“It’s still as good today …”

“We were in a little converted house. One side of it was an engraver and the other side was us. It was very primitive. I had an old underwood typewriter which nearly broke your fingers as you typed on it. We had no equipment at all, we used the local printer. I used to type the minutes on stencils and I can honestly recall one time bringing back to the office 500 copies of minutes, each 24 pages, walking down the street with these great bundles and having to get in the gutter. We were so primitive but we got by”, said Margaret Barrett in her 2002 oral history interview of the early days of the Australian Federation of Credit Union Leagues (AFCUL), the forerunner of COBA.

Margaret Barrett’s association with credit unions began in 1954 and continued post her retirement. She was Assistant to the General Manager of AFCUL and Voluntary Secretary at the Australian Credit Union Historical Co-operative (ACUHC), the forerunner of Australian Mutuals Archives.

It all started when she joined City Council Employees Credit Union [now Australian Mutual Bank] six months after getting a job at the Sydney City Council as a stenographer, which was her first job after leaving school. She told her 2002 interviewer that she, “joined City Council Employees Credit Union as a saver but then I had to take out a loan. I found them absolutely wonderful”.

Most of Margaret’s work in credit unions was done with the legendary Dermot Ryan, first as his Assistant as foundation General Manager of AFCUL and then as his Voluntary Assistant when ACUHC began in his home in Lidcombe, Sydney in 1985.

Margaret had a high regard for Dermot and obviously the feeling was mutual because he asked her to join him as his assistant at AFCUL in 1966. Of Dermot’s motivation for such tireless commitment to the credit union movement she said, “he was pushing for financial equality for all people … He felt if a person was financially secure, the rest would come. They would be emotionally secure and happy”.

The early days of AFCUL were anything but glamorous with Margaret and Dermot often working through the night during Annual General Meeting season and having to make do with very few resources.

By the mid-1970s Margaret’s role with AFCUL had become onerous as this was a boom time for credit union growth in Australia but it was also a time of struggle as many credit unions were in financial peril. In 1977, Margaret resigned from AFCUL and took up teaching, eventually gaining a Master’s in Education degree specialising in educating children with learning difficulties. 

In her 2002 oral history interview Margaret gave a shout out to what was then Sydney Credit Union to which she had belonged since 1954. She said, “My credit union is wonderful. I use them for travel and of course Dermot started that. I didn’t join it straight away because my membership number is 2373. But it was probably in the first 6 months of it. That’s all I have today, my credit union. It’s still as good today.  It’s still as caring today as the day it started.”