David Dufty - Radio Girl: The Story of the Extraordinary Mrs Mac, Pioneering Engineer and Wartime Legend

Florence Violet McKenzie should be a household name! This comprehensive retelling of her incredible and inspiring life is helping to make that so. Duftys new biography captures her unwavering dedication in the face of adversity and the sheer force and scope of her determination. Florence Violet McKenzie is one of my Australian touchstones, and I hope through this book she will be yours too!

Genevieve Bell

Distinguished Professor and Florence Violet McKenzie Chair

College of Engineering and Computer Science,

Australian National University

About the author

David Dufty has a PhD in psychology, and has worked as a social researcher at the University of Memphis, Newspoll, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. His book The Secret Code Breakers of Central Bureau won the 2017 Nib Military History Prize. He also wrote How to Build an Android: The true story of Philip K. Dick's robotic resurrection (published in the UK as Losing the Head of Philip K. Dick, and originally published in Australia as Lost in Transit: The strange story of the Philip K. Dick android).

First published in 2020

Copyright David Dufty 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

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Web:www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 665 4

eISBN 978 1 76087 416 2

Internal design by Post Pre-press Group

Set Palatino by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

Cover design: Nada Backovic

Cover photographs: Australian War Memorial, 136860 (top);Ex-WRANS Association (bottom)

To Jenny and Joan

CONTENTS

Before we begin, I have to tell you how this book came to be written.

In 2014, a retired spy suggested the idea to me, as we had a cup of tea in her living room. I was there to interview her about Australias code-breaking activities during World War II, a topic in which she was well versed. Incidentally, her life also would have made a cracking story, but unlike the one told here, it wont be published.

As the afternoon shadows lengthened, she changed the topic from wars and codes and long-lost friends. She said abruptly, You know, you should do something on Mrs Mac. I confessed that I had no idea who she was talking about.

She gave an enthusiastic potted summary of the deeds of Violet McKenzie, apparently nicknamed Mrs Mac by the thousands of young men and women who encountered her during the war. Shed had something to do with the WRANSthe Womens Royal Australian Naval Serviceand had trained lots of women in Morse code. At least, that seemed to be the gist.

I was deep in the throes of writing my book The Secret Code-Breakers of Central Bureau, and wasnt looking for a new project, but when I returned to Canberra I looked into the story of Mrs Mac, and discovered that she was tangentially related to my topic. It turned out that she trained the first women code-breakers in Australia (in signals, I should add, not in code-breaking as such), and that she personally persuaded the navy to set up the WRANS in the first place. That was intriguing. Who on earth talks a navy into establishing a new defence service?

The more I dug, the more nuggets popped to the surface. She was Australias first woman electrical engineer. She wrote a bestselling cookbook. She was an ABC presenter in its first year of existence. The list goes on and on, but Ill resist the temptation to tell you more, because these and other surprises await you in the pages that follow. As I explored the little nooks and alleyways of her life, new leads would turn up, suggesting yet more twisting backstreets of which I hadnt been aware.

My exploration of this fascinating womans life was helped at the start by the work of Catherine Freyne, a journalist who had investigated Mrs Mac several years earlier and had produced a documentary about her for Hindsight, a history show on ABC Radio National. Freynes work provided the pointers to the many directions one could go in exploring the life of this extraordinary woman.

Violet McKenzie made an appearance in my code-breaking book, in a chapter titled Mrs Mac and her Girls in Green. It is possibly the most talked-about chapter in the whole thing. When I gave presentations, I was somewhat nonplussed to find that many in the audience were more interested in Mrs Mac than in the code-breakers themselves, whose lives and works Id spent the previous five years piecing together. And when the Department of Veterans Affairs printed an extract of my book in their monthly magazine, they chose to publish the chapter about Mrs Mac. The message was unmistakable: there was something about Violet McKenzie that got people excited. She needed a book of her own.

It turned out that, while Iand most Australianshad not heard of Violet McKenzie, her memory had been kept alive to a fervent, almost fanatical degree by two separate subcultures: the women of the Ex-WRANS Association, and the men and women of the amateur radio community.

In 1987, the Ex-WRANS Association submitted an application for Violet McKenzie to be considered in a list of 200 great Australians for the bicentennial celebrations the following year. They were unsuccessful, but their work had a happy by-product, at least for me: in the process of writing the application, they had compiled an extensive portfolio of documents about her life. That portfolio was safely stored away in a cardboard box at the naval repository on Spectacle Island in Sydney Harbour, which is where I perused it 30 years later. After being escorted to Spectacle Island on a navy ferry, and while sorting through that lovingly compiled collection housed at the back of a dusty navy building, I was struck by an overwhelming sense that I was holding something important and beautiful that had been forgotten.

There was a time, now long gone, when Violet McKenzie was quite well known to the public. Luckily for me as a biographer, she was the subject of sporadic media attention over more than six decades, commencing with a 1920 feature in Sydneys The Sun newspaper titled Mademoiselle Edison.

When, in 2018, The Sydney Morning Herald printed my appeal to hear from people who had known Violet McKenzie (I threw caution to the wind and let them publish my phone number), I received calls over the next few weeks from people all over Australia, wanting to tell me their own stories about Mrs Mac. I visited many of them for in-person interviews. They spoke with admiration and awe, the most frequent descriptors of her being amazing, wonderful and marvellous. The closest anyone came to criticism was a veteran of the WRANS who described her as cunning, but only after having first sung her praises to the same extent as the others.