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

As you climbed the rickety stairs of an old woolshed at Sydney harbour in 1944, you would hear a thrum of clicks and buzzes. Rows of men and women in uniforms and headsets would be tapping away vigorously at small machines, under the careful watch of their young female trainers. Presiding over the cacophony was a tiny woman, known to everyone as 'Mrs Mac', one of Australia's wartime legends.

A smart girl from a poor mining town who loved to play with her father's tools, Violet McKenzie becam...