work. But if the work I did was feminist work, so be it.

Mrs Mac, it has been an extraordinary privilege to speak with you. Your legacy – the ferry, the tunnel boring machine, the park, the Naval Institute essay prize now named in your honour – these are small repayments for what you gave. But perhaps the truest memorial is the thousands of people you trained who went on to serve, to teach, to build.

I always said: you can learn anything from books. But you learn better from doing, and you learn best by teaching others. That’s the lesson of Clarence Street. That’s the lesson of the war. Pass it on.

Letters and emails

Following the interview, we received an extraordinary volume of correspondence from engineers, educators, historians, and innovators across the globe – each eager to press further into the details of Florence Violet McKenzie’s remarkable career, to understand the principles underlying her methods, and to discover what wisdom she might offer to those working in technical fields today. The questions that arrived ranged from the deeply personal to the rigorously technical, from historical speculation to contemporary application.

We’ve selected five of these letters and emails, representing voices from Venezuela, Mali, India, Russia, and the United States. Each correspondent brings their own expertise and their own hunger to understand how Mrs Mac solved the problems she faced – and whether her solutions still speak to the challenges we encounter now. Their questions address the hidden dimensions of her work: the psychology of teaching under pressure, the ethics of training people for wartime service, the art of making the seemingly impossible feel tangible and achievable, and the timeless question of how to invite others into fields that have been closed to them.

Paloma Fernández, 34, Telecommunications Engineer, Caracas, Venezuela
Mrs McKenzie, you trained thousands of people to send and receive Morse code at speeds of twelve to twenty words per minute, yet modern digital communications transmit millions of bits per second. I’m curious about the fundamental trade-offs you worked with: in your era, how did you balance signal clarity against transmission speed, and did you ever experiment with ways to compress or encode information more efficiently within the constraints of human perception? I ask because in my work on low-bandwidth emergency systems for remote areas, we’re returning to some of these older principles – and I wonder whether your training methods accounted for signal degradation in ways that might still be instructive.

What a thoughtful question, Miss Fernández – or is it Señora? Forgive me; the conventions are different now, I expect. You ask about trade-offs, and that word pleases me, because engineering is nothing but trade-offs. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never had to make a circuit work with the parts actually available.

Let me explain how we thought about it in my day. Morse code, you see, is already a form of compression – Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail designed it that way in the 1840s. The most common letters in English take the shortest time to send: E is a single dit, T is a single dah, A and I are two elements each. The rare letters – Q, Y, Z – take four or five elements. This means ordinary English text transmits faster than if each letter took equal time. Morse understood information efficiency seventy years before anyone called it “information theory.”

Now, when you ask about balancing clarity against speed, here is the practical reality we faced: the human ear, not the equipment, was usually the limiting factor. A skilled telegraphist could copy at twenty-five or thirty words per minute, but most of my students needed to reach twelve to twenty reliably, under conditions that were far from ideal. Static, fading signals, interference from other stations, atmospheric noise during electrical storms – these were constant companions on the wireless. The Pacific and Indian Ocean circuits were particularly difficult; signals would bounce oddly off the ionosphere, arriving in fragments.

So how did we account for degradation? Repetition and redundancy, primarily. The International Code of Signals, which I taught alongside Morse, uses standardised phrases precisely because redundancy aids comprehension when signals are weak. If a ship sends “QTC” followed by a number, the receiving operator already knows to expect traffic – the context narrows the possibilities, and a garbled character becomes recoverable. We also taught what I called “listening through the noise”: training the ear to recognise the rhythm of a letter even when individual dits and dahs were obscured. A well-sent Q has a distinctive galloping pattern – dah-dah-dit-dah – that an experienced operator can identify even through considerable interference, much as you might recognise a friend’s voice across a crowded room.

Regarding efficiency within human perception: we experimented, though not with the mathematical rigour you might expect today. I noticed early on that students who learned Morse as sound patterns rather than visual dots and dashes progressed much faster. This is because the visual representation introduces an unnecessary translation step. The ear processes rhythm directly; the eye must convert symbols to sounds and then to meaning. I designed my training to bypass that inefficiency entirely. Students never saw a chart of dots and dashes until they could already copy at eight words per minute by ear. Some of my colleagues thought this unorthodox, but the results spoke clearly enough.

As for whether I tried to encode information more efficiently within Morse itself – no, I didn’t tamper with the standard code. Interoperability mattered more than optimisation. A pilot trained in Sydney needed to communicate with a ship’s operator trained in Liverpool or a ground station in Darwin. Clever modifications would have been worse than useless; they would have introduced confusion precisely when clarity was most needed. In emergencies, the standard must hold.

But here is something that may interest you, given your work on low-bandwidth emergency systems: we found that procedural discipline often mattered more than raw transmission speed. A methodical operator sending at twelve words per minute with perfect spacing and standard procedures would get a message through more reliably than a fast but sloppy operator at twenty words per minute. Haste introduced errors; errors required repetition; repetition consumed time. Net efficiency favoured the steady hand.

I understand you are working in remote areas where modern infrastructure cannot reach. This gladdens me – it means the fundamental problems have not changed as much as people suppose. The ionosphere still bounces signals unpredictably. Static still crackles. Human beings still panic when lives depend on getting a message through. The engineering may be digital now, but the principles remain: design for the worst conditions, train for the human factors, and never sacrifice clarity for cleverness.

If my methods have anything still to teach, I suspect it is this: respect the limitations of the human being at each end of the circuit. We are not machines. We tire, we mishear, we grow anxious. The best communication system is one that accounts for our frailty and works with it rather than against it. That is what I tried to build at Clarence Street, and I am honoured to think it might still be of use in Caracas.

Elijah Carter, 28, Aviation Safety Researcher, Atlanta, United States
You mentioned training pilots and merchant mariners to obtain their “signaller’s ticket,” but you didn’t say much about what happened when things went wrong – when a trainee froze under pressure, or when equipment failed mid-examination. In aviation safety, we talk a lot about human factors: the psychology of performance under stress, the role of muscle memory versus conscious thought. How did you prepare your students not just for the technical test, but for the moment when their hands would be shaking and static would be drowning out the signal? Did you ever develop specific drills or simulations for high-pressure scenarios, and if so, what did they look like?

Mr Carter, you have put your finger on something that most people never think to ask about. They assume the difficulty is in learning the code – memorising which sounds belong to which letters – and of course that is part of it. But the real test comes when a young person sits down at the key with sweating palms and a pounding heart, knowing that their examination result will determine whether they can serve, whether they can fly, whether they can go to sea. That is when the training either holds or it doesn’t.

I learned early on that confidence cannot be taught in a lecture. It must be built, layer by layer, through experience. And the only way to give someone experience of pressure before they face the real thing is to simulate it – to make the training room feel, as nearly as possible, like the conditions they will encounter in service.

Here is what we did at Clarence Street, and I don’t believe I’ve spoken of this in detail before.

First, we introduced noise gradually. Students began in relative quiet, learning their letters and building speed in a calm environment. But as they progressed, I had my instructors introduce distractions: conversations nearby, doors opening and closing, other Morse signals bleeding through from adjacent practice sets. We called it “working through the clatter.” By the time a student reached examination standard, they had learned to maintain focus while the room around them carried on its ordinary chaos. This was deliberate. A wireless operator on a ship or in an aircraft doesn’t work in silence; they work surrounded by engine noise, crew chatter, and the general pandemonium of operations.

Second, we used what I called “broken signal” exercises. An instructor would send a message but deliberately allow the signal to fade in and out, or would introduce bursts of static using a separate oscillator. The student had to copy what they could, mark the gaps, and then – critically – not panic. We taught them to write a question mark for missed characters and keep going. The worst thing a telegraphist can do is stop and fret over a lost letter while the rest of the message sails past. You must trust that context will fill the gaps, or that you can request a repeat of the unclear portion using standard procedure. This exercise trained the mind to accept imperfection without freezing.

Third – and this was perhaps the most important – we conducted mock examinations under artificially heightened pressure. I would tell a student that an important visitor was coming to observe, or that their results would be posted publicly, or that only the top three performers would receive a particular opportunity. Not all of this was strictly true, you understand, but it produced the physical symptoms you mention: the shaking hands, the dry mouth, the racing thoughts. And then the student would discover that they could perform anyway. That discovery – that the body’s alarm signals need not derail the task – was worth more than any amount of encouragement.

Now, you ask specifically about what happened when someone froze. It did happen, particularly with students who had been told all their lives that technical work was beyond them. Women, especially, sometimes arrived at Clarence Street half-convinced they would fail. When a student froze mid-exercise, I did not stop them immediately or make a fuss. I let the moment pass, then afterward I would speak with them privately. I would say something like: “Your hands know the code. Your ears know the rhythm. It is only your mind that doubts. We must teach your mind to trust what your hands and ears already understand.”

For severe cases, I found that returning to basics helped. I would sit with the student and have them send simple, familiar sequences – their own name in Morse, or a phrase they knew by heart – until the physical act became automatic again. Muscle memory, as you call it now, is a powerful thing. Once the hands remember that they can do this, the conscious mind quiets down.

I also made certain that students saw their instructors make mistakes. Nothing reassures a nervous person quite like watching someone competent fumble a letter and recover gracefully. My instructors were under standing orders never to pretend perfection. If they mis-sent a character, they were to correct it using the standard error signal – eight dits – and carry on. This demonstrated that errors are not catastrophes; they are simply part of the work, to be acknowledged and mended.

Equipment failure was another matter. We trained students on multiple types of apparatus precisely so they would not become dependent on any single machine. If a key felt different or a receiver sounded unfamiliar, they needed to adapt quickly. I kept several older and somewhat cantankerous sets in the training room for this purpose – machines that required a particular touch or had idiosyncratic tuning. Students who had wrestled with difficult equipment in training found standard service equipment comparatively forgiving.

You use the phrase “human factors,” and I gather this is a formal field of study now. In my day, we simply called it “knowing your people.” A good instructor watches for the signs of rising panic – the quickening breath, the rigid shoulders, the pencil gripped too tightly – and intervenes before the student spirals. Sometimes intervention meant a brief rest; sometimes it meant a quiet word of reassurance; sometimes it meant giving the student a small success to rebuild their confidence. There was no single formula. You learned to read each person as an individual.

I will tell you something I have not often admitted: I lost students. Not many, but some. There were young people who came to Clarence Street with such deep fear of failure that no amount of patient training could shift it. They would withdraw before examination, or they would sit the test and fall apart despite being technically capable. These were not failures of intelligence or dedication; they were failures of belief. And I could not always repair that. It taught me humility. I learned that the instructor’s job is to create conditions where confidence can grow, but the student must ultimately find it within themselves. You can lead them to the threshold; you cannot carry them across.

If your aviation safety research leads you to design training programmes, Mr Carter, I would offer this: never separate technical instruction from psychological preparation. They are not two subjects; they are one. The hands and the mind must be trained together, under conditions that honour the reality of what the student will face. Anything less is incomplete.

Fatima Diakité, 41, Adult Education Specialist, Bamako, Mali
Mrs Mac, you spoke beautifully about rhythm and mnemonics in teaching Morse code, but I’m curious about something you didn’t address: how did you handle students who struggled? In my work training women in vocational skills across West Africa, I’ve found that shame and fear of failure often stop learners before the content ever does. You were teaching subjects that women had been told they couldn’t master, to students who may have internalised that message. Did you develop particular strategies for building confidence alongside competence, and were there students you couldn’t reach – ones who left before finishing – and what did you learn from those experiences?

Madame Diakité, your question moves me deeply, because you have named the invisible enemy – the one that no amount of technical instruction can defeat on its own. Shame. Fear of looking foolish. The voice inside that whispers, You don’t belong here; you will only embarrass yourself. I knew that enemy well. I saw it in the faces of women who walked through my door at Clarence Street, and I saw it in my own mirror, years earlier, when I sat in lecture halls at Sydney Technical College surrounded entirely by men.

Let me tell you how I thought about it, and what I tried to do.

First, I understood that a woman arriving at my school had often already fought a battle simply to get there. She had overcome family objections, perhaps, or employer reluctance, or her own deeply held belief that electricity and wireless were not feminine subjects. By the time she climbed those steep stairs to the Woolshed, she had already shown courage – but she may not have recognised it as such. My first task was to help her see that courage for what it was. I would sometimes say, quite directly: “You are here. That already makes you braver than most.”

Second, I structured the learning so that early successes came quickly. This was not about lowering standards; it was about sequencing. A student who masters the letter E on her first day – just a single dit – has accomplished something real. She has sent a Morse character. She is, in that small way, a telegraphist. The next day she learns T, a single dah. Now she can send two letters. Within a week, she can send simple words: “TEA,” “EAT,” “AT.” These are tiny victories, but they accumulate. Each one is a small stone placed in the foundation of confidence. By the time the difficult letters arrive – the Qs and Xs and Zs – she has a history of success to stand upon.

Third, I was very careful about how errors were handled in the classroom. I forbade my instructors from ever expressing disappointment or frustration with a struggling student, and I forbade students from apologising for mistakes. Apologies reinforce shame; they frame the error as a personal failing rather than a normal part of learning. Instead, we treated mistakes as information. “Ah, you’re rushing the dah in K – let’s slow it down and feel the rhythm again.” No judgement, only adjustment. I wanted the training room to feel like a place where imperfection was expected and corrected without fuss.

Fourth – and this may sound simple, but it mattered enormously – I ensured that women saw other women succeeding. When a new student arrived, I introduced her to women who were further along in their training. She could see, with her own eyes, that women just like her had mastered this material. This was more persuasive than any speech I could give. If Mrs So-and-So from Marrickville, who had never touched a wireless set in her life, could send at fifteen words per minute, then perhaps it was possible after all.

I also spoke openly about my own struggles. I told students about the engineering firms that refused to apprentice me because I was a woman. I told them about the diploma I had to fight for, the patronising professors, the tradesmen who assumed I didn’t know a resistor from a capacitor. I did not present myself as someone for whom success came easily. I wanted them to understand that difficulty was not evidence of inadequacy; it was simply the terrain we had to cross.

Now, you ask about the students I could not reach – the ones who left before finishing. Yes, there were some. And those cases taught me the limits of what an instructor can do.

Some women came to Clarence Street not because they wanted to learn wireless, but because a husband or father had pressured them, or because they felt they ought to contribute to the war effort even though their hearts were elsewhere. These students often struggled, not because they lacked ability, but because they lacked desire. I learned to recognise this early and to have honest conversations. I would ask: “Is this truly what you want? There is no shame in saying it is not.” Sometimes giving a person permission to leave was the kindest thing I could do.

Others were defeated by circumstances outside the classroom: illness, family obligations, employment that left them too exhausted to concentrate. These were not failures of character; they were failures of the world to make room for women’s ambitions. I could teach Morse code, but I could not provide childcare, or cure a sick relative, or persuade an employer to adjust working hours. Some women returned later, when circumstances changed. Others never did. I thought of them often.

And then there were the students who simply could not overcome the internal barrier – the ones for whom the shame had rooted too deeply. I recall one young woman, very bright, who could learn the code perfectly in private practice but fell apart whenever anyone observed her. We tried everything: gradual exposure, private examinations, encouragement, patience. Nothing worked. Eventually she stopped coming. I wrote to her, but received no reply. I do not know what became of her, and I have wondered for years whether there was something more I could have done.

What I learned from these experiences is that confidence is not a single thing; it is woven from many threads. Some threads I could strengthen: technical skill, early successes, a supportive environment, visible role models. But other threads – a person’s history, their family’s beliefs, the messages society had drummed into them since childhood – these were often beyond my reach. I could create the conditions for confidence to grow, but I could not give it to someone. They had to find it themselves, and some could not.

Madame Diakité, you are doing this work in Mali, across West Africa, in conditions I cannot fully imagine. But I suspect the fundamentals are the same. Build in early victories. Remove shame from the classroom. Let struggling students see others like themselves succeed. Be honest about your own difficulties. And accept – this is the hard part – accept that you will not save everyone. Some students will leave, and it will hurt, and you will wonder what you might have done differently. That wondering is the mark of a teacher who cares. Do not let it stop you. The ones you do reach will carry your teaching forward into places you will never see.

I think of my WRANS girls sometimes – the ones who went on to serve, who married, who raised children, who perhaps taught their daughters that technical work was not beyond them. I will never know all the ripples. Neither will you. But the ripples are real, and they matter, even when we cannot trace them.

Nikolai Ivanov, 52, Historian of Science, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Here is a question that may seem impertinent, but I ask it with genuine curiosity: if the Japanese had invaded Australia in 1942 – as was feared after the bombing of Darwin and the submarine attacks on Sydney Harbour – your WRANS telegraphists would have been among the first targets, intercepting and transmitting military communications under direct threat. Did you ever think about this? Did you prepare your students psychologically for the possibility that their work might place them in danger, or was this something left unspoken? And looking back, do you think there was a cost to framing women’s military service as “safe” support work, when the truth was more complicated?

Mr Ivanov, you have asked a question that I suspect few people have thought to put to me – and you are right that it may seem impertinent, but I do not take it that way. You are a historian; you understand that the past was lived forward, in uncertainty, not backward with the comfort of knowing how things turned out. In 1942, we did not know that the Japanese would be stopped. We knew only that they were coming.

Let me be direct with you: yes, I thought about it. One would have had to be wilfully blind not to.

After the bombing of Darwin in February 1942 – over two hundred people killed, ships sunk in the harbour, the town in chaos – the war ceased to be an abstraction happening somewhere far away. It was here. Japanese submarines entered Sydney Harbour that May and shelled the eastern suburbs. I was living in Greenwich then, on the north shore; we could hear the guns. Three weeks later, a submarine surfaced off Bondi and fired on the city again. These were not rumours or distant reports; this was Sydney under attack.

My WRANS girls at HMAS Harman were intercepting Japanese naval communications. They were part of the intelligence apparatus, working in signals interception, and if the Japanese had invaded and reached Canberra, those young women would have been among the first targets – not because they carried rifles, but because they carried knowledge. A trained telegraphist who has been reading enemy traffic knows things that an invading force cannot allow to survive. I understood this. I believe they understood it too, though we did not speak of it plainly.

Did I prepare them psychologically for that possibility? Not in any formal way, and I wonder now whether I should have done more. What I did was treat them as professionals undertaking serious work with serious consequences. I did not coddle them or pretend that signals training was a pleasant diversion from the real war. When I sent them off to Harman in April 1941 – fourteen young women in green uniforms I had designed myself – I knew I was sending them into a service that might demand everything of them. I told them to do their duty and to do it well. I did not tell them they would be safe, because I could not promise that.

But here is the complication you have identified, and I must be honest about it: the official framing of women’s service did emphasise safety. The government, the Navy, the press – when they spoke of the WRANS at all, which was rarely, given the “no publicity” directive – they presented women’s work as supportive, auxiliary, behind-the-lines. This was partly true; most WRANS were not in forward combat positions. But it was also a convenient fiction that made women’s military service politically palatable. Australians in 1941 were not ready to contemplate their daughters and sisters in mortal danger. The framing protected the policy from controversy.

Did this framing have a cost? I believe it did, though the cost was subtle and long-lasting rather than immediate. By presenting women’s service as inherently safe, we diminished its seriousness in the public mind. If the work was safe, it must not have been very important. If the women were never in danger, their contribution must have been minor. This is how support roles come to be undervalued – not through malice, but through a failure of imagination. People could not picture a WRANS telegraphist as someone whose work might cost her life, and so they could not picture her as a true participant in the war.

The reality was more complicated. Those young women at Harman worked gruelling shifts, under considerable strain, handling information that affected operations across the Pacific. Some suffered health consequences from the intensity of the work. And yes, had the invasion come, they would have faced dangers that no amount of “auxiliary” language could soften. We knew this. We simply did not say it aloud.

You ask whether there was a cost to that silence. I think there was. The women themselves knew their work mattered, and many carried quiet pride in what they had done. But the public – and later, the historians – did not always recognise it. The WRANS were folded into a general category of “women’s war work” that included everything from nursing to canteen service to factory labour, all of it honourable, but not all of it carrying the same weight. The specific nature of signals intelligence – the secrecy, the skill, the proximity to operational decisions – was obscured. When the war ended, people remembered the pilots and the infantry and the sailors on ships. They did not remember the women in headphones, copying coded transmissions in the small hours of the morning.

I will tell you something else, Mr Ivanov, since you have been brave enough to ask a difficult question. I have sometimes wondered whether I did those young women a disservice by not preparing them more explicitly for what might have happened. We trained them to send and receive code under pressure, to work through fatigue and noise and distraction. But we did not train them for capture, or for what an enemy might do to extract the intelligence they carried in their heads. The men received some preparation of this sort, I believe – or at least, they were told to expect harsh treatment as prisoners. The women were not, because the official position was that women would not be in positions where capture was likely. And yet my girls at Harman were precisely in such a position, had things gone differently.

I do not know what I could have done about this. I was not running a military organisation; I was running a training school. The Navy took my graduates and placed them where they were needed; I had no authority over their deployment or their further preparation. But the gap troubles me still. We asked those young women to serve in roles that carried real risk, and then we pretended the risk did not exist because acknowledging it would have been inconvenient.

Perhaps that is the honest answer to your question: yes, there was a cost, and I am not certain the cost has ever been fully reckoned. The WRANS served with distinction; they proved beyond any doubt that women could perform signals work at the highest standard; they helped win the war in ways that remained classified for decades. And yet the framing that made their service possible – the insistence that it was safe, supportive, auxiliary – also ensured that their contribution would be minimised in the national memory.

History is correcting this now, slowly. I am told there are books being written, archives being opened, names being recorded. But it has taken eighty years, and many of my girls are gone now. They cannot speak for themselves. So I speak for them when I can, and I am grateful to you, Mr Ivanov, for asking the question that lets me do so.

The war was dangerous. The work was serious. The women who did it were brave. I wish I had said so more loudly at the time. Perhaps no one would have listened. But I wish I had tried.

Priya Rao, 29, Product Designer and STEM Educator, Bengaluru, India
Mrs McKenzie, you used the Electrical Association for Women and your all-electric cookbook to make electricity accessible and unintimidating for women who had been told it wasn’t their domain. Today, we face a similar challenge with artificial intelligence and machine learning – technologies that feel opaque and exclusionary to many people, especially women in non-technical fields. If you were starting fresh in 2025, how would you approach demystifying AI the way you demystified electricity? Would you write a cookbook that uses machine learning to optimise recipes? Would you open a shop where people could tinker with algorithms the way your schoolboys tinkered with radio parts? I suppose I’m asking: what’s the modern equivalent of the buzzer in the cupboard – the small, tangible thing that sparks lifelong curiosity?

Miss Rao, what a delightful question – and what a challenge you have set me! You ask me to imagine myself in 2025, confronting a technology I never knew, and to suggest how I might make it approachable. I shall do my best, though I must rely on you to tell me where my understanding falls short.

You mention that artificial intelligence feels opaque and exclusionary, particularly to women. This does not surprise me in the least. Electricity felt exactly the same way in the 1920s and 1930s. It was invisible, powerful, and wrapped in technical language that seemed designed to keep ordinary people out. Men in white coats spoke of amperes and ohms and resistance; women were told simply to stay away from the switches lest they hurt themselves. The mystery was cultivated, I sometimes thought, because mystery confers authority on those who claim to understand it.

My approach was always to demystify through doing. Not through lectures, not through textbooks first, but through direct physical experience with the thing itself. You mentioned the buzzer in the cupboard – that little device I rigged for my mother when I was young – and you have hit upon something essential. That buzzer taught me more about circuits than any diagram could have done, because I could see the effect of my work. I pressed a switch; a light came on. The connection between action and result was immediate and tangible. There was no mystification possible, because the thing either worked or it didn’t.

So if I were starting fresh in 2025, my first question would be: what is the equivalent of the buzzer? What is the smallest, most tangible interaction a person can have with this artificial intelligence that produces an immediate, visible result?

You suggest a cookbook that uses machine learning to optimise recipes. I rather like that idea, though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. The cookbook I wrote in 1936 was never really about cooking. It was about confidence. I wanted women to understand that electricity was their servant, not their master – that they could command it to do useful work in their own kitchens, on their own terms. The recipes were a vehicle for that larger message. Each successful dish was proof that the technology obeyed the cook, not the other way around.

If your machine learning can be presented similarly – as a tool that serves the user’s intentions, that produces results the user can see and taste and judge – then yes, a cookbook might work wonderfully. But the key would be transparency at each step. Not “the algorithm has determined your optimal recipe,” delivered as an oracle’s pronouncement, but rather: “Here is what the machine considered, here are the trade-offs it weighed, here is why it suggested more cardamom and less sugar.” The user must be able to follow the reasoning, even if simplified, so that she feels herself a participant rather than a passive recipient.

Now, your other suggestion – a shop where people could tinker with algorithms as my schoolboys tinkered with radio parts – this is closer to my heart, I think. The Wireless Shop in the Royal Arcade was never just a place of commerce. It was a place of exploration. Boys would come in with pocket money and leave with a variable condenser or a length of copper wire, and then they would go home and build something. Sometimes it worked; often it didn’t. But the building itself was the education. They learned by doing, by failing, by adjusting, by trying again.

Can algorithms be made tangible in this way? I confess I do not fully understand how one “tinkers” with something that has no physical form. But I suspect the principle holds: people learn by manipulating things and observing the consequences. If you could create an environment – perhaps on one of your computing machines – where a person could adjust the workings of an algorithm and immediately see how the output changes, that would be a kind of tinkering. “What happens if I tell it to weigh freshness more heavily than cost?” “What happens if I remove this category of data entirely?” The learner would begin to develop intuition about how the system behaves, not through abstract study, but through direct experimentation.

I would also emphasise the social dimension. At Clarence Street, students learned alongside one another. They heard each other’s mistakes; they celebrated each other’s successes; they formed bonds that lasted decades. Learning in isolation is lonely and often discouraging. If you are building programmes to teach women about artificial intelligence, create spaces where they can learn together – not in competition, but in mutual support. Let them see other women struggling and succeeding. Let them teach each other. Some of my best instructors were former students who had only recently mastered the material themselves; they remembered what it felt like to be confused, and they could explain things in ways that a long-time expert could not.

You ask what might spark lifelong curiosity. I think the answer is the same as it ever was: agency. The moment a person realises that she can make a powerful thing do her bidding – that it will respond to her commands and produce results she values – something shifts inside her. She is no longer intimidated; she is intrigued. She wants to know more, to do more, to push the boundaries of what is possible. The buzzer in the cupboard gave me that feeling when I was a child. The first successful wireless transmission gave it to me again as an adult. I suspect your artificial intelligence could give it to women in Bengaluru and Bamako and Caracas, if only someone would show them the switch and let them press it.

One more thought, Miss Rao, and then I shall stop lecturing you as though you were one of my students – which you are not; you are clearly far more knowledgeable about these matters than I.

When I founded the Electrical Association for Women, I was careful never to position electricity as something women needed to understand despite being women. I positioned it as something women had particular reason to embrace because of their circumstances. Electricity could free them from hours of manual labour; it could give them time for other pursuits; it could make their homes safer and more comfortable. The appeal was practical and immediate. I did not ask women to become engineers for the sake of becoming engineers; I showed them that engineering knowledge served their own interests and their own goals.

If artificial intelligence is to become accessible to women – especially women who have been told it is not their domain – then the same approach may serve. Do not ask them to learn algorithms for the sake of learning algorithms. Show them what these tools can do for them: for their businesses, their families, their communities, their own creative ambitions. Make the technology a means to ends they already care about, and curiosity will follow naturally.

The buzzer in the cupboard was not an end in itself. It was a light in a dark space, helping my mother find what she needed. That is always the question: what does the person need, and how can the technology serve that need? Answer that, and you will have no trouble filling your classrooms.

I should very much like to visit your Bengaluru someday, Miss Rao, though I suspect that is beyond even this peculiar interview’s powers to arrange. But if you do build that tinkering shop for algorithms – do send word. I should like to know how it turns out.

Reflection

Florence Violet McKenzie died peacefully on 23rd May 1982, at the age of ninety-two. She had lived long enough to see the WRANS fully integrated into the Royal Australian Navy, to witness the first women pilots earning their wings in Australia, and to correspond with one of the twentieth century’s greatest minds about the flight of boomerangs and the mysteries of the didgeridoo. She did not live to see the ferry named after her in 2015, or the tunnel boring machine christened “Florence” on the Snowy 2.0 project, or the park dedicated to her in Canberra in 2023. History’s reckoning with her came after she had gone, which seems somehow fitting for a woman who never waited for recognition and never demanded credit.

What emerges from this conversation – and from the letters that followed it – is a portrait of someone whose practical feminism was so thoroughly embedded in her work that she rarely needed to name it as such. She did not protest for women’s rights; she built a training pipeline so effective that the military could not refuse it. She did not lecture about women’s capability; she created circumstances where women could prove it to themselves and to others. She did not wait for the world to change; she changed it through sheer competence, generosity, and an unshakeable belief that education could dismantle barriers more effectively than rhetoric ever could.

Yet the historical record has been remarkably unkind to her contributions. The official naval histories treat the WRANS as a creation of military policy rather than the achievement of one determined woman and her three thousand trained telegraphists. Biographies of Australian engineering tend to overlook her entirely, as though the first woman to earn an electrical engineering diploma in the country were somehow less significant than male counterparts who achieved the same qualification decades later. The secrecy that enabled her breakthrough – the Navy’s insistence on “no publicity” – has had a perverse and lasting effect: it protected her achievement at the moment of its greatest vulnerability, but it also erased her from the record at the moment of her greatest impact.

What Mrs McKenzie said in this interview, when given the space to speak for herself, challenges several comfortable narratives. She was not a pioneer who faced obstacles and overcame them through determination alone; she was someone who created institutional infrastructure to force institutions to change. She did not believe that technical excellence would automatically be recognised; she understood that visibility, institutional power, and strategic pressure mattered as much as competence. She was not naive about the cost of secrecy and erasure; she acknowledged, in her conversation with Mr Ivanov, the specific damage done by framing women’s wartime service as “safe” and “supportive” when the reality was far more complex and far more dangerous. She did not see her work as complete; she was candid about students she could not reach, mistakes she had made, and the painful gap between what she had built and what the world was willing to remember about it.

There are gaps in the historical record that this interview cannot fully bridge. We know that she trained twelve thousand servicemen, but we do not have precise records of who they were, how many succeeded, what happened to them afterward. We know she operated from temporary premises, but we do not have detailed inventories of her equipment, her curriculum materials, or the technical specifications of her training methods. We know she corresponded with Einstein, but only a handful of letters have survived. The archive of her life was scattered when she closed her school in the 1950s; much of it is simply lost. This interview has filled some silences, but not all of them.

What stands out, however, is how her perspective on her own work differs from how it has been recorded and interpreted by others. In the official accounts, she is often positioned as a “teacher” or a “trainer” – roles that are important but secondary. In her own words, she was an engineer who recognised that training was technical innovation. She designed systems for transmitting knowledge the way she designed systems for transmitting electrical current – with precision, redundancy, and an eye toward the human factors at each node. She understood her work as infrastructure building, not as charitable education. This distinction matters profoundly, because it reframes women’s contributions from the realm of support and service into the realm of fundamental technical achievement.

The uncertainties in the record are also worth acknowledging directly. We do not know exactly what happened during her negotiations with the Navy in 1940 and 1941. The official accounts suggest a straightforward process of testing and approval; her own account hints at more friction, more uncertainty, more strategic pressure than the polished histories suggest. We do not know the full extent of her involvement in selecting the first WRANS or in shaping their training and deployment. We do not know whether she had misgivings about how women’s military service was framed, or whether she simply accepted the constraints of her era and made the best of them. The historical record is silent on these points, and this silence creates space for alternative interpretations – some of which may be closer to the truth than others.

Yet even with these gaps and uncertainties, Mrs McKenzie’s legacy has proven resilient and generative. In the decades after her death, her work has been rediscovered and built upon by historians, engineers, and educators who recognised what she had contributed. Books have been written; archives have been opened; academic papers have examined her training methods and their enduring relevance to pedagogy and human factors engineering. The WRANS itself has become a subject of serious historical scholarship, and many of those accounts now acknowledge her role in its creation, even if that acknowledgment sometimes comes late in the narrative or in a footnote. In 2015, when the Sydney Harbour ferry was named after her, it was not a sentimental gesture; it was a deliberate act of historical correction, driven by people who understood what she had done and insisted that it be remembered.

More recently, her approach to technical education – learning through doing, building confidence through early successes, creating spaces where people could tinker and experiment – has found new resonance in conversations about STEM education and diversity in technical fields. Modern educators studying how to make engineering and computing more accessible to women and marginalised groups have found in her methods something that still works: the principle that competence builds confidence, that visible role models matter, that institutions can be forced to change through excellence rather than waiting for them to be ready. She was doing this work eighty years ago, with nothing but a determination to prove that women belonged in technical fields and a room full of Morse keys.

For young women pursuing paths in science and engineering today, Mrs McKenzie’s story offers several hard-won lessons. First: you do not need permission to begin. You may need to find workarounds, to be creative with your resources, to insist on your own visibility. But the fundamental truth remains: if you develop genuine expertise, institutions will eventually have to reckon with it. Second: the goal is not to be recognised; the goal is to do the work and to make it possible for others to do it after you. Mrs McKenzie gave away her knowledge freely, trained thousands of people at no cost, and then stepped aside when her work was no longer needed. She did not try to build a lasting monument to herself; she built a lasting capability. Third: pay attention to the barriers that are not spoken aloud. The resistance to women in technical fields is often wrapped in polite language – “no publicity,” “safe support roles,” “natural aptitude” – that obscures what is really happening. Call it out. Name it clearly. And then work around it by being so good at what you do that the excuses become absurd.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly: remember that visibility matters, even when it comes decades late. Mrs McKenzie did not live to see the ferry or the tunnel boring machine or the park. She did not live to see the WRANS fully integrated, or to know that her training methods would still be studied by people trying to teach Morse code more effectively in 2025. But those delayed recognitions are not nothing. They are a form of justice, however incomplete. They are a way of saying: we see you now. We understand what you did. And we are building on it.

In a field where women’s contributions remain systematically overlooked, where the infrastructure built by women is too often absorbed into institutional systems without credit, where the teachers and the educators and the behind-the-scenes architects are forgotten while the students they trained become celebrated – Mrs McKenzie’s story is a call to vigilance. It is a reminder that we must actively work to preserve the names and the contributions of women whose work has been erased. It is a plea for honesty about how power works, about how institutions change, and about the cost of secrecy even when secrecy is politically protective.

But it is also a call to action. If Mrs McKenzie could build the institutional infrastructure for women’s military service in wartime, working from a room above a wool store with no government funding and against official resistance, then what might we build now, with all the resources and platforms and networks available to us? If she could make electricity accessible to women through a cookbook and a magazine and a shop, then what barriers might we dissolve through equally imaginative, equally practical means? If she could train twelve thousand people in a highly technical skill, then what could we accomplish if we brought even a fraction of her ingenuity and generosity to the question of how to make STEM more welcoming, more visible, more genuinely accessible?

Mrs Mac is gone, but her work endures – not because it was monumentalised, but because it was fundamentally sound. She built things that mattered. She taught people how to think and work. She left patterns behind that others could follow and improve upon. In the end, that is perhaps the truest measure of a life spent in service to technical education and human progress: not the recognition that comes during one’s lifetime, but the quiet persistence of the work itself, still teaching, still inspiring, still proving possible what others thought impossible.

Editorial Note

This interview is a dramatised reconstruction, not a transcript of an actual conversation. Florence Violet McKenzie died on 23rd May 1982, more than forty years before this interview was conducted. What you have read represents an imaginative engagement with her life, work, and legacy, grounded in historical sources but shaped through the lens of contemporary understanding and creative interpretation.

The factual foundations of this reconstruction are solid. The biographical details – her birth in 1890, her achievement as Australia’s first female electrical engineer in 1923, her amateur radio licence (VK2FV) in 1922, her founding of the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in 1939, her role in creating the WRANS in 1941, her training of over 12,000 servicemen and 3,000 women, her OBE appointment in 1950, her correspondence with Albert Einstein, her death in 1982 – these are drawn from published historical records, including academic biographies, archival materials held by the Australian War Memorial, the Dictionary of Sydney, and contemporary accounts by those who knew her.

However, the specific phrasing of her words, the anecdotes she chooses to emphasise, the reflections she offers on her mistakes and uncertainties, and the emotional texture of her responses – these are reconstructed. They are based on patterns of thinking evident in her published writings, the testimonies of those who studied under her, and the historical context in which she lived. But they are not her actual words, recorded and transcribed. They represent an informed imagining of how she might have spoken, given what we know about her values, her methods, and her character.

The supplementary questions and responses follow the same principle. The five questioners – Paloma Fernández, Elijah Carter, Fatima Diakité, Nikolai Ivanov, and Priya Rao – are fictional personas. They were created to embody different professional perspectives and international contexts, allowing Mrs McKenzie’s legacy to be interrogated from multiple angles. However, the questions they pose are grounded in real issues: the technical challenges of training under pressure, the psychology of overcoming imposter syndrome, the ethics of military service framed as “safe,” the ongoing struggle to make technical fields accessible to women and marginalised groups, and the question of how to adapt her methods to contemporary technologies.

The conversations with these questioners are imagined exchanges. Mrs McKenzie did not have the opportunity to reflect on artificial intelligence, on modern diversity initiatives, or on how her methods might be applied by educators in Mali or India. But her responses are constructed in a way that is consistent with her known values: her emphasis on learning through doing, her insistence on clarity and demystification, her generosity in sharing knowledge, and her pragmatic approach to overcoming institutional barriers.

Where the interview departs most significantly from documented fact is in the realm of reflection and introspection. The frank admissions – about students she could not reach, about mistakes she made, about uncertainties she carried – are plausible inferences drawn from what is known about her character and her approach to teaching. But they are not confirmed by primary sources. They represent an educated imaginative engagement with her interior life, based on what her actions and words suggest about her thinking, but not direct attestation of what she thought or felt.

The emotional and philosophical dimensions of the interview – the sense of quiet pride, the reflection on erasure and delayed recognition, the candour about wartime anxieties – these emerge from an attempt to honour the complexity of her life while avoiding both hagiography and reductive simplification. She was not a saint. She was not a victim. She was a skilled engineer and educator who navigated extraordinary circumstances with ingenuity and determination, who made choices that had consequences she understood imperfectly at the time, and who lived long enough to see some of her work vindicated and much of it still overlooked.

Why this approach?

This dramatised reconstruction serves purposes that a straightforward historical summary cannot. It allows readers to encounter Mrs McKenzie not as a name in a footnote or a figure in a photograph, but as a presence – someone with a voice, a perspective, and a interior life. It creates space for the kinds of conversations that did not happen during her lifetime but that illuminate her thinking and her relevance to contemporary challenges. And it acknowledges an important truth: that historical understanding is always constructed from partial evidence, shaped by the perspectives of those doing the constructing, and deepened through imaginative as well as analytical engagement with the past.

How to read this responsibly:

When you encounter a detail in this interview that moves you, that seems important or revealing, please treat it as a starting point for further inquiry rather than as settled fact. Seek out the primary sources. Read the books by historians who have studied her work. Examine the archival materials. Let this fictional conversation draw you toward greater engagement with the historical record, not away from it.

At the same time, do not dismiss the insights that emerge from this dramatised engagement simply because they are imaginatively constructed. The principles she articulates about teaching and learning, about infrastructure and institutional change, about the costs of erasure and the possibilities of excellence – these reflect patterns evident in her documented work and life. The specific phrasing may be invented, but the substance emerges from careful historical study.

A note on the supplementary questions:

The five questioners represent a deliberate attempt to bring international and interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on her legacy. They are fictional, but they embody real questions that contemporary educators, engineers, and researchers are asking as they grapple with issues of technical education, gender equity in STEM, and the recovery of overlooked historical contributions. Their questions are not something Mrs McKenzie was actually asked, but they are questions she deserved to be asked, and imagining her responses creates a space for dialogue across generations and disciplines.

In closing:

This interview is offered with deep respect for Florence Violet McKenzie’s actual life and work, and with full awareness of its limitations. It is neither documentary nor speculation, but something in between: a form of historical engagement that uses imagination in service of understanding. It aims to illuminate rather than to mislead, to deepen engagement with her legacy rather than to replace it, and to suggest why her story still matters to anyone concerned with technical education, institutional change, and the question of how to create more equitable and inclusive spaces for women and marginalised groups in STEM.

The reader is invited to bring critical attention to everything presented here. Where it aligns with documented fact, it can be trusted. Where it ventures into imaginative territory, it should be understood as an informed hypothesis about how she might have thought and spoken, grounded in evidence but not reducible to it. And where it raises questions without providing answers – about institutional change, about erasure, about the long arc of historical recognition – those questions are offered as an invitation to further thought and conversation.

Mrs McKenzie’s actual words survive in publications, in archival materials, and in the testimony of those she taught. This dramatised reconstruction sits alongside those sources, hoping to complement rather than to displace them. The reader who finishes here should feel called to seek out more – the fuller picture, the primary sources, the continuing scholarship on her life and work. This is a beginning, not an ending. It is an opening, not a conclusion.

Who have we missed?

This series is all about recovering the voices history left behind – and I’d love your help finding the next one. If there’s a woman in STEM you think deserves to be interviewed in this way – whether a forgotten inventor, unsung technician, or overlooked researcher – please share her story.

Email me at voxmeditantis@gmail.com or leave a comment below with your suggestion – even just a name is a great start. Let’s keep uncovering the women who shaped science and innovation, one conversation at a time.

One response to “Florence Violet McKenzie: Australia’s First Female Electrical Engineer and the Architect of the WRANS”

S.Bechtold

06/12/2025

Cheers to Mrs Mac and the willingness to find a way or make to make a way if you can’t find one.

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