The Australian Women's Register

Kathleen Rachel Makinson, wool researcher and Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Textile Physics, speaks of her childhood in London and her inclinations towards science at school, winning a scholarship to Newnham College at University of Cambridge, her preference for physics, her interest in crystallography, how she might have continued at Cambridge in nuclear physics, partcipating in student politics in both communism and the Peace Movement, demonstrating in London against the invasion of Austria, becoming engaged to an Australian doing his doctorate at Cambridge; emigrating to Australia in 1939; work as a research assistant at the University of Sydney and her involvement in radar research during WWII; the difficulties for women applying for research positions during the War, how she ended up in wool research in CSIRO; how it was not possible to undertake doctorates in Australia during that period; returning to Cambridge in 1970; why CSIRO set up a Wool Physics Division; how her work contributed to efficiencies in wool shrinkage.