3 NOVEMBER 1991: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH LEON MAGREE OF VICTORIA
I will ask you Mr Magree where were you born, and when?
LM: In 1937 in Hawthorn, Victoria.
Did you grow up round there?
LM: Yes, not far away, my parents lived in Surrey Hills, a suburb of Melbourne, and they lived two or three miles away from where I was actually born and we lived all our childhood life in the suburb of Surrey Hills.
What sort of influence do you think you got from your parents? This is always a difficult question.
LM: Well it was a very stable and solid family background, I am pleased to be able to say. I had an older brother, Richard, who is ten years older than myself and my sister Noelle who is nine years older than myself. They would have been a strong influence on my life also and certainly I learned from their example.
Any political or religious influence?
LM: Yes, it was a Catholic family. We would be, I imagine fifth generation Australians, our origins go back to Kilkenny in Ireland, I believe. We can certainly trace back our family tree on my father’s side to Ireland and as a result I suppose there is a strong Catholic influence through the family. That likewise would have been a strong influence on my childhood life.
Any political influence, or industrial, involved in unions or anything like that?
LM: Well having grown up through the 1950s, at which stage I would have been thirteen or fourteen, fifteen, I was very conscious of the split in the Labor Party in the 1950s. The Parish in which we lived, or where we attended church, namely St Dominic’s, East Camberwell, would have been one of the strong posts of Santa Maria’s organisation, the Movement of the National Civic Council or whatever it might have been called in those days and subsequently the Democratic Labor Party, and I can recall my father being encouraged to attend local branch meetings of the ALP which would have cost about two shillings and six pence to become a member, and at which they were obviously trying to get the numbers up to make sure a Catholic influence existed within the local branch. This of course was all a forerunner to the eventual formation, or breakaway, from the ALP and the formation of the DLP. Fortunately, I would say mainly through my brother’s influence, I quickly realised that my own allegiance lay more with the traditional ALP way of thinking rather than the Church-sponsored DLP, so I claimed to be a very loyal and true, and hopefully good but other people will judge that, Catholic. I sometimes shock people when I say my political affiliation would have been certainly with the, and still is incidentally, with the traditional ALP.
So where did you go to school?
LM: Primary school would have been at St Dominic’s, East Camberwell and the Dominican Fathers, who came from Ireland themselves probably in the late 1930s and Dr Mannix gave them the East Camberwell Parish to look after, the same as he gave other parishes scattered around the Melbourne Arch Diocese to different Orders of the Church. So we have in Victoria the only parish that the Dominican Priests were asked to look after, St Dominic’s. Whilst we actually lived one street outside the border of the parish, because we were geographically closer to that particular church we tended to gravitate there. So the Dominican Sisters at East Camberwell, the nuns who taught at the school and the priests in the parish would have had an influence on my life at that stage. From St Dominic’s, East Camberwell, I went probably in 1946 to St John’s, Hawthorn, which as I explained earlier was only a few miles down the road. It was a tram trip every day to school and I would have been there from probably Year 4 to probably Year 7, that would have been the years 1946 to 1949, where we were taught by the Marist Brothers, again an Order of religious brothers within the Church who originated from France. From there to Marsalin College, also at Camberwell and also conducted by the Marist Brothers and that particular college was only founded in 1950 so I was a pioneer, one of the first students at that particular college which has recently celebrated its fortieth year. I was at Marsalin College at Camberwell from 1950 to 1952 when I left, having completed my Intermediate Certificate which is now the equivalent of what you would be say Year 10, in 1952.
What did you like or dislike about school? Was there anything you were particularly good at?
LM: No, I was never a particularly brilliant student, in fact I was highly overrated as far as Marsalin College was concerned because St John’s, Hawthorn, was a pretty rough and tough primary going on secondary school where it was pretty much the survival of the fittest and academically I would have just been in the middle of the ruck, you might say. But because Marsalin College was new and everything was perhaps small in numbers compared with St John’s of Hawthorn, I went suddenly from being in the middle of the pack to being second in the grade and I am sure it was an overrating of one’s true ability and really didn’t come as an advantage. It would have been better to have perhaps still back at St John’s learning from the school of hard knocks, you might say.
So what job did you go to first?
LM: Well, I had some ability in the area of drawing and art, I like to think, and a leaning towards the printing industry, so I decided, not with a great conviction I must admit, I decided that was to be my future in the printing industry. Now to get into the printing industry one had to do an apprenticeship and because an apprenticeship took five years I had to leave school with only my Intimidate Certificate and I would dearly have loved to go on longer at school, had the advantage of a better education, but because one had to start an apprenticeship at the age of fifteen I left school at the end of 1952 and commenced as an apprentice photo-lithographic artist within the printing industry in 1953. I completed my apprenticeship in 1958 with two firms that would have been Morris and Walker in Fitzroy and Photoplates, who was a subsidiary of Morris and Walker Printing Company in Fitzroy. It was during that time, and you might well ask how on earth did one move from the printing industry to the credit union industry, it was during that particular time that I became, as a young worker, very much involved in the Young Christian Workers’ Movement in Victoria. This was a youth movement within the Catholic Church, had its origins in Europe, in Belgium in particular, in probably the 1930s, the idea brought to Australia in 1941. It was mainly founded by a priest, Father Frank Lombard, and I became involved in the Young Christian Workers’ Movement and saw their work in the field of co-operatives.
Exactly what did you do at the Young Christian Workers’ Co-operative?
LM: As I say I was only involved within the Youth Movement itself. The YCW was an organisation that provided an education in itself insofar as it had basically two groups, it had a leaders’ group who met each week, they were the young men picked usually by the Chaplain to the YCW, and they had what you’d call the general membership. The general membership involvement was mainly one of social and sporting activities, depending on the season, whether it be football, cricket, athletics or what have you. The social and cultural, there was debating of course which was very valuable and there were dances to be conducted and social activities, picnics and all that. Various types of activities that would go on in any youth organisation. But as I say, it had the leaders’ groups which went far deeper that the sporting and cultural and social activities insofar as the leaders’ groups was a place where young people would train to accept responsibility within their workplaces and within the community generally. They had a very set program to follow based on the YCW’s inquiry method, as it was called, of ‘see, judge and act’, simple as that, that if you saw a problem you judged whether that problem … I will start again, you saw a situation, you judged whether that situation was right or wrong having regard to the principles you were endeavouring to adhere to, in other words was their a conflict between what you saw happening in your work place or your community compared with what you though the situation should be. Then having judged that there was something wrong then you took action. That action might have been as an individual or it might have been some group action. That inquiry method of ‘seeing, judging and acting’ can be applied in everything we do and I am sure other organisations still apply that formula. They mightn’t recognise that they are applying that method, but it was a great way of forming young people to accept responsibility in their work place and in their community. To use practical examples, take the apprenticeship issue. In those days, in 1950, apprentices were expected to do the dirty jobs around on the factory floor because they were the most recent person to become employed in the place. Consequently, they weren’t being trained properly in the particular trade that they were in. So you recognise a problem, you know it is not right, so you sit in judgement on that and you try and take some action to change the situation. You either personally approach your employer and say, ‘Well this apprentice’s training is being neglected because of all the type of work is being expected to do, sweeping the floor and so on, and can’t we do something about it?’ Or you take collective action by getting the organisation, say the Young Christian Workers’ Movement, to take representative action on behalf of the young apprentices generally. And so we did this and the apprenticeship was just one particular problem. I call to mind perhaps things of a more religious type significance, very basic things like for example trying to put Christ back into Christmas, little campaigns like that, encouraging the local picture theatre to put a slide up come December of a Nativity scene just to prompt people of the true meaning of Christmas. A small thing to do, but an action carried out by your talking about fourteen, or fifteen, or sixteen year olds. Arising out of this came of course the co-operative, or the YCW’s involvement with the Co-operative Movement, which we obviously wanted to lead up to. The YCW’s involvement in the Co-operative Movement came out of the inquiry method, of seeing the young workers of the day, many of whom were coming back from the War, who needed access to credit at a reasonable rate, who needed housing finance, who needed to be able to buy the basic necessities of the home, furnishings, etc. So the Young Christian Workers’ Movement as part of its representative action was instrumental in having, along with other groups of course, legislation brought into the Victorian Parliament similar to what was already in New South Wales allowing credit unions to be formally registered under the Co-operation Act, as it was to be called, and the credit unions to be known as Co-operative Credit Societies and trading co-operatives to be registered under the Co-operation Act and of course co-operative housing societies to be formed. So the YCW sponsored many of the first co-operative housing societies, they sponsored a trading co-operative, which still exists and they formed a credit union which later merged with others and now can’t be identified as such, as a YCW credit union, and of course they helped form the first association of credit societies, known as the Association of Catholic Credit Societies which brought together, in addition to the YCW, the Central Credit Union brought together I think three other parish credit societies.
And your involvement in those co-operatives, in those organisations? Have you any idea, personal experience of the history of the various organisations? People involved with them?
LM: Well, this brings us back to how I came to move from being an apprentice printer into the co-operative field, where having got to like what I was doing as a volunteer, you might say, in the Young Christian Workers’ Movement and seeing the work they were doing in the co-operative field, I applied for a job as a clerk with the Security Co-operative Housing Society in 1958. I was appointed to that position and it was within that group of co-operative housing societies, who as I said were sponsored by the YCW, that they had a credit union. I had already joined in 1957, if I remember correctly, a credit union for the first time and I started saving with that and I think I took out my first loan from a credit union in around about 1958, which is already recorded on another tape. The purpose of that loan was to buy a lawn mower and the purpose of having to have a lawn mower was that I mowed the neighbour’s lawn. You might say why the heck did you mow the neighbour’s lawn? Well the neighbour had a garage where I could keep my little 1940 Austin car, we didn’t have a garage at my place my father never owned a car. So for rent for the garage I mowed these people’s lawn. It was much easier to mow a lawn with a Victa motor mower which was financed with a loan from the YCW Central Credit Union. That is a long story, but that is how I first came to borrow from a credit union and I haven’t stopped since, mind you.
Who was running the credit union at that time? Who was the main figure that you met in the YCW Co-operative?
LM: Well, Ted Long interviewed me for the job, even though his involvement at that stage was in the trading co-operative. Because he was like a father figure within the YCW Co-operative Movement he interviewed me for the position in the housing societies. Bob Maybury was my actual boss, you might say, my employer, being the Senior Secretary of the housing co-operative group and Bob’s involvement in co-operatives covered not only the housing societies but also the credit societies, probably in an honorary capacity. So because the YCW Trading and Housing Group had sponsored the Credit Union and the Association of Credit Unions, those latter two bodies operated from out of the offices of the Housing Society so my clerical work included not only the work on the Co-operative Housing Societies but also keeping the books of the YCW Central Credit Union, of which I later became Secretary, so that was just another job within the YCW group of co-operatives. It must sound very confusing but that it how it grew. Likewise, the work with the Association of Catholic Co-operative Credit Societies just sort of grew out of working in the same building, you might say, the same group. So to answer your question more directly, Ted Long and Bob Maybury were the initial people with whom I came in contact.
A few weeks ago I rang you up in Melbourne, it was a Sunday, and you mentioned that you were going to a fiftieth anniversary or the foundation of some organisation in that field. Which organisation was it and have you got a brief idea of the fiftieth anniversary, the events leading up to it and on?
LM: Yes, well the function to which you refer was one to recognise the fiftieth year of the Young Christian Workers’ Movement in Melbourne, having been formed by Father Frank Lombard in 1941, and still going though in a much reduced form. Strangely enough probably stronger in other States of Australia than in Melbourne, which is just a quirk of fate you might say. That was the occasion on that particular Sunday that you rang. In addition to a church service, a mass that was held and celebrated by Chaplains to the YCW from many years back and currently there was a gathering reunion, you might say, in the Northcote Town Hall and on display was a good range of memorabilia covering the YCW’s activities over those fifty years both in a sporting, social, co-operative and educational field.
The foundation of that, just briefly, I don’t know whether you know about it, I mean it occurs to me that there is a lot of left-wing people who used to have this sort of training for identifying problems and taking action. In fact I got some training at a university course at the Sydney University of Technology which was then the Institute of Technology, and the people were left-wing radicals. I don’t say they were communists but they were definitely left-wing radicals. In the history course there you actually had to undertake those processes as part of the history course, you understand, you had to identify a topic that you wanted to deal with and find out what was wrong and do something about it, as part of the course. If you didn’t do anything about it then you didn’t pass the course. So I was wondering, whether the Catholic side of this was a response to left-wing action or was it something that came out of the Catholic faith, do you think?
LM: No, they took that inquiry method from what they had seen occurring in the equivalent organisation, the YCW in Europe. It wasn’t called the YCW there in Belgium it was called JOC which perhaps translated could stand for Young Christian Workers. The founder of the JOC, or the founder of the YCW, in Europe was a young priest again, Father Kardign and later to become Cardinal Kardign, so he was recognised by the Vatican for his work by rising through the ranks you might say. He was a very young enthusiastic priest who formed the YCW initially in Europe and had this inquiry method operating there. So I would say that it was just brought to Australia and adapted to suit Australian conditions and I don’t think we would have got it from any other outside organisation.
No, I was just wondering the background behind it. Ideas are sort of thrown up and sometimes they disappear for years and years but eventually they will come back again. I will be on the look out for the origins of that. It is rather interesting because I got subjected to it and it was a great shock to me. The idea that I was taking an academic course and I had to do something about things, this seemed to me this was an academic course I didn’t have to go out and do anything but we did and I’m very glad we did too. But it wasn’t from a Catholic perspective it was something rather very left-wing. What is more we used to get into arguments about that but that is another thing, I accepted the principle and I thought it was a good one. We actually changed a number of laws in doing this, so I would be happy to research it myself.
LM: Yes, well I would be the last one to suggest that the YCW had a monopoly on the ‘see, judge and act’ method and as I said you can apply it to any facet of your life now.
Now back to credit unions. The YCW, what year did it form its first credit union, the Savings and Loans Society?
LM: Well, the YCW Movement in itself had encouraged its various branches, I understand and this is a little bit before my time, to form savings clubs. It emphasised the need for young workers to try and save even though it might only be small amounts. So they had these savings clubs things formed and they actually attracted the attention of, I believe, the Federal Government of the day in the form of the Treasurer, Ben Chifley, who apparently became aware of these savings clubs being formed and there was some correspondence went on between Father Frank Lombard and Ben Chifley because the suggestion being that they contravened the Banking Act, I believe, others perhaps could be more accurate on that. Anyway, the savings clubs ended up falling on hard times and the actual YCW central co-operative society, or the YCW Central Credit Union as it was called, was formed in about 1952 and the legislation enabling it to be registered would have been 1954 and I think it was August 1954 that the YCW Central Co-operative Credit Society was actually registered. It was the first co-operative credit society to be registered under that piece of legislation. Let us remember there were other co-operative credit societies in Victoria prior to this, there are examples of the CIG, the forerunner of the CIG Employees Credit Society having been formed in 1948, the ABC Staff Association not long after, I would suggest. And of course there is the very early example of the Co-operative Credit Society of Victoria having been formed by the Civil Servants of the day at the turn of the century and it was still in existence in the 1970s, I would suggest, though it didn’t grow to any extent and it was just an isolated example that pre-dates a whole lot of other attempts to form credit societies in other States obviously and quite an interesting example.
Are you aware if that society paid or charged interest?
LM: I would feel they would. I think their history is detailed in the book put together by Dr Neil Runcie called Credit Unions in the South Pacific, and the Victorian section was written by Andrew Lo, a Jesuit student at the time who did his thesis for his degree on the history of Victorian credit societies. I can still remember him coming into my office with great excitement having discovered this Co-operative Credit Society of Victoria and holding in his hand a copy of their Constitution which he had been allowed to take away and photocopy etc. on the understanding that he would return it. That was the first I had ever heard of their existence.
Yes, I have read that article in that book edited by Professor Runcie. I have also interviewed Professor Runcie but I haven’t found Andrew Lo as yet.
LM: Yes well he was, as I say, a Jesuit student from Hong Kong. I don’t think he went ahead with his studies. I don’t think he ended up becoming a priest of the Church so what has happened to him I don’t know.
I understand he is living in Sydney somewhere, but I have no idea where.
LM: One should also mention incidentally the other examples of credit unions in Victoria, small as they might have been, founded by again mainly organisations within the Catholic Church, the National Catholic Workers’ Movement, sorry National Christian Workers’ Movement, not to be confused with the Young Christian Workers’ Movement, sponsored the formation of a credit union.
End Tape 1A: 3918 Words: 1 hour 15 minutes.
3 NOVEMBER 1991: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH LEON MAGREE OF VICTORIA
There were a number of different groups that sponsored credit unions within their associations, why were they separate, why did they not get together?
LM: No they didn’t appear to have their own associations. In a book produced by the National Catholic Rural Movement group they do talk about a federation of co-operative credit societies, but I get the impression that such a federation or association was never formed. The history of those particular credit societies is well detailed in Susan Pepper’s book entitled Giving Credit to the People and I would recommend reading of that to anyone who wants to find out where they were. In the case of the Rural Movement ones they were mainly to be found in country towns like Port Fairy and the likes and in the case of the National Christian Workers Movement it was some of the inner or near inner suburbs of Melbourne.
Now, from your experience working at the co-operative, well you were working both for the co-operative and the credit union in actual fact, were you?
LM: Initially working for the Co-operative Housing Society and the Credit Union and then in 1965, again if I remember correctly, devoting my full attention to the Association of Catholic Co-operative Credit Societies, which as its name suggests was the association formed to co-ordinate the activities of the parish credit societies that existed in Melbourne and that Association was formed in 1957 and I became its first full-time employee as Manager in, I believe, 1965.
Who was the foundation Chair and Directors of that organisation, do you remember, have they been written up?
LM: Yes, the foundation Chairman was Jim Ryan, who also was Chairman of the YCW Central Credit Society, and Jim remained Chairman for a number of years and I think he passed away in 1964, unfortunately. He was a lovely fellow to know. Other Directors, the names of the other Directors are well detailed in the Register of the Association of which we have recently obtained a copy.
So what was your involvement with the Association from then on? You were the sole employee were you?
LM: Yes, for a short while I was the sole employee. We did quickly appoint a secretary, a secretary-typist you might say, and just the two of us ran the Association. Again we were fortunate that we were able to share offices, or rent offices, from the overall YCW group of co-operative housing societies, the YCW co-operatives, so if both of us were not in the office any one day we could be sure the phone would be answered and orders taken for stationery, whatever particular service inquiry was received. We were lucky from that point of view that we had an office to share with other people working around with us.
How did you actually run it as a business at that time, the book-keeping and various other functions?
LM: Well from day one the Association conducted its central bank function, a fact not readily appreciated by a lot of people, particularly interstate people, that the Association always saw itself as a central bank, or having a central bank activity meagre as it might have been talking about loans of about three hundred pounds or six hundred pounds, as it was in those days, to the credit unions. We always encouraged our member credit unions to keep their cash reserves with the Association which most of them did and 10 per cent of their members’ savings being the figure suggested as the reserve. Strangely enough that magical 10 per cent figure still seems appropriate even in today’s climate where under some legislation 7 per cent is a minimum. But from a point of view of the Association’s central bank, you were encouraged to keep 10 per cent, it wasn’t law but that was policy you might say, and keep it all with the Association because you knew the Association could lend it out to our credit unions who may in turn be able to lend it out to their members. So that was one activity. The other activity was the Supply Department, to use that New South Wales terminology, the stationery section. We provided stationery for our member credit unions. And of course there was a representative action that had to be taken if we had to approach Government, whether it be departmental people or politicians, well the Association was expected to carry out that role.
Did you have any involvement in that area?
LM: Yes, we had to face up very early in our life to a number of legislative issues, particularly Stamp Duty in Victoria which the Bolte Government was keen to impose on all organisations irrespective of whether they were co-operatives or not. So we had to fight Stamp Duty issues, Stamp Duties on various documents, we had a Stamp Duty on lending per se at one stage which affected all financial organisations if they lent interest above a certain rate. For a while there we could avoid it by changing our documentation so that the interest was expressed at a rate which was just under the rate prescribed in the Act. But that became impossible and I think for three years there, nearly three years, we fought to have credit unions exempted from this tax on lending which was quite onerous and a tax which had to be passed on to the borrowers. We were finally able to take a deputation to Sir Henry Bolte just before an election and he assured us that it was never his intention to catch us up under that particular Act and in fact he said, ‘Gentlemen what can I do for you?’ and we explained what harm this duty was causing to our credit unions and to our members and he quickly gave instructions that we were not to be included. The beauty of it was the way our exemption was written into the legislation, it wasn’t something that appeared in the Regulations as an exemption, if it had been it could have been changed quickly, it was actually written into the Act as part of the definition of what a loan was. ‘A loan does not include a loan advanced by a co-operative credit society.’ That was the most perfect exemption that one could ever obtain because you don’t alter legislation, or in those days you didn’t alter legislation lightly and to have it actually written in like that was a real win as far as the Association was concerned.
You were actually on that delegation were you?
LM: Yes, along with Dermot Ryan who we had asked to come down from AFCUL to help us and also Peter Hodgkinson and Ralph Lewis, two or the Directors of the Association. When that actually happened that would have been, I imagine, in the early 1970s, I would say it probably would have been 1970 so it was actually five years after I started. There was a lot of previous representation taking place on State Government issues, particularly Stamp Duty issues. Let’s face it we were pretty young and in some ways naive about the method of approaching politicians and bureaucrats, but in many respects our newness gained us more friends than enemies, I won’t say they felt sorry for us but I think they appreciated our sincerity in our somewhat humble method of approaching members of parliament and bureaucrats in respect of those issues. I probably contravened one of the most basic points as far as taking delegations, or basic points as far as lobbing is concerned, I feel you shouldn’t just go on your own because you leave yourself open for accusation of having perhaps done deals or not coming back with a true report on what actually happened, I was later advised that you should always have someone else with you when you approach politicians or the bureaucrats. But anyway we achieved a lot in that time. I can distinctly remember the head of the State Government Finance Department of the day, and this would have been in the mid-1960s, saying to us, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get as big as they are in New South Wales. Do you know they’ve got friends on both sides of parliament up there.’ I remained speechless because I failed to see what was wrong with having friends on both sides of parliament. The same gentleman on another occasion accused me of having I think his words were, ‘strange bedfellows,’ when he actually saw me personally lobbying Opposition Labor people, as they were at that stage, Opposition members of parliament in the corridors of the State Parliament House. That night a Bill was passed that wasn’t to our advantage and the next day I had to ring this Finance Department official and ask him, ‘Where do we go from here?’ He suggested that it was no longer a departmental issue it was a political issue and that we’d been, I am sure he used the words, ‘we had some strange bedfellows,’ having been seen talking to the Opposition at the time. So obviously we struck a raw nerve there in that type of representative action.
I know you have got one lobbying story that you have told before, but have you got any other lobbying stories that you haven’t told?
LM: Well the ones I have just told are probably the main ones in the area of the State Government issues. Keep in mind that at one stage in the State Government area the Upper House was keenly divided and the balance of power was actually held by an Independent, I believe, probably a situation not unsimilar to what exists in some States know in 1991. It was an interesting exercise to have to go and talk to Government politicians and then go across and then see the Opposition members. Of course in the case of those days, the National Party, or Country Party as it was called, were sort of a third party again, they obviously weren’t in coalition with the Liberal Party. Then you had the occasional Independent who had to be spoken to, who might have ended up being the most powerful person in the Upper House of the Legislative Council. Anyway I think you are starting to refer to the representative action we took in the national field and in particular the Federal Government Home Savings Grant legislation and the deputations we took on a couple of occasions to Canberra where we were accompanied by representatives from New South Wales in the form of Dermot Ryan and Les Robinson and I think Clarrie Stewart from the ABC Credit Union and from Victoria in addition to myself we had Ralph Lewis and Peter Hodgkinson and Gordon Farrer. Dermot was anxious because the Upper House in the Federal scene, namely the Senate, was the House that was going to make the big decision where we could perhaps change the numbers in our favour, it was important from Dermot’s point of view that we provided as far as possible a good cross-section of Australian credit unions. We eventually found Dame Annabelle Rankin, the Liberal Minister for Housing and Minister for the Government Home Savings Grant, found her in King’s Hall and approached her, which was what you could do in those days. Lobbying was very basic, you were free to wander around and there was none of the security that exists today in parliament or even existed in the old Parliament House in its final days. Security was very lax, you could just sit around and move easily into the offices of members of parliament and as I said we found Annabelle Rankin, confronted her in the King’s Hall. Dermot introduced himself, introduced the various members of the party naming who they were and what States the came from, Dame Annabelle quickly realised that there wasn’t a Queensland representative, which was her home State, and said, ‘No one from Queensland?’ Fortunately Dermot ,as quick as he could be in that kind of situation, pointed to Jack Coyne who was with the New South Wales party and said, ‘Jack Coyne played football for Queensland, Dame,’ to which Dame Annabelle reacted, very positively I thought, with a smile. But we were able, particularly the Victorian representatives, to wander into the offices of Senator Willesie who was the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Upper House, into Lionel Murphy’s office, then around the corner to the DLP’s members who I think would have been Mr Little, probably Mr McMannus, Mr Gear and the Senator from Tasmania, Burn, or was it O’Burn? There was no difficulty in getting at least three of those gentlemen together in their Party room, small as it might have been, and tell them who we were and what we were there for. It took them a little while to find a copy of the Act which we thought was the important thing which had ever been brought into parliament, but which of course was just another piece of legislation as far as they were concerned. We sought and got the support of the DLP people and then we had to go back and talk to Lionel Murphy and explain that if we got the ALP support along with the DLP support we would have the numbers to achieve the amendment to the Act we were trying to achieve. Obviously Lionel Murphy was very reluctant to be seen supporting something that the DLP was supporting and there had to be a lot of tricky negotiation at that stage to try and get the numbers. I don’t think we were successful on that particular occasion which meant more trips back. Another little sidelight of that visit, and this already appears on tape or has been recorded on tape as part of a visit to Dermot Ryan, was the fact that on that visit to Canberra the Victorian party had the foresight and good sense to travel up the night before whereas the New South Wales party tried to fly up on the morning of the day when we were going to be taken by Tom Uren to meet all these Senators. Of course the fickle finger of fate caught the New South Wales people and they were just stuck in a fog, circled Canberra for probably a couple of hours I believe, unable to land. You can imagine how frustrated and wild Dermot was on two issues: (a) that he couldn’t be there; and (b) the thought of Victorians being left with the responsibility to take this delegation. The Victorian people realised what had happened to the New South Wales party and quickly found Tom Uren who could not be more helpful, who was most gracious and of great assistance to us, and we had achieved already a good deal before a very wild and frustrated Dermot arrived with his party later in the morning. He was very surprised to see what had already been achieved by that time.
Any other lobbying stories before we go into another subject?
LM: Vince Martin, the Labor Member for the seat of Banks in the Federal Parliament was also very helpful, having a credit union background himself, and I can recall having been up to Canberra on one occasion on the Home Savings Grant issue and travelling back to Melbourne that night and just getting to sleep when the phone rang beside my bed and it was Vince Martin saying that, ‘You’d better get back here quickly, the Bill’s being brought on sooner that we thought.’ So the next morning I had to hop on a plane and head back to Canberra. That was the type of relationship we had with Vince Martin, he was aware of our interest in the legislation and was keen enough to track us down no matter what hour of the night it was and tell us to get back and be there.
Were you involved in any of the cases that took place in order to try and get taxation exemption from the Federal Government?
LM: No not involved in the actual court cases, though the Association of Catholic Credit Co-operative Societies in its very early life, in 1957, did contribute financially meagre as it might have been to taxation cases which were being fought in New South Wales on behalf of credit societies or a particular credit union.
Now was that Father Gallagher’s Antigonish credit unions, or was it the New South Wales League’s cases?
LM: No, it was Father Gallagher’s Antigonish Movement and strangely enough we had a close connection probably because of the Catholic connection, you might say, with Father Gallagher. From a distance in Victoria we probably saw Father Gallagher’s movement, I use the word ‘movement’ carefully, as being closer to what we were trying to achieve in those early days in Victoria than what the New South Wales Credit Union League was doing. In fact we saw them as the enemy, silly as it might seem. Of course later the reverse occurred. We soon became allied more with the New South Wales Credit Union League. I have always felt that was mainly due to Father Marion Ganey’s involvement with both the traditional Credit Union League in New South Wales through Clarrie Murphy and Keith Young and Beresford, etc., and then of course our own connection with the Association in Victoria through Ted Long and Frank McCann and Frank McCann’s brother, Father Charles McCann who was the Chaplain to the Co-operative Movement in Victoria officially appointed by Archbishop Simmons to that position, I hasten to add. There was a very personal and close relationship developed between Father Marion Ganey in Fiji and Father McCann and Frank McCann and friends of Frank McCann, Ted Long and so on. Ted Long was invited by Father Ganey to go to Fiji and talk at the Burjican School, or the forerunner to the Burjican School, for credit unions in that country.
Did you ever go to Fiji to visit Father Ganey?
LM: No, I have never had that privilege. I have obviously met Father Ganey on his several visits to Victoria and he was a speaker at our Warburton Schools on two or three occasions and another later School at Phillip Island too. So I did have that pleasure of meeting him over there.
Was there an Antigonish connection in Victoria prior to Father Gallagher’s involvement in New South Wales?
LM: You are talking Antigonish in Canada?
No, I actually mean wasn’t there somebody in Victoria who was also involved directly not through Father Gallagher?
LM: Well the original Antigonish Movement comes from Antigonish in Nova Scotia, Monseigneur Coady and so on. Because the YCW co-operatives were so philosophically based, etc., they took a lot of their philosophy, for want of a better term, from the Antigonish Movement. We read their publications and Ted Long travelled to Canada, I believe, and would have visited the University of St Francis Xavier in Nova Scotia, so there was a connection there.
What hasn’t been cleared in most of the publications that I have seen, also people don’t seem to have much of an idea whether the strand of involvement in credit unions in Victoria descends from the New South Wales involvement of Kevin Yates and his speaking around in Catholic circles and what independent involvement there might have been with other people.
LM: Yes, I don’t feel, or I have never really felt, that the influence of Kevin Yates extended to Victoria. The YCW, for example, their involvement with credit unions arose quite independently of what Kevin Yates had done and was doing in New South Wales. The similarity is interesting, but I would say it was quite independent. Now this is where Ted Long’s thoughts on that subject will be of interest to you and to others listening to future tapes, I feel.
I was interested when I recently went to Queensland as well because there is another strand there which comes in from the Douglas Credit in Canada directly to a Christian Credit Union in Queensland which has got nothing to do with the Catholic Church, nothing to do with the Anglican Church, it came directly from Alberta from a group of Douglas Credit people.
LM: Yes, well I am certainly unaware of that.
I was amazed when I heard it. I wondered exactly the influence, not belittling Kevin Yates efforts, only thinking that there must have been some other influences around at the time as well.
LM: Yes well I think these influences diverse or common as they might have been, again are well documented in Susan Pepper’s book, so that is why I always recommend the reading of that to track back where Santa Maria and his people got their influence as far as the Rural Movement was concerned, where did the National Christian Workers get their inspiration and then of course, later again, the YCW where did it get its influence.
Now your involvement from here on, in the VCCA, what was that mainly?
LM: Well the Association of Catholic Co-operative Credit Societies, as I say, was formed in 1957. I became their first full-time Manager I believe in 1965. It was soon after that we became aware of Graham Benson and his activities at Morwell, where he was involved with the Morwell Trading Co-operative and had formed a credit union called the Latrobe Valley Co-operative Credit Society, again, from what he had seen in New South Wales in the Newcastle area where they had a trading co-operative as well as a credit union, I understand. Graham had made contact with Stan Arneil and Stan had obviously encouraged Graham to start spreading the word and getting more people throughout Victoria involved in credit unions. Virtually out of the blue one day came a letter addressed to all credit unions in Victoria encouraging the formation, or coming together, in the form of a State association. Of course our Catholic association was a little bit suspicious of all this and a little bit concerned but it forced our hand, you might say it forced us to face up to the fact that we probably couldn’t continue to be an association of parish credit societies, it was as simple as that. We either had to wind up that association and be part of a new association or alternatively we had to change the name of that association so that clearly embraced by its actions and deeds and appearance all credit co-operatives in Victoria, or could embrace them all. So a number of meetings were held, one famous one held at 431 St Kilda Road which was the Nurses’ Memorial Hall. At the first one I believe Stan Arneil and representatives of the Latrobe Valley group and other credit unions spoke.
End of Tape 1B: 3828 Words: 1 hour 24 minutes.
3 NOVEMBER 1991: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH LEON MAGREE OF VICTORIA
You were just talking about the fact that you became aware of the formation of another association of other credit unions around.
LM: Yes at the meeting at 431 St Kilda Road and the Chairman of the Catholic Association, Tom Stubbs, got up and announced that it had been agreed that the Association of Catholic Credit Societies was prepared to consider changing its name and rules to allow the easier affiliation of other credit unions. A committee was formed to investigate the formation of such an association and that is in fact what transpired. In 1966 the Catholic Association changed its name to the Victorian Credit Co-operative Association which still continues today and it was probably the easiest way of forming a true State association by simply changing the name and rules of the existing one. With hindsight you could perhaps look back and suggest well it might have been preferable just to have wound up the first association and form a brand new one and then everyone could apply to join. But there was a lot of goodwill on all sides in the change of name that occurred and the change of rules and so we went on from there to encourage the formation of credit unions and help with the formation of credit unions not only in parish scenes but in industrial areas, employee situations, community groupings and so on.I continued as Manager of the Association under its new name and as we grew we had to employ obviously more staff and eventually Don Harris came onto the staff as our, you might say, our field representative, I can’t recall his exact title at the time. Don came with a lot of enthusiasm and good qualifications in the accounting area and he eventually was appointed the Chief Executive of the Association and my role became more of one of the representatives going out and visiting the various credit unions and helping form new ones. There was a somewhat of a major change there in the staffing structure and that would have occurred probably about 1970, in that time.
Had you become involved in AFCUL at that time? Who was the Chief Executive at that time?
LM: Oh yes. The Chief Executive at AFCUL would have been Dermot Ryan.
Well then it would have had to have been after 1970 then, it would be in 1970.
LM: Yes, that is true. That is true because I can remember Dermot contacting me and expressing some concern as to the changes that had taken place in the staffing structure. Don Harris and I got on very well and I still consider him a good friend even though he later left the Association and worked with Waverley Credit Union, where I also worked, and we have always had a pretty close connection although I don’t see him as often as I probably should. So that is how we changed the Association in its format.
I should also recall the fact that in 1965 we went to Newport to a School conducted by the CUNA Mutual Organisation and the New South Wales League of Credit Unions under the direction of Stan Arneil, an enthusiast whose experience was to be felt by credit unions throughout Australia, or influence rather, and other groupings throughout Australia. Ted Long, myself and Graham Benson, along with Geoff Wall of the ABC Staff Association Credit Society were the first Victorians to attend what became the traditional Newport Credit Union Schools. The following year Keith ?????? would have been there and Keith would have been there for the rest of the Schools as they were conducted each year.
Do you remember Room 19 at the Newport Schools?
LM: That sounds like the room where perhaps extra-curricula activities were conducted to the very small hours of the morning.
Hospitality provided by what was the City Council Credit Union in those days.
LM: That sounds right. I still have at home the actual folder from that particular School containing all the names of everyone who attended and the copies of the papers that were put out. Keep in the mind the Victorian people were still pretty suspicious of New South Wales credit unions. We always felt there was a hidden agenda there somewhere, and in particular the involvement of CUNA Mutual, we were not comfortable with the CUNA Mutual organisation. We felt that they were trying to in many respects, we won’t say infiltrate, but gain some very strong influence over Australian credit unions as a means to an end, the end being the advancement of CUNA Mutual Insurance Society which was either a life or general insurance company and had a strong interest in obtaining business from Australia. Of course our suspicions were compounded when Stan Arneil was appointed as the Manager of CUNA Mutual in Australia and we could see this coming from a long way off. But of course Stan eventually fell out with his employer and departed from CUNA Mutual, like very many other groupings he has been connected with and left in unhappy circumstances. Stan was a great inspiration to people throughout Australia as far as formation of credit unions, but he was also a controversial figure, controversy seemed to follow him wherever he went. He would often tell us of how he was appointed as the Adviser to the Labor Government on Co-operative Societies and when he had a disagreement with the Premier of the day, he challenged the Premier to sack him, so the Premier did sack him. Stan would tell that story himself. Later we saw Stan fall out with his bosses at CUNA Mutual and then of course he even fell out, or left, the Australian Federation of Credit Unions under unhappy circumstances which was very sad because we all learned a lot from Stan and gained from his enthusiasm and his ability to get up and speak. He was a very tall man and always attracted attention by his appearance and by his ability to get over the story in a forceful fashion.
Have you go any stories about Stan Arneil?
LM: Just give me time to think. I can always remember the time he came down to Victoria to address an annual conference of the Australian Bank Employees Association. They had on their agenda the possible formation of a credit union and it seemed quite strange having regard to the industry in which they were employed, notwithstanding that the Commonwealth Bank had their own Employees Credit Union already, a big one to boot. Stan just called into my office and said, ‘Come on we are going down to confront this group,’ or words to that effect. In no time, notwithstanding the opposition that came from the floor to the idea of forming a credit society, in no time they were influenced by what Stan had to say, purely, I would suggest, by his appearance and by the method with which he got over his story. Mind you he was helped by one of the Victorian delegates getting up and pointing out to his colleagues that most of them were probably on salaries far above the average bank employee who didn’t have access to personal loans, or if he did it was under conditions that weren’t conducive to what they would like to achieve and that they should consider not themselves as probably highly paid bank employees but the other employees, and that seemed to carry the day. But I can still remember Stan standing up and addressing a very large gathering of bank employees who then proceeded to form their own credit union, registered in Queensland, the ABU Credit Unit, and I understand it is still one of the Queensland credit unions even though it operates throughout Australia.
So what about the other people that you have know in the Credit Union Movement, Dermot Ryan, people like that? You have mentioned a few things about Dermot, have you got any stories you can tell, whether funny or otherwise, you can tell about him?
LM: Well later when I went to Papua New Guinea on behalf of the Australian Federation of Credit Unions, that would have been in 1971 when Dermot was the Chief Executive of AFCUL. This was the time when I felt I really got to know Dermot well and his family having to pass through Sydney on my way, naturally enough, to Port Moresby. I saw Dermot working first-hand, because we had already experienced him having had him down to Victoria to attend the Warburton Schools, we got to know him as a lovable character, a bit of a rogue you might say in many respects, rough and ready. But we appreciated what he had done for New South Wales credit unions and the doors that he could open as a result of his connections through the Trade Union Movement and the political movement and most of us in Victoria got to like him very much. I did mention Graham Benson and I should enlarge on that. Graham’s work in promoting credit unions in Victoria must be recognised. He later went on to become Chairman of our State Association, or President, whatever term we used at the time, and he was another enthusiast just like Stan. He would probably commit Don Harris and myself to a lot of different meetings around the country and suburbs which we would have got to eventually, but Graham wanted everything to happen straight away. So we saw a great period of growth in those mid-60s in the early days of the Victorian Credit Co-operative Association. There were new credit unions to be formed, in fact in one week we formed five new credit unions which was somewhat unusual but they all came to a culmination at the one time.
Did you actually involve yourself in credit union development, in going out and attending formation meetings and advising people?
LM: Yes that became one of our prime functions at the Association, particularly after we’d opened our bond, or opened our ranks to admit credit unions that were not parish-based credit unions. We had a set format to follow. We would write to industries asking them to consider the formation of a credit society. Nine times out of ten we would get no response so we would have to ring them up and ask them if they had read our letter. On most occasions we would be allowed an interview with the Personnel Manager and we would explain that the steps from here would be if they were interested to call a meeting of their employees at which we would explain what was involved and out of that would arise, in most cases, the actual calling of a formation meeting and the meeting of the statutory requirements as far as the legal registration of the credit society.
Did you develop this format yourselves, or did you take it from someone else?
LM: No that format of forming industrial-based credit unions, I am talking about employee-based whether they be formed within industries or professional associations, that format was taken I suggest straight from New South Wales. Don Harris and I spent a bit of time with the equivalent officers in the New South Wales Credit Union League.
Who were?
LM: Ron Swanson for one, Les Robertson would have been the Manager, names slip the memory of the other staff up there at that time.
Harvey Dickinson, Malcolm Samuel?
LM: Harvey Dickinson, Noel I don’t believe, I have met Noel incidentally at the Newport School, but Noel wasn’t working for the League in those days. John Porter is another name, I probably came across John. Ron Swanson was the main one who we copied, you might say. We went around with Ron to a couple of sites in New South Wales and followed his format. Now keep in mind that is how we formed what you might call the industrial-based credit unions. If I might harp back to how the parish ones were formed it was an entirely different manner in which Ted Long and his YCW people had gone about the formation of the parish credit unions and that meant that the formation was more akin to what I understand what they had learnt from the Canadian experience, and I am talking probably east coast Canadian experience, whereby they would hold what was called cottage discussions, a title which I personally didn’t like because I though it was un-Australian and which I plead guilty too, or take credit for, whichever you like having eventually having changed to home discussions. But whether they be called cottage discussions or home discussions, they were a very successful way of forming the parish-based credit unions in Victoria in the 1950/1960 period, where they would either ask to be allowed into a particular parish or district or were invited in, whether it be metropolitan or country, and they would encourage the people who they contact to convene a number of these cottage discussions in the homes of the people who would eventually become the members of the credit society. The whole idea was just thrashed out in the lounge room. For example, I would have held one in my own home at Boleen and I would have invited neighbours and other people from the parish into my home. There might have been perhaps twelve people present and some of those in turn would conduct similar cottage discussions in their home. So by doing this over a number of weeks in a parish you would eventually cover forty or fifty people and if you thought you had enough interest in the formation of a credit society then you would then convene a formal meeting that would be required. So that cottage discussion, or home discussion, effort was found to be most successful both in the metropolitan and the country areas. The likes of Ted Long would travel many hundreds of miles to places like Ballarat and Bendigo and Geelong and Mildura and Swan Hill. Or if they didn’t go that far, the people from Bendigo would go on to Swan Hill and Mildura to form these societies.
Now were there any other community credit unions formed outside that method around Victoria?
LM: Well the Latrobe Valley one was an example. That would have been formed not by the cottage discussion method, to my knowledge.
But by that time you were Manager of the Association, so did you start to operate in a new way?
LM: The new way was a somewhat strict format we followed copied from New South Wales. I would say we would have started that after 1966 and it was mainly used to form industrial-based credit unions because most of the parish ones had been formed at that stage.
In Victoria, did you have a relationship with the Registrar, you had to negotiate the rules for credit unions in various circumstances? I mean did you have to negotiate as they did in New South Wales to form community credit unions? Did you have to negotiate the Bonds of each one?
LM: I feel the negotiation in relation with our State Registry of Co-operative Societies was an excellent one. They knew what we were doing. We had a set of model rules provided by the State Government. We had a very standard set of amendments to those model rules which was readily acceptable to the Registry of the day. We never to my knowledge had any problems in the actual registration of Common Bonds. We had a pretty standard terminology as far as the parish ones were concerned, the wording would be something along these lines that the Common Bond would be the adherence of a particular parish, and the word ‘adherence’ was chosen for obvious reasons, it would cover perhaps a person who didn’t fit within the strict parish boundaries but patronised that particular parish so he or she could be eligible to join that particular parish credit union, and it obviously covered the non-Catholic partner in what we used to call a ‘mixed marriage’, a quaint term I feel, but the non-Catholic partner would be accepted as an ‘adherent’ to the parish and therefore readily accepted as one able to join to parish credit union. In the case of industrial ones we formed, the Common Bond was the employee of that particular company and their spouses. Later on some of them would have included their children and other relatives, of course, but I would say at that stage, I am talking 1966 on, it was mainly the employees and their spouses were the Common Bond of those industrial credit unions. The community ones, some of them would have named particular boundaries perhaps, or the names of cities or shires, the residents of or employees of those cities or shires were eligible to join. So we didn’t have the conflict or the argument that I understand that New South Wales might have had with their Registry as far as the Common Bond was concerned. But that changed later on of course, when things became more complicated as far as Bonds were concerned. The Registrars with whom we were dealing, there was Ted Evells, a father figure as far as co-operatives were concerned in Victoria, initially there would have been Warren Jungworth, he would have been the man responsible as Registrar through the particular period we have discussed just to date. I like to think we enjoyed a good relationship with their office.
Would you have a credit union advisory committee in Victoria to the Minister and were you ever on it?
LM: We didn’t have a credit union advisory committee. Because we came under the Co-operative Act we had a co-operative advisory committee. To answer your question, I wasn’t on it. Ted Long served on that advisory committee at one stage.
What about dealings with the Ministers for Co-operatives, did you have any dealings with them?
LM: Again, we have never had a Minister for Co-operatives. We always came under the Ministry of Housing and he was responsible for Co-operative Societies.
Well it is the same as Victorian Housing and Co-operatives.
LM: The term ‘Co-operatives’ has never been used as far as the name of a Minister is concerned.
Yes, but he is still your Minister if you wanted to approach somebody?
LM: At the time it would have been actually the Treasurer of the day, who might in turn have shared the Premier’s role, I believe. But the Minister for Housing was formally the Minister responsible for Co-operative Housing Societies and any society registered under the Co-operation Act.
Now, I think we have got a number of subjects that we haven’t covered yet. We haven’t covered credit union education and Chapters. I don’t believe we have covered AFCUL, apart from a very small amount. Can you think of any other subjects we should cover before the interview ends. Not cover today, but we should go onto next time.
LM: Well, certainly education and the emphasis that was placed on education within co-operative societies in Victoria. This would include the formation of the Co-operative Development Society by Ted Long and his people within the YCW group, it would cover the Warburton Schools that we held, the regional groupings that existed in the Association, the Catholic Association later on to be called Chapters in the more expanded Association.
Well, perhaps we should break there because you have got your plane to catch and we can continue this hopefully in Melbourne at some other time. What do you think?
LM: Good idea, thanks Richard.
End Tape 2A: 3290 Words: 1 hour 10 minutes.
3 NOVEMBER 1991: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH LEON MAGREE OF VICTORIA
I will ask you Leon, when you left the VCCA what job did you have then? Why did you leave the VCCA?
LM: Well I left the VCCA in 1972 having accepted a position as Manager of the PSA Tradings and Loans Society in Port Moresby, PSA standing for Public Service Association. The credit unions in Papua New Guinea were called Savings and Loans Societies the reason for which is the subject of another story. So that is the reason I finally left the VCCA in 1972. Prior to that, in 1971, I had visited Papua New Guinea on behalf of the Australian Federation of Credit Unions who had been requested by their Reserve Bank to review the development of Savings and Loans Societies in Papua New Guinea and I was fortunate enough to be up in PNG for two weeks visiting the major centres of Port Moresby and Lae and Kodoka and Rabaul. I realised whilst I was there that the PSA Society, being the largest Society in the country, required a more in-depth study of its particular position and its likely future. So Gerald O’Byrne was chosen to also visit Papua New Guinea on behalf of AFCUL to just concentrate on that one society and so it would have been late 1971, or early 1972, that he would have visited Papua New Guinea and he came back and recommended that the PSA Society should in fact advertise for an ex-patriot Manager and that position was advertised both in Australia and Canada, or North America certainly. From the applicants I was chosen. I obviously got quite a strong interest in the place having visited there in 1971 and got the bug you might say and applied for the position and was fortunate enough to be appointed.
Was David Loring up there during the time you were up there?
LM: Yes, David had gone there from New South Wales. I am pretty sure he was actually working for a credit union before he went up there.
He was working for the Reserve Bank up there, I think?
LM: Yes, because the Reserve Bank were actually responsible for the development of credit unions, or Savings and Loans Societies as they were called, in Papua New Guinea and we might as well put this on tape now as to why that came to pass. If we go back to Dr Coombs, ??????? Coombs, Governor the Reserve Bank, he realised there was a need for what he called ‘grass roots banking’ in PNG and he had visited Fiji apparently and seen the development of credit unions there and decided that something similar should be formed for the indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. He arranged for the Reserve Bank to be virtually the sponsors of those Savings and Loans Societies and they called them Savings and Loans Societies not credit unions. They actually formed savings clubs before they went the next step and became Savings and Loans Society. In many respects I think we were fortunate the Reserve Bank had had the time and the resources to undertake this development. As far as the Credit Union Movement in Australia, I think we were very critical of the role of the Reserve Bank up there, we thought it was rather a patronising way of forming credit unions, in other words the people didn’t seem to be forming them themselves, they were formed for them by the Reserve Bank staff. That is how David came to be employed up there. He was concentrating on the urban, or industrial-type of Savings and Loans Societies in the Port Moresby area. He would have been up there for a number of months before I arrived.
How did you go up there? I don’t mean how did you get up there but how did you find managing in that area?
LM: Well, there were certainly a number of difficulties associated with it. The accommodation for the credit union wasn’t the best in the world, that was improved whilst I was there. They were working under sub-standard conditions before they could get a reasonable office of their own. They were experiencing rapid growth, membership applications just flowed in everyday, as did loan applications. It was a situation which was hard to get control of really but there was a steady flow of new business and yet they were running in a deficit because the savings far outstripped the loans and they were far too liquid to be able to make a surplus on their trading, particularly with their overheads of having employed an ex-patriot Manager across the other staff. All the other staff were indigenous people, I was the only ex-patriot on the staff of the Savings and Loans Society. We were under continual pressure by the Government of the day to localise the position, in other words to have an indigenous person trained to take over from the ex-patriot Manager and of course this pressure was applied to all Government departments up there and industry, that they should be working quickly towards localisation as it was known. This was a time when the country was moving towards self-government, not independence but self-government. Independence followed a short while later. In fact the country turned to self-government whilst we were there.
Did you manage to train anybody to take your job?
LM: Yes and no. We had advertised for a local person to take over and somebody had accepted the position, but just before taking over he changed his mind, if my memory serves me correctly. So it was back to square one. As my contract was due to expire in 1974, there was insufficient time for a local person to take over so we did employ a fellow who was in turn going to understudy the Australian who took over from me.
And how long were you over there?
LM: Just under two years, twenty-one months to be exact, June 1972 until Easter 1974.
Was that the expiry of your contract?
LM: The nature of the employment, the nature of the contract, was very much along public service lines. I have never experienced anything like it before having never worked in the public service and never having worked under a contract before. But being a public service savings and loans society, or credit union, they were used to employing people on that basis, so that the Public Service Association itself and its off-shoot the Savings and Loans Society tended to employ senior people under contract and it suited me to work in that way.
So how was it when you took over and how did you manage to improve it, or did you manage to improve it?
LM: Well, I would like to think that I did manage to improve it, its methods of operations, to put a bit of system into its operations. Two years certainly wasn’t enough. With hindsight one would have rearranged one’s nature of the employment differently. There was no leave, for example, available until the end of the twenty-one months period, which I think was difficult for an Australian working under conditions up there not to have leave at least once every twelve months. I think if one repeated the exercise you would at least insist on say two to three weeks say after twelve months rather than trying to wait nearly two years before taking leave. That length of time tended to mitigate against efficiency towards the end of the term. I must admit I was very fortunate having gone there, I took my family with me obviously, the children, my youngest at the time would have been five, the next one seven and the eldest nine or so, and it was an interesting stage for them. Schooling was comparatively easy to obtain under the State system up there and so I didn’t have to worry about secondary education for them which they obviously started on return, or the eldest one did. I went up with three children and came back with four, our youngest child having been born whilst we were up there.
And the method of operation there, how was it different from operation of a credit union down here in Melbourne?
LM: Well it was very much a manual operation initially, on a sort of a computer system but it was a local ICL system which had a lot of shortcomings and was never up-to-date and never on time and consequently the staff were trying to work off computer reports that were many weeks old. You can imagine the difficulties that brought to the society insofar as the people were pouring in to do transactions, mostly withdrawals because the money was deducted from the salaries; money was coming in by pay roll deductions, that was no problem; but as I say withdrawing over the counter in hordes and yet the record one was looking at to ascertain whether they had money in their account could have been anything up to six weeks old. Consequently one had to keep a manual system of transactions since the last computer report and it was just virtually impossible to work under that situation. So that was a problem inherent to the operations of the particular society.
What about your dealings with the Board, did you have any dealings with the Board?
LM: I had a good relationship with the Board, I feel. They were mostly local people, indigenous people with one exception, an Australian who was married to a Papua New Guinean living up there. I enjoyed a good relationship with the Board. I endeavoured to apply the standards that I was used to in Australia as far as the operation of the Board and the Society as far as setting policies and having reports and agendas and minutes all up to date, etc. It was just the difficulty of operating up there with the out of date computer system and there was no other alternative available at the time and the difficulties of working under humid and hot conditions which were obviously foreign to me which tended to slow things down in many respects. One lacked a lot of enthusiasm because of the torrid weather conditions under which you were working up there.
Did you have a Supervisory Committee with that credit union?
LM: We did actually, because it had tried to follow the book as far as setting up a credit union and the book had probably been provided by Australia or North America. In fact whilst there was a Supervisory Committee, in effect I don’t think it did very much. They had an auditor who came in, same as we had an auditor in credit unions in Australia, and did an annual audit. But the Act under which they operated, or the Ordinance as it was called, did provide for the appointment of Loan Committees and Supervisory Committees. It was more akin to the New South Wales legislation you would find.
And was there a Savings Stabilisation Fund and the proper insurance and central banking system and things like this?
LM: Taking them in reverse order, yes there was a fledgling central bank, they had formed a Federation. We didn’t have to worry about State organisations so we had the two tiers: we had the societies affiliating with a national federation and they had, as I say, a fledgling central bank operating. As far as insurance, we had loan protection insurance through, I am pretty sure it was CUNA Mutual actually, up there. Well obviously the normal insurance as far as fidelity guarantee, etc., which was with CIC I am pretty sure, CIC Insurance. I am pretty sure the life cover on loans with CUNA Mutual. I know the premiums were very high because we were bulked in with the experience of South Pacific nations as far as our claims experience was concerned.
And when you left Papua New Guinea, was that to a job back in Australia?
LM: That is a very good question because I took with me to Papua New Guinea a letter from Graham Benson on VCCA letterhead congratulating me on my appointment and wishing me well up there and assuring me that on my return a position would be found for me, something I found not to be the case when I came back. I can honestly state that I had to apply for unemployment benefits when I came back for a very short period of time, because there was in fact no positions available within credit unions. The Preston-Lawler Credit Co-operative, later to be known as Plenty Credit Union, were able to find work for me on one or two days a week, as did Dandenong Credit Union, through Gavin Cook, they employed me for a little while. But give the VCCA credit, they did find a little bit of work for me in their Albert Road office, I think helping Brendan Griffin as far as the work he was doing either in what was called the Victoria Credit Union which was operating out of the office of the VCCA. But fortunately a position came up reasonably quickly with the Waverley Credit Union who had advertised, or were looking for, their first Manager and I was appointed to that position in 1974. So I didn’t have to wait too long. So in fairness to Graham they did eventually find a position, in fact it was Phillip Elliot that drew it to my attention. It was probably Phillip who suggested that I should apply for it.
Well, now perhaps we’d better get back to the purpose of the exercise. We have sort of done a bit of housekeeping as far as your life is concerned on the outside, perhaps now we should talk about credit union education generally, and Schools as you remember them.
LM: Yes, well to help cover this subject I have had another read of Susan Pepper’s book and I think she covers the subject rather fully.
I am only after your own experience.
LM: Fine. But I can just repeat a couple of her words on page forty of the book where she says, ‘Educate or perish’, was an important theme in the Co-operative Movement and the early co-operators in Victoria realised this. Now the YCW Co-operatives had placed a lot of emphasis on the need for education within co-operatives and this seems to follow the pattern of the Antigonish Movement in Canada and they always tried to develop some form of education or tried to get Boards of co-operatives to devote some time to the subject of education, whether it be on the philosophical nature of co-operatives or on the more technical side of the proper operation of co-operatives. That flowed through to the Association in its original form in 1957. Then it was more formalised by the formation of this Co-operative Development Society, which I believe was formed in 1961, and was formed primarily to concentrate on education in co-operatives. As Susan explains in her book, the Co-operative Development Society endeavoured to produce publications, programs that individual co-operatives, whether they be credit co-operatives or trading co-operatives or housing co-operatives, would hopefully follow as far as an educational program was concerned. Just how successful this was they were very successful in producing a newspaper called The Co-operator which came out for quite a period of time and then a quarterly bulletin. I was only reading a few old copies recently and you can get a bit of a giggle reading it now, but I suppose it was the thought of the day. There was a heavy emphasis on the philosophical side and the Christian basis for co-operatives etc. If one reads the report prepared by Bob Maybury when he visited Nova Scotia and other places overseas in 1964, again you see this heavy emphasis on the Christian basis of co-operatives to which to my mind was a somewhat narrow approach to the subject. I think this was born out in the comments that Bob Maybury picked up as he went around on the Co-operative Development Society’s Charter, you might say. If you read his report, and there is a copy of it in the library here I notice, the first section of that report is the Development Society’s Charter which is full of philosophical and Christian principles, etc. and probably a bit narrow in its thinking. He has obviously asked these overseas people as he has visited Nova Scotia or wherever for their opinion on it and they, I feel, have tended to agree with what I think of it, it was too narrow. Anyway we see later on, as history will show, that the Development Society endorsed the opening of the Bond of the Catholic Association.
Incidentally, Bob Maybury’s Report is also in the Historical Co-operative. It was amongst Berry Calverley’s papers.
LM: Good. I am pleased to hear that.
There is two copies of Susan Pepper’s book, one in draft from which she sent up, I think it was for Berry, to have a look at and the other one is a proper copy. Tom Kelly has annotated it. It is scrawled, ‘And so and so and so and so’ and including all sorts of a lot of people who he thinks she has left out.
LM: Yes. I know Charles Butler has been critical of several parts. For example she does say that the first credit union in New South Wales was formed by Kevin Yates and obviously Charles Butler has found errors in that regard.
I noticed something in that which I wanted to ask you about, and I did ask you about it on the phone. It mentions that the National Catholic Rural Movement reorganised their credit societies in 1945, now is that a misprint. It has got a quotation from the report of the Rural Movement at that time. Now, if that is so, there was a lot more credit societies formed much earlier in Victoria than is otherwise said.
LM: Than have otherwise been given credit for.
Mind you, I still think that there were credit society adjuncts to other organisations all over the country, all over the world for that matter, that weren’t strictly co-operative credit unions. But in New South Wales and I think in Victoria here they mention them starting up as adjuncts to building societies, for instance. So where can I get the National Catholic Rural Movement’s papers? Where would I find them?
LM: Well Susan Pepper might be able to guide you to the right person.
She hasn’t used it. You see she is quoting and the next thing she is talking about the first one being formed in 1945? (1954 on tape) and so on. In fact she hasn’t followed it up although she quoted it.
LM: Yes, well she mentions that by 1953 there were fifteen credit unions, so …
But before that she mentions that they were reorganised, I think it is in one of those quotations there or maybe in another one.
LM: But by the mid-1950s they had sponsored the formation of over twenty different credit unions.
Then in another one it says, quoting a report from the National Catholic Rural Movement, that they reorganised them in 1945. There is the quote, ‘The NCR recognised very early the need to form an Association in 1945 the National Report stated: “The Movement has decided to federate existing credit unions”.’ 1945. So we have got a lot of work to do on top of what has already been done.
LM: Well you will be talking to Ted Long in a couple of weeks. Well his comments on that would be of interest, I am sure. I think I have mentioned to you there was a booklet produced by the Rural Movement which I know Susan Pepper would have had access to which refers to all those little country credit unions that the Rural Movement had formed and none of which apparently became registered under the Co-operation Act, except perhaps for, or to my knowledge they didn’t, except for Benalla. I think Benalla might track its origins back to the Rural Movement. Benalla of course is still in existence as a community credit union.
I notice also, that there are large quantities of savings banks, some of them co-operative in fact quite a large number of them co-operative, who also lent money. Why can’t you call them credit unions? There is one in Queensland which is eighty-six, eighty-seven years old at the present moment, it is the Cairns Penny Bank, that lends money. In fact, I think it had $2 million to lend out there, the last I heard.
LM: Well let’s get back to the subject of education, which I think you were asking about. I talked about the emphasis the YCW co-operatives had placed on it and the origins of that relate back to their close connections with the Antigonish Movement. Then the formation of a Co-operative Development Society which was expected to be the education co-operative within the YCW sponsored co-operative societies.
Were you involved with that?
LM: No, I was starting to specialise more in the credit societies, whereas Ted Long had gone off to specialise in the promotion of the Development Society. It was hoped that the Development Society would continue to grow and be looked at as the source of co-operative education within the Victorian Movement generally. Well that didn’t eventually come to pass, because it eventually wound up, which again Ted Long would be best to comment on why that occurred. I suppose finance would be the main reason because people give lip-service to education but when it comes to actually handing out hard cash to finance a body which is only going to concentrate on that one subject, it is hard to see it come to fruition always. Of course it is the type of society which would find it difficult to generate income itself unless its Schools are such that they can charge money to come to, or produce publications that can be run at a profit. At any rate, the Development Society did start to sponsor Schools on Co-operatives and the first one was held in 1963. It was held over six evenings and there were eleven speakers on a wide range of topics. That was held in what they call Lombard House, after Father Lombard in the YCW Co-operative’s building in ?????????? Street in Melbourne. There were good numbers attending, it was crowded if I remember correctly. The same people came back six consecutive Tuesdays and that was seen as an excellent start to the Development Society’s idea of sponsoring Schools. Then there was a very successful residential School held in 1966 at Newman College at Melbourne University.
End Tape 2B: 3817 Words: 1 hour 40 minutes.
12 FEBRUARY, 1992: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH LEON MAGREE
LM: We were talking about the successful Schools sponsored by the Co-operative Development Society in 1966 which embraced not only the credit co-operatives but also other forms of co-operatives in Victoria, the trading co-operatives, and was the first example of them all coming together for a Residential School in Victoria. It was held, as I said, at Newman College and more people would have been involved in that occasion and there was an excellent spirit existed at that gathering, and a lot of enthusiasm for an appreciation of what we felt we could achieve as far as working together. The Warburton Schools that were run by the Association, and mainly sponsored by the Morwell Co-operatives and the ABC Staff Association Credit Union were probably as Susan said, the next phase in bringing people together. They tended to concentrate primarily on credit unions without involving other forms of co-operatives and they ran from 1966 until 1973, when the Warburton Chalet was burnt down. They were very well attended, again there was great enthusiasm displayed and it was sort of a highlight in many respects of the credit union year to attend those particular Schools.
To what extent were they following Newport in New South Wales, and sponsorship of CUNA Mutual?
LM: Well they did definitely follow the Newport School, but they were different because of the area in which they were held, Newport was by the sea in New South Wales, whereas Warburton was held in the middle of winter up in the hills and it was freezing cold outside and in fact it was cold in some of the accommodation areas. I can remember Jack Coyne, from New South Wales, refusing to accept the accommodation that had been allotted to him on one occasion. I found him in the foyer of the Chalet and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and Jack said, ‘I’m not staying if that is all you can give me, I’m going.’ So he was found a better place to bed down. Fortunately the people who ran Warburton Chalet improved the accommodation over the years during which we were attending so that the standard of the School improved likewise.
Must have heated it up a bit much when it burnt down.
LM: Yes, heated it up too much. I was actually living in Papua New Guinea at the time it was burnt down, so I accept no responsibility for that whatsoever.
Do you remember the Warburton Weekly at those Schools?
LM: Yes, that would have been something that Norm Hodgson, Graham Benson’s offsider, would have produced. Norm had a little office up there at the Warburton Chalet where he produced I think it would have been a daily publication reporting progress. Again this followed the pattern of the Newport School so it was very much modelled on the Newport Schools. Of course Dermot and Stan Arneil were present and there was much shall we say frivolity going on very late at night. There was a particular area of the Warburton School, the Warburton buildings rather, fortunately set a fair way away from the accommodation area, known as the snake pit, and that provided a dance floor plus plenty areas for talking and drinking and whatever else might have gone on. A lot of work was done after hours certainly.
I notice that a morning service was led by Helen MacIntyre in the swimming pool.
LM: At Warburton? Must have been in the years after I went to Papua New Guinea because I have no recollection of that one whatsoever.
Morning prayers in the swimming pool.
LM: No, I know nothing about that, I deny all knowledge. Father Ganey also attended those schools. He came out on a couple of occasions at least to Warburton and Joane Naisara would have been there, at one of the earlier ones I feel. The same people who attended the Newport Schools. That would have been the influence of Graham Benson.
Did you attend Toowoomba, the Tasmanian ones and Christie’s Beach in South Australia?
LM: No, I never attended any interstate Schools other than the Newport one and the Warburton Schools.
What about the Chapters, did you attend them?
LM: Well we can probably move onto the Chapters. But keep in mind that the Catholic Association in its early form had regional gatherings, they did not call them Chapters. The term Chapters is again something that has been brought from New South Wales and also from overseas, North America. Just as the term League was foreign to Victoria, we could call our association an Association, the term League was foreign to Victoria, the term Chapters was foreign to Victoria. So we had these regional groupings in the Catholic Association and they, as its term suggests, they brought together credit societies on a regional basis whether it be suburban regional or country regional. They held various seminars, for the want of a better term, in the evenings or more particularly on Sunday afternoons. Again the subjects covered would have been philosophical subjects relating to the formation of co-operatives and the more technical sides as I have said before relating to the better operation of credit societies. I can remember attending those at Mount Waverley, for example, and probably Box Hill and there would have been ones held out in the Reservoir area no doubt. Then of course in the country areas at Bendigo and Ballarat, Ted Long would probably have been present at all those. Moving on, later on when we changed the name of the Association well the names of the regional groupings tended to change to Chapters to keep us in line with New South Wales, so we had the Melbourne Chapter which still exists, and we had Chapters operating in the south to cover the credit unions operating in the southern suburbs, then one in the south-eastern, one in the east and no doubt in the northern suburbs. The success of their operations varied. The south-eastern one was probably still in operation, it eventually merged with the southern one because of the merger of credit unions.
Yes, Gavin Cook was talking about that.
LM: They used to conduct their Chapter meetings at the Dandenong Club and because of Gavin’s involvement they were run very much along the lines of Service Club meetings whereby some of the meeting would be conducted whilst you were eating, etc., and that seemed to be very efficient and a good way of operating. The meeting was over in a short space of time and it combined the serious side of having a guest speaker and a subject to consider as well as the social side of meeting together over a meal and exchanging points of view with the people with whom you were sitting. They were very useful. The Melbourne Chapters continued to run in much the same way. I must admit I enjoyed the conviviality of the suburban Chapters more than I ever enjoyed the Melbourne Chapter, which tended to be a bit more formal because of the natures of the credit unions attending. But that is just a personal opinion. So that would have covered education, probably. We have moved from the early days of the Schools run by the Development Society of the Association and the Warburton Schools which were more credit union-orientated as distinct from the more Co-operative Movement area.
What about ICUD and AICUM now, are you involved with either of those?
LM: I attended one of the very first Schools held at Albury conducted by the Managers’ Institute. It was so early that I can assure you that we were all accommodated in the one motel, everything was conducted in the one venue, whereas today they are accommodated all over Albury and I think the main venue is probably some conference centre or town hall up there. So that is the only one I have ever attended as far as AICUM is concerned. That would have been pre-1981, because I was at Waverley Credit Union at the time.
To what extent do you think that ICUD for the Directors and AICUM for the Management has taken over credit union education?
LM: Well they obviously have taken over the education, and that is possibly not a bad thing. In the case of both organisations, I have probably been a little bit critical of them insofar as I have seen them as a bit of a prop for those credit unions that choose not to be affiliated with the various State Associations, and through the State Associations with the National body, the Australian Federation of Credit Unions League, because the credit unions that can send representatives to AICUM and ICUD functions can still manage to keep up to date with what is happening in the overall credit union movement without being affiliated with their State or National body. So in a way they are perhaps getting the benefits of joining together without the financial commitment. I think the stature of both AICUM and more recently ICUD has grown and of course their organisation and the conferences they run appear to be very professionally organised and well recognised.
Your involvement with AFCUL, have you been involved much with them?
LM: As you know the Victorian Association wasn’t amongst the State bodies that originally formed AFCUL, so I wasn’t there right at the beginning. What was it, Queensland, New South Wales, First Queensland and New South Wales that formed AFCUL? Victoria either was not eligible or chose deliberately not to be part of it. But then once we did become part of AFCUL I was closely involved because I was working for the State Association here. One of the very early meetings that was held with AFCUL after Victoria came in was in fact held in Victoria, it was held down at the Brighton Savoy Motel, at Brighton, and I was in attendance on that occasion. The numbers were very small because it was a small organisation, in fact we were cramped into a room not much bigger than this room we are sitting in doing this interview.
I notice that you were an alternate delegate, but I haven’t got you down as a delegate. Were you actually a delegate?
LM: I do believe I was a delegate to one meeting when I later became a Director of the Association. I don’t think I was ever a delegate when I was employed by the Association. But see I later became a Director of the Association after returning from Papua New Guinea in 1974 and I am pretty sure I was a delegate to an AFCUL meeting held in Melbourne shortly after that.
Is there anything else you want to cover about AFCUL, or should we cover your period of your Directorship at the VCCA?
LM: Well, as you know, AFCUL was formed by Stan Arneil and his friends from New South Wales and Queensland and it was part of Stan’s grand plan after he’d gone around Australia forming credit unions very quickly he wanted to have every State have its League or Association and he quickly wanted them to Federate. Victoria stood back and watched all this happening and felt it was happening all too quickly. Then of course he went off into the South Pacific Islands and he formed some sort of South Pacific Association which lasted about five minutes in the Samoan, Fiji area there. Again we stood back and watched and said this wouldn’t work. But of course AFCUL did work. We needed a National body because there were National issues coming up, particularly in the legislative field with matters such as the Home Savings Grant legislation, so AFCUL performed a very useful role in that regard. Of course Stan moved on from his work with AFCUL and was followed by Dermot Ryan and Kevin Murray and there continued to be national issues which had to be tackled. So as far as my involvement in AFCUL annual meetings, I can recall attending one of the early AFCUL conferences that was held in Surfers Paradise and I think that would be regarded as one of the most successful ones. Stan was one of the keynote speakers and that was the one that Robertson from CUNA International attended, Dick Robertson from Arizona attended, and he was also a keynote speaker. I think that would have been Victoria’s first real involvement in an interstate AFCUL convention and there was a lot of razzamatazz associated with the organisation and arrival of the official party in Surfers Paradise, where it was held. We all naturally enough flew up the Victorians to save money in one plane and other States seemed to come with us. In other words either Adelaide or Tasmania flew up with us from Melbourne. Anyway we all arrived much around the same time. I daresay we touched down at Coolangatta where we were greeted by Bruce Moore, of Moore and Starr fame, who was the Mayor of Surfers Paradise, not a young man at that stage but I can still picture him dressed in a lovely lightweight suit adorned by his Mayoral regalia, chains of office etc., accompanied by these beautiful Meter Maids in gold bikinis standing on the tarmac. As I say, this was typical of the razzamatazz of the new credit union national organisation.
Was that during the Dermot Ryan era?
LM: No, this is the Stan Arneil era. Dermot was around but I don’t know who was responsible. I would say the Queensland people, Merv Callaghan would have to take some blame for having organised this glitzy welcome to the Victorian and interstate parties who were shocked by the nature of the welcome. Having been welcomed, and Dick Robinson from USA having been welcomed, we were all bundled into double decker buses for the trip from Coolangatta to Surfers Paradise, or it might have been something closer than Surfers Paradise, anyway it might only have been from the airport to Coolangatta. Anyway it seemed to take forever and a day to get there because the official party, that is the Bensons and the Dick Robinsons and the Stan Arneils, they didn’t have to travel in the double decker bus, they were in fact travelling in antique cars, what do you call them, vintage cars which could only travel at a certain speed and the roads in those days weren’t anything like they are today. Of course we had to crawl along behind these vintage cars which were probably open and enjoying the lovely air whereas we were crammed in our best suits, of course, in these double decker buses wishing we could get there a lot quicker. Anyway, we eventually got there and it was a very successful conference. It was opened by the Governor of Queensland. Obviously Merv Callaghan and his people hadn’t stinted as far as the razzamatazz that went along with all that. Of course this gained a fair amount of publicity in the local press. These things tended to put credit unions on the map, you might say, in may respects.
Were you at the Hobart conference where the tax position was announced by Frank Crean?
LM: No. I was not at that one. Do you know what year that would have been?
I think that would be 1974.
LM: Well I would probably have been still in Port Moresby, or only just come back from Port Moresby at that stage.
You were a Director from 1974 to 1977.
LM: Yes, but I was not involved in the Hobart AFCUL conference.
Were you at Dermot’s farewell in Canberra the following year, in 1975?
LM: Yes. I wasn’t a delegate, I don’t recall being a delegate, but I was sent there by the VCCA.
As an observer?
LM: As an observer. The atmosphere at that conference contrasted greatly with the sort of enthusiasm that existed at, for example, that earlier one held in Surfers Paradise, because the divisions had started to show within the Movement, whereas back in that earlier one we were all for coming together and getting it all together. We have managed, in the case of Victoria, to affiliate a lot of the ones that weren’t affiliated and there was more unity in existence. Though even at that stage there tended to be this rivalry between those perhaps who favoured CUNA Mutual and those who favoured the other side of things. There was a marked contrast, for example, at Surfers Paradise between the applause, the standing ovation, given to Stan Arneil’s address and the sort of forced standing ovation given to Dick Robinson from CUNA because of the two different personalities. Stan was a wonderful orator whereas Dick was a very much a low key type speaker. Stan Arneil finished his speech with those famous lines of ‘He’s not heavy, he’s my brother’, which others have, incidentally, tried to copy within the credit union movement without the same effect as Stan could give to it.
They made a song of it?
LM: Yes.
It has been around a long while, Stan didn’t originate it.
LM: Stan didn’t originate it, but many of us hadn’t heard it before Stan came out with it on that occasion and the way Stan could use it to finish a speech was something that had to be seen to be believed, had to be experienced. Naturally enough, it brought a natural reaction of a standing ovation. I have heard others attempt to finish their speeches with the same words, but it falls a little flat unfortunately.
Do you remember the seminars that used to accompany AFCUL meetings, conventions, at one time? Professor Geoffrey Meredith from Armidale University used to …
LM: Yes. In fact the one I attended in Melbourne as a delegate had been preceded by a seminar conducted by Meredith. That is right, but I didn’t attend the seminar, I perhaps came in on one of the seminar sessions but that was followed, if I remember correctly, by the actual meeting itself.
Before we get off the AFCUL conventions, you realise that one of those AFCUL annual meeting conventions was actually held at Warburton. Flushed with the success of the Warburton Schools, Graham influenced AFCUL into actually holding one in Melbourne, more particularly holding it at Warburton, and that was very successful in so far as it embraced people coming from all over Australia to attend and being exposed to the elements of Warburton, all the good things and bad things about Warburton.
Once more a Berry Calverley collection includes the various little roneoed sheets called, instead of the Warburton Weekly which was for the Schools, which was spelled Weakley, it was the Dermot one, the AFCUL which was called the Warburton Very Weakley.
LM: Yes that would be typical Dermot having a shot at Victorians. Dermot in his own fashion would give no credit to anything that came out of Victoria, would never like to be seen as giving credit to anything that came out of Victoria whatsoever.
Whereas the Warburton Weekley, from the Warburton Schools, had the proper masthead and all that sort of thing, whereas this one was drawn by Dermot.
LM: Yes, it looked a bit like his publication which he produced when he was Chief Executive of AFCUL called, AFCUL Briefs.
Briefs was the Peter Jennings one, which was fairly presentable.
LM: I could stand corrected, but didn’t CUNA have CUNA Briefs.
It did indeed, and Dermot had AFCUL Shorts with a daggy pair of shorts.
LM: Yes, which shocked, horrified the Victorians who expected a masthead of a little bit higher standard. But you could see Dermot’s humour coming through it all and see him having a shot at his American counterparts and something they probably didn’t see the funny side of either. It was something that you couldn’t show to people outside the Movement, they wouldn’t see the funny side of it either, I don’t think. It was a bit sub-standard. It raised a few laughs amongst the credit union people, certainly, internally.
What about your Directorship from 1974 to 1977, what was the main happenings during that time at the VCCA?
LM: How much time have we got?
I think about ten minutes.
LM: Well I think the way I came to become a Director in 1974, I left Victoria as you know in 1972, I left the VCCA with Don Harris being the person in charge and Graham Benson as Chairman. Whilst I was in Papua New Guinea what happened to me, that is having been replaced by Don Harris, was the same thing that happened to Don insofar as the Board at the time decided that Don wasn’t going to be the person to head up their organisation and they advertised for a Chief Executive who, just as Don had come over the top of me, Geoff Conrad came over the top of Don. So Don left the VCCA to take up the management of the Glenn Waverley Credit Union, as it was known in those days, and I received a phone call in Papua New Guinea from Australia and it was Graham Benson on the line. Graham said, ‘I’ve got the new General Manager of the VCCA on the phone and I want you to speak to him,’ and he whispered, ‘he’s the closest thing to Les Robertson you could get.’ It was very nice, you might say, of Graham to ring me, but why he chose to ring me.
End Tape 3A: 3596 Words: 1 hour 20 minutes
12 FEBRUARY, 1992: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH LEON MAGREE
Your Directorship, you were saying?
LM: I came back from Papua New Guinea in 1974 and was approached by the Managers of two credit unions asking would I consider standing for the Board of the VCCA, that they weren’t happy with the way the VCCA was going. Why they thought I could change things as one Director I don’t really know. Anyway, I agreed with their suggestion and I was duly nominated and elected in 1974. I felt a little uncomfortable because I was a former employee of the Association now sitting as a Director. It wasn’t a particularly happy time, I don’t think I had enough time to devote to the job. They were going through a difficult time with the Jubilee Lake matter, Jubilee Lake Co-operative, about which others have probably spoken. The Teledata, that was the EDP system, and its problems.
What were the problems from your point of view, with that?
LM: Well financial problems really which resulted in the Association running into a very large deficit.
Yes, but was the problem the fact that they had bought it from there and put the person they’d bought it from back in as a Manager, or what was it?
LM: I think it was a problem of growing too quickly. The credit unions were starting to boom, the central bank function was booming, they were flush with funds and looking for places to put it and they weren’t prepared to accept legal advice they were being given by Marney and Goldman and therefore went off without property authority, I suggest, and sought the advice of other solicitors.
Who on the Board was responsible, do you think?
LM: For all this happening, oh I couldn’t name names unfortunately at this point of time. As I say I think I was just one and I think the people who nominated me to go onto the Board expected a lot of one person to make changes. There was obviously a need for some change, but one person wasn’t going to achieve it. So it wasn’t until other changes occurred on the Board itself, people like Don Harris and Arthur Carter came back onto the Board and Graham Benson, etc., that some changes were eventually achieved. Ian Larsson, of course, and Ken Plugh I’d say were eventually responsible for the departure of Geoff Conrad as the General Manager and that all came to a head at a particular special meeting that was held, I believe, on Mother’s Day and strangely enough I wasn’t present. I think I must have set higher priorities on that particular day. But there were some very difficult meetings held and it wasn’t a unified Board by any stretch of the imagination. There were those Directors who were sympathetic to Geoff and probably responsible for his initial appointment and those who wanted to see Geoff move on and so you had this unhappy feeling on the Board, really conflict, with regards to the management. I think some of the people that Geoff appointed under him, to put it frankly, seemed to leave a bit to be desired as far as the operations of the financial side of things.
What about the term when Leon Turner took over for a few months, do you remember that?
LM: Yes, I remember that vividly. Leon was put in as a temporary Manager. He was operating the Jubilee Lake organisation downstairs in the same building as the VCCA and he was brought in to act as a Manager. The first meeting we attended after he was appointed, we walked into this very room in which we are now sitting to find we weren’t sitting at a Board table, the tables were individual tables around the room. It was part of Leon’s approach trying to achieve some form of cohesion. He must have read about it in a book somewhere, or been taught about it at school. It was a most unusual situation where we were sitting as groups of three at individual tables at this first meeting after his appointment. Eventually commonsense came into play and the Board table did take on its traditional format. It wasn’t this table we are at now.
Is that when they nailed it into the floor so they couldn’t move it?
LM: No, that came later. But obviously the table was such that it could be moved into a committee format, but to me it was quite unusual and didn’t really help the proper running of the Board meeting. Leon sort of acted as Acting Manager there for a while. Unfortunately, his main responsibility, the Jubilee Lake fell on hard times and proved to be a disaster financially and never came to fruition. That was the dream of Graham Benson that we’d have this wonderful venue up at Daylesford which would fill the gap that the Warburton Schools used to provide but this would be an ongoing thing. In fact Graham, and I’ve seen it in print, had in mind that I would be chosen as perhaps the full-time Manager or operator of this School when I came back from Papua New Guinea. As I say, I have seen it in print but it was never put to me seriously by anyone. The idea was great, now I am talking about the Jubilee Lake complex at Daylesford. The idea was great but the actual application of it, by Leon Turner in particular, was a complete disaster. He just poured money into the Lake. People used to say, down the drain certainly, into investigating the whole idea and excavating for the thing which never came to fruition.
And was there any other matter during that time? Had the problems of stabilisation been gone through at that time or were they still going on at that time? The Stabilisation Fund and the Stabilisation Committee, were you on that at all?
LM: Yes, I think I would have served on the Stabilisation Committee, the one that was run on a voluntary basis by the affiliates of the VCCA. Of all the criticism you can throw at the VCCA from different angles, about the disaster of its computer systems, the disaster of its Jubilee Lake experience, etc. etc., the Stabilisation Fund is one area that I will defend to the day I die. It was a success in my mind, particularly due to the efforts of one Brendan Griffen, who was employed by the Association and specialised for a number of years in the Stabilisation Fund. The work he put into operating that Fund and ensuring the Fund ran properly and ensuring that credit unions ran properly, particularly the smaller ones, I am high in my praise of the work that Fund did and the work that Brendan did in particular.
They didn’t have the authority of the Registrar as they did in New South Wales, either, and they didn’t act in the heavy way which was so often done in New South Wales, either, and yet they were more successful in that there is no credit union in Victoria where a member lost money.
LM: That’s right. Of course the weakness of the Fund is that it couldn’t embrace all credit unions.
But you still had no failures, whereas in New South Wales they had two which were outside the funds and they went down.
LM: Well we were fortunate, I suppose, that nothing outside the Association went defunct on us and nothing within. Those that did have problems within were quickly attended to by Brendan and probably one other staff member that he had.
But they had no authority had they?
LM: But we disciplined ourselves. The Stabilisation Fund that you will see in Bob Maybury’s reports, I believe, that it be recommended that it be formed. Over many months, many years we argued what format it would take. There was going to be a non-fund would you believe, a fund that nobody would put money into until something went wrong, but you would have the fund there. In other words, you wouldn’t have any money earning no interest, but as soon as something went wrong you would be committed to put something in, that was called a non-fund. That was one idea that was seriously considered. But eventually the Stabilisation Fund was formed, it was formed for the affiliates of the Association. If you belonged to the Association you had to be part of the fund and we kept money in that Fund and of course it tidied up a lot of little problems that sprung up from time to time.
Well Queensland, although they were successful, they actually had two funds because the first one became entirely used up.
LM: Well you haven’t visited Brendan Griffen yet have you.
No, I don’t know whether he is on the list here. Did you put him on the list then?
LM: Well he was invited certainly and you are obviously not picking up this week, but I would hope you get to him before you finish this project. He will be able to tell you stories about that Fund. But one that I might have told you previously, but if not I will tell you again if we have got time, because when I was a Director of the Association Brendan used to like to take with him a Director along to visit the credit unions. He knew one particular credit union, the Manager, he suspected the Manager was doing the wrong thing, but he also knew the Manager could very quickly pretend to have a ‘dicky ticker’ as they say. So we went along to this Board meeting and the Directors were completely loyal to their Manager and had no idea what was going on, but Brendan had his suspicions. On the way to the meeting, which was held a fair bit out of Melbourne, he said, ‘I’ll bet pounds to peanuts that the Manager will pretend that he is taken ill during the meeting when I start to ask some serious questions.’ And sure enough comes the time when Brendan starts to zero in on a particular problem the Manager says, ‘Oh, Oh, it’s my heart,’ and asked to be excused from the meeting. It only took a few days, if not weeks, to bring to the surface what was happening. He was eventually convicted and I believe did time, poor fellow. He was on the local Council, if not Mayor of the city in which the credit union operated.
Did his heart good, did it?
LM: Did his heart a lot of good, the rest out at the pen I would imagine.
I think we are going to have to stop now. (Rest of Side is blank.)
End of Tape 3B: 1807 Words: 45 minutes.