The 93-year-old Women's Australian Auxiliary Air Force veteran and retired Victorian school teacher said when she was a girl attending Presbyterian Ladies College in Croydon in the 1930s, the staff had been heavily leavened by spinsters of a certain age.

"Being horrible little girls, we thought 'they're on the shelf, what's the matter with them?'," she said. "If they did get engaged or married we were [usually] over the moon."

The reality was, the deaths of more than 60,000 young men in World War I had left a huge hole in an Australian population of just over five million.

"There just weren't enough men to go around," the Narrabundah resident told Fairfax.

Hooke also thinks of the women of her own generation who were widowed during World War II or, in later years, saw their husbands' lives cut short by injuries and illnesses brought about by their service.

"Every time I go to a Legacy meeting I look at all these women and I think, 'They're the victims of war'," The long-serving Legatee said.

"I wish we could just click our fingers and they could see their husbands standing next to them - even though they'd get a shock, in some cases.

"But it's not only here; it's everywhere, all over the world. It's not just on our side; it's on the other side as well."

Hooke, who was born at Burwood in 1923, is a member of "the greatest generation" and one of the tens of thousands of women who stepped up to help fill the manpower shortage that resulted from the recruitment of a citizen army almost a million strong to fight off Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.

Her father, David Thomas, grew up on a small farm near Forbes in NSW. His life changed when he won a scholarship to Sydney Grammar and then went on to study chemistry at Sydney University.

"Dad was a very clever chemist. But he died when I was 10; on my first day back at school," Hooke said. "He was the first person to synthesise thymol [a powerful antimicrobial compound used in antiseptics]. If he had lived through the war [when the stuff was manufactured by the tonne] we would have been millionaires."

Her mother Alice championed Hooke's push for an education, despite initial resistance from the pater familias.

"My father said: 'There's no point in educating girls; they are only going to grow up, get married and have children'. But my mother was a very clever woman and I ended up going to PLC, Croydon."

While the family had begun the Great Depression better placed than most, David Thomas' early death in 1934 left the household without a breadwinner.

Alice Thomas subdivided the family tennis court and built two semi-detached villas that were let out.

"You've heard the expression 'genteel poor'. Well that was us," Hooke said. "There was no widow's pension and women of my mother's generation had no training to do anything."

The family home was a regular port of call for the swaggies and other unemployed men.

"My mother always found a job for them," she said. "We kept chooks and she'd get them to look for eggs or to cut up wood for the fire.

"My mother would never have used the expression 'saving face' but it was saving face. When they finished their task she would give them a huge sandwich and a billy of tea. They'd earned it; it wasn't a donation."

Times were hard, financially and psychologically.

"There were people who would spend their day on the sand dunes at La Perouse. They included lawyers and doctors who would take their briefcases and pretend they were going to work. But there was no work.The unemployment rate was a third of the population and it was right across the board."

Despite an outward appearance of affluence, every penny was stretched as far as it would go in the Thomas household.

"You rarely got anything new and if you did it was about three sizes too big [so you would wear it out before you grew out of it]. Hand-me-downs is what you [usually] got."

After matriculation Hooke went to Sydney University in 1941.

"It never occurred to me not to want to go to," she said. "It would be like saying 'I don't want to breathe'.

"There were enough women, that didn't strike me as anything extraordinary. What was extraordinary was that there were [almost] no men there. They all went to the war."

One student, Ted O'Reilly, lingers in her memory still.

"He was doing his fourth year. The prof had asked him to come in and say goodbye to us. He came down and shook the prof's hand and [then] he was missing in the Pacific several months later.

"They never discovered what happened. There were lots of those. They came one day, they were off the next and [then] they were gone."

Mrs Hooke, who spent decades as a science teacher in Victoria after the war, never gave serious thought to a career while she was at university.

"I certainly never thought of teaching. I thought I'd just get married and have babies. I was just going to get a degree because that's what you did. That's what I wanted."

There was the small matter of defeating Japan to be sorted out first, however.

"I joined the WAAAF when my results came out [at the beginning of 1944]," she said. "I'd already been to see them, been interviewed and been accepted. [That day] I walked across Martin Place and got a newspaper. Yes, I'd passed [my degree]. I continued on to the recruiting place and said 'right, I'm ready'."

While the WAAAF was of the RAAF, its members were not in the RAAF.

"We were an auxiliary and that made us different. The hierarchy for once were very sensible. They ripped a woman who was head of Berlei, Clare Stevenson, out [of the company] and made her the head of the WAAAF. She was terrific. We all liked her very much, she was our senior officer."

One of the downsides was the ranks did not match those in the RAAF.

"We didn't get flying officer or pilot officer, we got section officer. I did my rookies at Bradfield Park in Sydney. The first practical thing we learnt was how to pick up a kit bag.

"We were told 'to bend ze knees' and I still 'bend ze knees'. I could pick up 70 pounds [32kg]. That's not bad."

During her early months in the service, Hooke had to conceal her academic achievements.

"I had to keep it very quiet that I had a degree. [Otherwise] nobody wanted to talk to me. Talk about reverse snobbery!"

She completed officer training at Melbourne University and was moved through a number of different postings until, in 1944, American Liberator bombers started arriving in Australia in large numbers after entering service with the RAAF.

"Somebody came in [to our office at the Department of Works and Bricks in Melbourne] and said they had a job for me and Jack Blythe, the Flight Lieutenant who worked with me.

"Liberators were going through our tarmac runways and making huge potholes. We'd never had anything like them landing here before. Up at Tocumwal, which was a huge station, it [the potholing] was dreadful."

RAAF high command heard the Americans had come up with a way to calculate how thick the pavement needed to be to handle specific wheel loads on landing.

"It depended on the characteristics of the subsoil," Hooke said. "It involved a formula and several tests. My job was to go out with some LACs [Leading Aircraftsmen] and their augers and take samples.

"We'd do a random sample down each side of the runway and down the middle and bring them back and weigh them [to determine if they were uniform]."

"I'd sit in the back of the truck and weigh them and put them in bottles ready for shipment back to our laboratory in Chapel Street [Melbourne]."

Hooke knew nothing about soil testing.

"We learnt on the job," she said. "I've walked every inch of this runway [at Canberra Airport]. The first one we did was Tocumwal, the next one was Canberra, then East Sale and then the war was over."

Word about the new soil testing regimen, which was eminently applicable to road building, had got out and before she left the WAAAF Hooke ran a two-week course for council engineers from around Victoria.

"I often wonder if they ever used it? I doubt it. The roads out to Heidelberg never improved."