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Kaye and Tony
This month Australian Mutuals Archives are celebrating our 40th Anniversary. We were pleased to have former Archives Trust Chairs Kaye Wetzler and Tony McNamara attend our recent birthday party (they are pictured above with Trust Chair Greg Stevens at the party). Here is a potted history of their lives in mutuals.
Kaye started working as an Accounting Machine Operator before hearing about credit unions in church. Father Clark at Punchbowl told us about “this credit union thing, where you can save the money and borrow the money”, said Kaye. Sometime after she heard about a clerical role going at Merryville Credit Union. She applied and got the job. This was in 1971.
She then took up a marketing role at Merryville before becoming General Manager of Statehealth Staff Credit Union in the 1980s. Her final role was CEO of TAFE & Community Credit Union begun in 2005. Shortly after her retirement she joined the Australian Credit Union Archives Trust in 2013 and was Chair from 2016 until stepping down in 2021. She was also involved with CUFA and the Insight program.
On her resignation from the Archives Trust in 2021, Kaye offered the following on the value of the Archives:
The longer I’ve been involved the more I understand the value of what the archives have to offer and the more I am inclined to promote it. To lift the profile to have it not something, as I said, that sits over here in the background but it becomes a central part, an overall part of the industry, where we’re automatically turned to for keeping records and sharing our history.
Tony McNamara turns 90 this year and his long involvement in mutuals includes membership of the Australian Credit Union Historical Co-operative from its origins in 1985. Tony became an Australian Credit Union Archives Trustee in the mid-2000s and was Chair from the late 2000s until 2013. He joined the University of New South Wales Staff Credit Union in his younger years and became a Director there in 1972 and was Chair from 1973-1988. From 1990-2006 he was the Training Co-ordinator at the Australasian Institute of Credit Union Directors.
