ANSWCU 27: 10 MAY, 1990: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH RON BIRCH
May I ask you first, Rob, where were you born and when?
RB: I was born on 9 March 1929. I understand it was at Kensington in Sydney.
Did you grow up round there?
RB: In the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. My first eighteen months my father and mother had a shop on the corner of Downing Street in Sydney opposite the Bat and Ball Hotel, which I think is a landmark known to many people. From there they moved over to Kingsford and from there they went down to Coogee. At that time my father was a commercial traveller, but from 1938 due to the Depression and many different things in the industry he was in he became a storekeeper again and we were over in Maroubra Road, Maroubra from 1938 to the time I got married in the family store.
So what do you remember when you were growing up, what do you remember of the area?
RB: Oh many things that I can recall from those days that date myself. I can remember that my father’s sister, or two sisters, had a shop down in St Luke’s Street, Coogee, at the time my grandmother lived in Coogee Bay Road, we were up at Coogee and I attended Coogee Bay Public School up until third class, so I must have been about eight or younger, and I can recall going down to my aunties’ shop, and back in those days butter came in fifty-six pound boxes and you used to sell it by the pats. I can recall that, that sticks in my memory. I can’t recall anything else about my grandfather or my grandmother up until about the age of nine or ten when memory got a bit clearer.
Where were you at school?
RB: Well, as I said I went to Coogee Bay Public School until third class. When we moved in 1938 I came over to Maroubra Junction Public School for fourth, fifth and sixth class.
What did you like and dislike about school?
RB: School didn’t particularly worry me either way or t’other. I was the eldest in the family. With a brother five years behind me, I seemed to be distant from that. You seemed to be learning by yourself. Mother and father were preoccupied with shops and whatever. In fourth, fifth and sixth class I was no outstanding student, I wasn’t in the top five in any class I was somewhere in the middle.
What sort of subjects did you prefer?
RB: History used to intrigue me. Geography, particularly. Mathematics was one that I could not get to grips with, particularly in high school. Just a general feeling on history and geography, reading of course, I liked to read a great deal.
What sort of subjects, or do you prefer fiction?
RB: Very all round. I was brought up in a hard school. As I said we lived in a shop. My father inherited when his father died, as part of his inheritance, from his father the complete library that my grandfather had had. It dated back from the early 1880s, 1890s and then you could buy the complete set of the works of Dickens, the works of Thackeray and Sir Walter Scott. Now, for example I think I read every book of Sir Walter Scott back and front. Peverill, The Peak, The Talisman, the lot. Beautiful books once you get into them, but I could not get into the works of Thackeray. Dickens yes. But Thackeray, too heavy and too whatever. There were other books in that library and from the age of about twelve to sixteen I was an avid reader.
What influence do you think you got from your father?
RB: My father was a very middle of the road person. He was religious in his own right although he would not attend church. His comment was, he came from a father who was a Methodist lay preacher, his mother was a Methodist, my father allegedly now Methodist but he maintained he worshipped with ‘Dr Greenfields’, in other words on Sundays he would be out in the open spaces. He said as long as he was doing right by his fellow man and did not do anybody wrong, lived a completely pure life, he reckoned he would be looked after. Of course my mother was Catholic and there was a divergence of opinion, nothing great, but dad was a very quiet spoken gentleman. He should have been a clerk. He tried it as a commercial traveller after the First World War but unfortunately the Depression intervened in his particular line of business, he was a commercial traveller for a small American firm which was trying to crack into the petroleum industry in Australia against the combines of those days, Shell and whatever. He was on the road trying to go round to all different people and interest them back in the days when there was multi-pumps in the early thirties. He did that for a few years, but round about 1934 or 1935 he was unemployed and he had to look around for something to get some money in and that is why the family rallied around and he became a shopkeeper again.
What about your mother, how did she influence you do you think?
RB: Well, mum’s always been there to guide us. I was one of three, but I was the eldest. I have always maintained I have had a mother who was completely over-protective. We weren’t allowed to go bike riding because you might hurt yourself, couldn’t go swimming down at the beach and ?????? by yourself, you might get into trouble. Very much over-protective. Some might say I became the bad boy of the family round about the age of fifteen or sixteen when I sort of said, ‘Look, I can only take so much of this, I am going to start doing things I want to do.’ That put me off-side for a few years.
Where did you first go to get work?
RB: Well my first and only, you’ve got to appreciate that I finished third year, Intermediate Certificate in Sydney in 1943 in the middle of the Second World War, I had done Intermediate. Back in those particular times you were looking around for where you were going to go to work, in 1943, I was fourteen and nine months when I sat for the Intermediate. But at fourteen going on fifteen the way the War was going at that particular time nobody could give you any guarantee that it was going to go for three or four years and when you applied for various places in Sydney, like my godfather at the time was working in the Sydney County Council so dad said to go in and see uncle Ben. The Sydney County Council weren’t putting on any male recruits because they had to make way for people when they returned from the War to fill the jobs, so they weren’t putting on any male recruits whatsoever. So my father was keen for a government job or something similar, one of the statutory organisations was the place to go. He wasn’t particularly keen on the banks, he didn’t like the idea of banks for a career. So one of the other thoughts was the Sydney Water Board, so at the time the Water Board was structured so that they had local government representatives and there was an Alderman Mobley from Randwick Council who looked after the Eastern Suburbs constituency at the Water Board. So I fronted up to this place near Randwick Intermediate High School up in Baker Street and said, ‘Look in your speech today you said if there is anything you could do for the boys of Randwick, you would. I have applied for a job at the Sydney Water Board could you keep in mind, or give a recommendation or say something on my behalf?’ Well as it turned out there were ninety-three applicants to the Water Board that year but only six were put on and I was one. I started on 6 March 1944 in the Sydney Water Board and had my fifteenth birthday three days later.
What was your first job there?
RB: Well I was appointed into what was called the Central Records Section, which was part of the Secretariat of the Water Board. It was where all incoming correspondence and all the files of the Water Board were kept and it was the hub of the Water Board for their administration records. I stayed there for six years.
Exactly what did you do?
RB: Well for the first couple of years you would be a ‘Gofer’, you would go for this and you would go for that. The idea was there were files around the Water Board, the correspondence would come in and part of the job we had to do was to attach the daily correspondence to the files and make sure they were pointed in the right direction for action. Mundane things. Complete the files of course. Mark them off and do that monotonous thing called filing. Answer telephones, queries as to where files are and after a while, with a bit of experience, you would get somebody who would ring you up and ask for a file or if there was a file on such and such a subject and it was part of the art of being able to identify that there was a pre-existing file by a certain number, once a file was given a number it kept that forever, and if you could turn up the title of it and that was the one they wanted you could tell them where it was and what it was all about. Usually with the system that was in place you could find them. Interesting job because going around the Water Board you learnt how the Water Board operated. I was there for six years and I was sort of kept back. Four of us started at the same time, the first three were transferred out over a period of time, I was told that I had a great facility for remembering numbers and subjects so I was kept there for a few years.
Where were the premises then?
RB: Still at 341 Pitt Street.
The old ones had been pulled down, it was a new building?
RB: That was the new building that had been put up on the corner of the lane in 1937, 1938. I came in in 1943 so it was more or less a brand new building and we thought we were in Paradise in those days, as compared to Sydney. Everything was relatively modern by our standard in our days. Of course one of the things that struck us when we first came in to go to work was the Water Board had had a lot of windows on the ground floor running along Pitt Street and they had all been bricked up. Somebody was going to drop a bomb so everything was bricked up. People were going to drop bombs and Sydney was completely worried that things were going to happen courtesy of the invaders or whatever. There is an anecdote on that. I mentioned that my father had brought a shop in 1938. At the time he looked at various places in the Eastern Suburbs before he settled on leasing the shop at Maroubra Road, Maroubra. He looked at one in Bondi and it was quirk of things years later that we realised that when that submarine was off Bondi and lobbed a few shells over in Sydney during the Second World War, a shop was hit and it was one of the ones that my father had looked at. He identified it from the picture. He said, ‘Look at that!’ It is one of the anecdotes in our family that one of the shops that he might of leased was the one that was damaged by a stray shell fired by this submarine at night time into Sydney. That is a thing that was always recounted in our family.
So how long did you stay in the headquarters there?
RB: To 1960.
Where did you go next?
RB: I progressed down to what was called the ‘factory’ in the Water Board parlance, the Rating Chamber where people paid their rates. Everything was kept manually and there were something like fourteen hundred employees down there. Not back in the days of sitting up on the stool with a quill pen, but everything was done manually. Manual records and everything.
Did you have a darg? Do so many an hour?
RB: No that came in later on and that was always a thing that I resisted. They used to bring in this system of trying to see whether you were efficient. You would be in a certain job, particularly if you got a bit senior up and you won a graded job, and there was one chap called the Correspondence Clerk, back in those days we used to call him the Paper Clerk, because files were called papers, but they would say, ‘How many did you have on hand at the start of the week and how many at the end of the week, how many did you do?’ But a person could write a letter in quite simple and get answered, but the next one could be a most involved one, so there was no way on a file system you can efficiently gauge what people are doing.
No, it is just repetitive work like people paying rates.
RB: No it was just inquires at the counter. The official rate paying was done at the Cashier’s Section.
It is just that I was recording a lot of people who worked in the clerical sections of the transport and they used to have dargs on all their jobs. They had to stand up and record the stuff by hand, so many an hour.
RB: No, it was never that bad. But the only thing with the Water Board, the Correspondence Clerk was called the Paper Clerk and there were nine Rating Chambers on the ground floor and of course downstairs, underneath, on the floor below was the ablution block and the locker rooms and of course if you wanted to go to the toilet the way to say it politely at the counter was to say, ‘I’m going to Section 10,’ which was down below. Everybody in the ‘factory’ knew that Section 10 was down below, that was the toilets. But you would politely say, ‘I’m going down to Section 10,’ and they would know what you were talking about.
Were you still in the factory when you first heard about credit unions?
RB: Yes. For three years at least. I was in what was called the Assessor’s Branch until 1960 and of course as recorded in the history we put out in SWB some years afterwards, in our first ten years history, details there at the time what I had done from about 1950. I had been interested in doing things. I had been Secretary of the Water Board Rifle Club. At the time the Water Board up on its roof had a twenty-five metre range where there was all bulwarks and everything but you could go up at lunchtime with a twenty-two mounted on a 303 stock and you could fire on this range at a target and that went for years and I was Secretary of that for quite some years. About 1951, 1952 I became Secretary of the Social Club, which I kept for many many years and I sort of got interested in that. It was because of my activity in the Social Club and other things that I was known to a few people. But my first exposure to credit unions is what has been said. I got married in 1955, I married Jane Seery, and her father was one Patrick Thomas Seery, known as Tom, and at the time he was the Administrative Assistant to the Commissioner of Transport, technically Beresford Calverley’s superior, but he was a Director of the Transport Building Society. He became a Director of the Transport Credit Union, at the time.
So you married into the credit union movement? ??????????????? did that too. Was it Malcolm Samuels or …
RB: Well for a start Bill Howe did that. But no, it was just that for a couple of years, I got married in 1955, we went to live at Belmore, away from the Eastern Suburbs, and one of the first things that upset me was that on the corner of the Water Board and the corner of Black’s Street was the ES&A Bank. I know that at the time when we moved to Belmore we had a corner block, not a big back yard but long. Being on a corner I had one hundred and five foot of footpath on the side and forty-five foot of footpath on the front and the paspalum went mad. So I thought, after eighteen months of trying to do it with a hand push mower that it wasn’t doing me any good and I thought I might try one of these new-fangled Victa mowers that had come on the market some years previously. So I applied to the ES&A Bank for a loan to buy a mower. The result was that whilst I had been at the Water Board, at that time it would have been about 1956, 1957 round about that vintage, so I had about twelve years service at the Water Board and I had been on their superannuation for about ten years but of course you couldn’t touch it, it was locked away until you retired, but I had been in employment. By that time I had been appointed into a grade, I think I had become one of the graded officers, one of the lowest graded officers of the Water Board so I was on my way up the ladder, and the answer from the bank was that they had considered your application, and the application form was about ninety-seven questions and the only question I didn’t answer was ‘Did your forebears come out on the First Fleet?’, but the answer was I could have fifty pounds for three months. I thought that was an insult. I can’t remember the price of the mowers but they were dearer than that. So I was turned off by banks and it was about 1957 when our first child came along and although we weren’t exactly battling my wife and I but we were finding it hard in the present circumstances of those days we had a lot of expenses with our first child, my father-in-law sort of said, ‘What you need is to start a credit union off in the Water Board. Somewhere you can borrow money.’ When he came up he wouldn’t preach it every time he came up to dinner but from time to time he would make the point, ‘Look, with what you have done in the Social Club and the way you are known, you could organise things. You would be a natural to help start it off.’ That went on for a while and as time went by there was this one particular lunch hour that I looked in the weekly bulletin the Water Board sent round to staff. In one of the bulletins it was mentioned that there was a lunch hour showing of a film, King’s X, being put on by the Water Board Trading Co-operative at the lunch hour and it would explain the workings of a credit union. Now as has been documented elsewhere in our history of the SWB, at the time Paul Bounds, he went to school at Randwick Intermediary High School at the same time, he and I were in the same year but we were never friends. But we started at the Water Board in the same Records Section and naturally a friendship developed over those years, so much so that by the time 1959 came we had been friends, the family had been friends, both wives knew each other. So I rang Paul up one day and said, ‘There’s something on in a couple of days time about credit unions. My father-in-law keeps pounding at me. Let’s go up and find out what it is all about.’ So of course we went up there and that is the first time I became aware of Keith Young. He was up there and he spoke at the start, explained the film that ran. The Water Board back in those days was on a forty-five minute lunch hour and I think the film went for twenty-five minutes, so you didn’t have much time. Basically it was being sponsored by the Trading Co-operative, because the Water Board at that time had allowed a Trading Co-operative to have space within the Water Board environment. You could go down there to the Trading Co-op and you could buy your lollies, your sweets, you could buy a small toaster. But they were completely strapped, they couldn’t finance from their own resources if you wanted to buy a new refrigerator or something fairly big. So what they were looking for was instead of just referring people to a place to get a discount and you had to find the money elsewhere, they were looking for a means whereby they could encourage introduction through them with finance being provided other than their resources, but not necessarily whatever the percentage was in those days from the hire purchase sharks, or direct cash orders or whatever they were. So they had sponsored the film. The way the meeting was going at the end it looked like they had been talking for two years ;about what they should do about a credit union, and they were a pack of people who weren’t prepared to move and in my expression, a ‘pack of old women’. But fortunately at that particular meeting one chap got up and said, ‘Well look what are we going to do about this?’ That was Billy Howe, who at the time had a little bit of experience from St Durran’s at Punch Bowl, he had been on the Supervisory Committee. I think a couple of others said, ‘Well, let’s do something about it. Why don’t we take it a bit further. Let’s form a group and look into it,’ and that was Paul Bound’s, myself, Don Harvey and a few other chaps. At the meeting the Board’s photographer at the time, a chap called Gordon Dodd, he was interested. He was tied up with Anglican Lane Mission and he was tied up with doing things for his fellow man, that was his leaning.
Keith Young was active in that area too.
RB: Yes, well they knew of each other over the years. But we sort of took it from there. That was about, from memory, would have been May of 1959 give or take a month. As it developed we started to make some inquiries, I know, but I ended up going down to the Transport Credit Union, Government Transport, and speaking to the then Secretary, stuck for his name but his surname was Dunn, my father-in-law introduced us to him and we got some information off him. We went down to find out how you did it, how you formed it and how many people you needed, because there was no where to go to find out. I mean there was a Registry which gave us a bit of information. Keith Young was there as a part-time person. Yes there was a Credit Union League of about thirty individual credit unions. We took it a bit further. We thought it was worthwhile. Some might say that we put out our first brochure, courtesy of Gordon Dodd, Keith Young gave us a piece of literature from the United States which we adapted. We got the paper presented and we run off a ‘dodger’, put it all round the Water Board and in August 1959 we had a formation meeting. I think from memory some sixty-seven people said they were prepared to join and I think we were officially formed and up and running by 3 September 1959. I was one of the first Foundation Directors on the Foundation Board. Paul Bounds was a Foundation Director and at our first meeting we had to appoint a Secretary and Treasurer. Paul Bounds became Treasurer and I became Secretary. When we put our form in to the then Registrar, by the name of Crosky, we got the information back, ‘Look you cannot be a Secretary and a Treasurer of a Board to direct yourself. If you want to be a Director you have got to resign as Secretary, or if you want to be a Secretary you have got to resign as a Director.’ Because we had an administration viewpoint, Paul Bounds and I resigned as Directors, stayed as Honorary Treasurer and Secretary respectively and casual vacancies were added and two new chappies came in and became Directors. So strictly speaking I can claim I am a Foundation Director of SWB. I stayed Secretary, Honorary, until 1965 when Paul Bounds became the first full-time Manager of the credit union. We had advertised. We had put part-time staff on in 1961/62 in the credit union, but Paul resigned in 1965 to become the Manager and that year I resigned as Secretary and became a Director and I have been a Director ever since.
When did your credit union join the League, straight away?
RB: Yes. My memory fails me there, but I think we were number thirty-eight. I might be wrong, might be thirty-two, but it is in the thirties.
You were living at Belmore. You never joined the Belmore Credit Union?
RB: I was a Foundation Director of the Belmore Credit Union and one of the stimulus for founding Belmore Credit Union.
Was that before the Water Board one or after?
RB: That was after. That was about 1962, 1963. You could see the need for it. At that particular time I had three of four years in the Water Board as, if you like, a government instrumentality and I think about 1962 we were up to a few thousand members by then, a couple of thousand members, and we were growing.
Was Morrie O’Brien on the Board of the Belmore Credit Union?
RB: Yes, we had Morrie O’Brien. We formed that. That, if you like, was one of the levellers for me from thinking big in a credit union movement to come down to a small little parish one of one hundred or one hundred and fifty members at the most, and have to put up with, yes, people on a Board that weren’t government employees that thought similar to me, the likes of the Bill Howe’s, the Don Harvey’s. Yes, I had to put up with the chap who was the painter, who was the mechanic and they just did not understand finance. Half the battles of Belmore Credit Union was trying to get people to understand what you were talking about.
Did you come across John Francis Richards at that time?
RB: He lived behind us. We were on the corner of Garden Street and Trafalgar Street and three doors down from us was a paddock with one cottage which was eventually sub-divided into two cul-de-sacs and houses were built in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Yes John Frank Richards, I could go on my back door and I think if I had a cricket ball I could have lobbed it on to his roof with a reasonable throw. Of course Morrie O’Brien was round in the same street. But Frank Richards was there for a few years and then he moved away. Yes, I got to know Frank Richards as an auditor, as a person that had been in the credit union movement and that time in the things that I was doing and other activities in the credit union movement which we will touch on, we used to use Frank for lectures and things and educational activities in the Chapters.
End Tape 1A: 4736 Words: 1 hour 50 minutes.
ANSWCU 27: 10 MAY 1990: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH RON BIRCH
Now I will ask you, when were you first involved with the Chapters?
RB: Well, as I said, the Sydney Water Board Salaried Officers Credit Co-operative Limited, which was our first title, joined the League immediately and it was early in 1960 when I attended a City of Sydney Chapter meeting and we found that was the place where we could go along to, we were, the word is not ‘conned’ by Keith Young, but we were told that if you wanted to learn things this is where you went. At the time they were being held at the rooms of the Hibernians, just behind the old dental hospital, upstairs they used to have the meetings there. I know Paul Bounds and I went along a couple of times. It might have been the third meeting of the Chapter we attended. It was the Annual General Meeting and Keith Young had announced that he wanted to concentrate on being Secretary of the New South Wales Credit Union League so he wanted to stand down as Chapter Secretary. So me being, all those things I’ve told you about, being a born organiser or whatever, so I got nominated and that was the start of my involvement in the City of Sydney Chapter. That lasted right through until about 1974.
Were you involved with Owen Jones at all?
RB: Over the years you would embarrass me if you asked me to recall the positions I held. I would say for the first three or four years I was constantly Secretary of it. We always had a Committee of four, sorry five, and we always found that that was never enough, but we seemed to change around. Sometimes I was Chairman, other times I was Treasurer, Secretary, but as a Committee of five titles meant nothing. We would work the same programs and if you like the Chairman was there to Chair the meetings that we held. When you were Treasurer or Secretary you sort of arranged meetings or took part in the meetings. For a few years I was Chairman of the Chapter or President of the Chapter. That lasted until about 1974.
How did the Co-ordination and Development Committee start?
RB: That’s a story by itself. Being the City of Sydney Chapter we were the only one in the early ’60s, but because of what had happened of it was a universal progression. Universal Credit Union started in 1946. After a while a certain number of Catholics were out in the Western Suburbs and they formed St Durran’s at Punchbowl. That was an offshoot of Universal. Well some might say well we were all going into the City of Sydney Chapter but the strength of credit unions at the time was out in the Bankstown, Canterbury, Hurstville area. Everybody was out there. We saw a need instead of going into the City, yes there were a few credit unions out in that area, Barralla, Lidcombe.
Did you have anything to do with Lidcombe?
RB: Not much.
Father Gallagher?
RB: No. No that was beyond the pale to talk to Father Gallagher and Anigonish or Antigonish, whichever school you went to. But we formed the South-West Chapter in the early ’60s and of course Lee Nash was out there, because he lived at Punchbowl. Clarrie Murphy used to float through and that. But round about 1964 we were saying in the Chapters, we were in their view preaching heresy, what we were saying was that we’re the Chapters, this is where people come to get information, this is where people come to talk. One of the things we put up was that we felt that the people who go to the Annual General Meeting of League put a motion up cold, going to the League, the papers would be coming out beforehand, but the first time would be on the floor of the actual meeting and half the time they were ill-prepared, they would go down because they weren’t researched enough. So what we said in the City of Sydney Chapter was, why can’t League motions be aired and have to have the mark of the Chapter first, be aired at the Chapter, at least be presented, could be discussed informally, no motions no nothing, a forum, and if they needed tidying up, let’s tidy them up. That was heresy. We couldn’t do that. We were told that was wrong. So we didn’t do it. But that is what we now do in ANSWCU by area meetings. You know everything is done. But what we wanted to do in 1964, 1963/1964, was utter heresy. But we saw that we had a role to play. Clarrie Murphy of course had been appointed as League Manager, the one and only, by himself. He had no resources. Education pure and simply was with the Chapters, so between the two Chapters we decided to form a committee to run an educational school. I don’t care where it’s said or what it’s done, we did it in March 1965 at the Newport Inn, the first residential weekend School was run by the combined Chapters. It was a success. Some might say the League saw how successful it was and we had plans to run one in twelve months time and six months down the track they sort of said they were going to do it. They announced it and of course it was only a matter of time of course before the League was there and that was done by Stan Arneil and they become the CUNA Schools over there. But to answer your question which was a long way round, because of the success of what we did at that School in 1965 and what we were doing in the two Chapters in Sydney, Berry Calverley the then League President, said, ‘Look, we’ve got to get out to the people around New South Wales to form these Chapters. We are going to set up a special committee.’ The committee of three volunteers with one League Director. The League Director became Lee Nash, myself, I was asked would I do the Secretary’s job because I had shown what I could do as a Secretary, and a committee came into effect and that took about two years.
Was that before Stan Arneil became Development Officer at the Registrar’s Office?
RB: That would be taxing memory.
1964 he became …
RB: Well he only lasted six months. No it would have been subsequent to that because it would have been after the ’65 School. It would have been about 1966/67, because I was the Secretary of it and we were announcing meetings, we were having meetings at Dubbo, we went up to Murwillumbah about three times; we used to involve them in it because at the time the Minister was ???????????? Stephens, Minister for Co-operatives and we invited him to come to a dinner and he spoke nicely about what a wonderful thing we were doing. We had meetings at Newcastle that took place at the Hotel. We used to go down to the ‘Normandie’ at Wollongong. So many dates. Quite often we would come up the hill on a Friday night at 12.30 a.m. 1.00 o’clock in Clarrie Murphy’s car, because Clarrie lived at Punchbowl. Four of us would go down to run a meeting and say, ‘Gee that was a waste of time,’ you know there was only eight or nine people there from the credit unions. Of course one of the things we were trying to do in those days was to convince AIS to join the League, you know they were not in the League and there were some anti-League credit unions down there and a few were that in the League and a few who were going to Chapter meetings. But I did that for two years. We formed Chapters, Wollongong formed, we formed a Chapter at Parramatta, one formed at Newcastle, a mid-West Chapter formed and I relate my activity in that, it shows that if you go around picking up enough dust people think you are doing things. Don Harvey had a policy in SWB to try and encourage people on the Board to be involved outside of Board activities, to get involved in the movement, because we thought there were advantages and benefits for the credit union to be well informed. So at the time Don Harvey had followed on the League Board. He applied for the job of Administration Manager and was standing down. The year that he stood down, I nominated and to show what you can do, I think to this day that my name had been known through all my activities including two years on this Chapter Co-ordination Committee, particularly people from the country and as I had been in the City Sydney Chapter that when the election came out I took the poll and I topped the poll over Beverley Calverley he stood as League Chairman at the time.
So where did that end up for you?
RB: Well I have just got me into the League Board for two years. Two years of activity in there. At the time of course a lot of things were going on. The argument about who was going to run the insurance and we had the fight between CUNA Mutual, whether it was going to be administered locally by a local group or whether it was going to be CUNA Mutual, that was one of the bun fights that we had at the time.
What was your view of that situation?
RB: Well I was one of the six that was castigated from the floor of the meeting. One of the leading advocates of what we should of done was of course Ken Miller, and that is what we did. We set up our own. We weren’t going to go cap in hand and be dictated to by an overseas interest. We did it locally and that is the way we went. Of course one of the other things at the time of my term of office was to buy the building at Burwood. Again I was a member of the Board who were pilloried because of buying that, risking everything buying a building, but we did it. That’s the difference. These days people coming into the movement might be still volunteers coming in, but things that we did in the ’59s to the ’60s as a volunteer, the satisfaction we got that we did it for the first time.
Can you remember why the first School was at Newport?
RB: Mainly because we had on the committee a chap called Kevin Gleeson, he only lasted two years. Kevin Gleeson, to give you a demonstration, if you look up into the heavens there are stars up there that have been blinking for ever, but occasionally across the heavens comes a meteor, makes a terrific impression for the short time that it is there, then it is gone. Kevin Gleeson was a meteor in the credit union movement for a couple of years. He was a salesman. To give him a budget and give him the cash and turn him loose you would be broke in no time. You would have to leg rope him and keep control of the cash resources away from him. Not that he would do anything illegal, but his enthusiasm got away from his judgement. So when we first mooted the first School because we were all out in the south western suburbs we were looking at the Sylvania Hotel on the corner of the Princes Highway where you turned to go down to Cronulla. We looked at that and it’s amazing that we were tossing up about going there. We got some prices. At the time Kevin was looking around and came up with some other prices and it just became that Newport, back in the days of pounds, shillings and pence, worked out cheaper. I think they turned up the other day that we charged to go to that weekend, twelve pounds fifty shillings. I went through some of the papers, we looked through some of the things that we had. The menu for the meal was seven shillings and sixpence, the cost, in today’s money you would laugh at it. Considering say a convention down in Canberra, National Directors Convention, where we charged $430 from the Friday through to the Saturday, shows you how the money has changed.
The first Newport School, did they a Room 19?
RB: There was always that room that the Sydney County Council was notorious for.
Sydney City Council?
RB: Yes, Sydney City Council, sorry you are quite correct, the Sydney City Council was always notorious for what they did. Open house and they had their activities. That was again, but not because Dermot’s not hear to listen, but the thing that always upset me, I am a methodical person, I like to be orderly, if a thing starts at a certain time it starts at a certain time and of course the bane of my life back in the Sydney City Chapter back in the ’60s was that you got a booking from the Sydney City Council to come to a Chapter meeting starting at 6.30 p.m. and you would be right in the middle of your guest speaker, you’ve done everything, 6.55 p.m., guest speaker has been going for ten minutes, in walks the horde. Been down to the Fosters Pub, in walks the horde, four or five from Sydney City Council. Completely disrupt the meeting before it could settle down and that went on not just once it went everywhere. All those ???????? making a booking, booking closed six weeks before, they’d ring up the day before, they’d want to come and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Gee they always got rubbed the wrong way at the AG by Dermot but they got to love him after a while. But for years there as the organiser of a function. Yes when they went to seminars or whatever they always enjoyed themselves and Room 19 was the start of many.
Do you think that there was value in those informal discussions, shall we say, that took place in places like Room 19?
RB: Well I can answer you again, my definition of a Chapter meeting was that the public’s program was the excuse to get you there to learn afterwards at the informal supper breaks and talking at the end of the meeting and the same at seminars, the informal groups back in those days. Because we were still trying to learn and you can only learn from the others who have done it. Whilst there was a set program, when you got into the groups after the day was over, before the next day up in the rooms, that is where you learnt. I meant we learnt a heck of a lot and it’s not the first time. Even in those Chapter co-ordination activities we couldn’t afford to take everybody away but we might be on the things at 3.00 a.m. in the morning after the function is over, we had a dinner, we’re staying there overnight and getting the plane out next morning, but we would be sitting up with the likes of Alan Jones and Jack Lange at 3.00 in the morning with a bottle of Scotch and talking and that’s where we planned things and learnt.
When you started in 1965 as a Director of the League, as it was then.
RB: 1968 I think.
1968/69 you were on and when you were on the Board at that time, 1968/69, that was right in the middle, no it was just before the insurance split wasn’t it?
RB: Yes. As I said that was one of the bun fights that was developing, the insurance split. Of course there were a lot of other things going. There was the one about taxation liabilities and everything.
Also the push towards the Act.
RB: Yes, that was being developed.
Were you involved with that at all?
RB: No. I seemed to be more leaning towards what I was doing in Chapter’s activities, making sure that people were being educated and trying to help out in that area. I didn’t go any great committees. Let’s face it it might be said I might have the numbers for two years at League meetings with no specific expertise, just generalising around making decisions.
Do you remember the argument, it was during that period, over the South Pacific representative of CUNA International?
RB: No. I can’t recall it. It would be stretching my memory.
Well they actually got the League to advertise the position. But then CUNA International made the appointment and the appointment was of a person, I think it was Tom Ryan who was of CBOA, who wasn’t in the League. There was a bit of an uproar about that.
RB: Yes. I recall Tom Ryan becoming that. Of course Tommy Ryan was Secretary of the CBOA Credit Union and I had served with Tom at one particular time when he was in the League, we served in the early ’60s on a Dues Committee, the old perennial thorn which comes up time and time again. It still comes up, the dues, what are you going to pay, what sort of structure, per capita, per assets, whatever. But I have learnt to appreciate Tom Ryan, a nature’s gentleman.
Jack Bannister was on that Committee wasn’t he?
RB: Not to my knowledge on the one I was talking of. There have been Dues Committees and Dues Committees, they come and went like the tide, but the one that I was on was Tommy Ryan, a chap from the Gas Company Credit Union, a chap by the name of Nichols and he was an ????????????? But we came up with a report and of course it got varied at the next AGM. But Dues Committees came and went.
Do you remember the argument about the setting up of the Savings Stabilisation Fund as it was in the first instance? Dermot Ryan and Ken Miller came back from the ’67 trip to America there, they were National delegates, and they presented a number of reports. Dermot presented one on the Savings Stabilisation Scheme and he had specific ideas of how they should fund it?
RB: No, that is clouded in my memory. The report came back, yes. We could see that we had to do something to protect ourselves because right at that particular time, in those days, in the ’60s, you raised it in talking before, they had this parallel opposition of the Antigonish Father, Father Gallagher. They were getting these vibrations in the papers from time to time that people had invested in a credit union, put their money in and they wanted to get it out and they found they couldn’t get it out and it would be twelve months or so. Of course it was written up in the papers, you know, ‘Credit unions can’t repay deposits!.’ You’d look at it and it would end up, ‘Father Gallagher’. So it was recognised that we needed to set something up to say that we had stability and my recollection is that there was no argument as far as I was concerned, we had to do something ourself. The Government wasn’t particularly interested in us as we were only small fry in those days. So we had to set something up ourselves. But as to how it was going to be funded or whatever, my recollection is dim on that.
Dermot was apparently one against the rest.
RB: Well it wouldn’t be the first time Dermot has been one against the rest and to use the same sounding word, and ‘won’, w-o-n.
He didn’t win all the time, but he used to lose on the Board and win at the Annual General Meeting.
RB: Well of course Dermot had a facility for ringing people up on the phone and ask you what you thought about it. He would get a consensus on the Board but there might be six against and three for and he would go round and tell everyone it had been carried, then when it came to the collective group then that is when it used to get done on the League Board at the general meeting and win on various issues over the years.
Tom Kelly did that and he lost.
RB: Tom was never as persuasive as Dermot though, as you can see by their personalities.
Was this about the co-operative bank?
RB: No that was never on. Never, never on. Tom in all earnestness, if he ever listens in to this, he wasted a lot of time trying to get a co-operative bank up and running. It was years too early. The same as they wanted to push this co-operative building society. All the tremendous ideas came up in those years but we wasted lots of time and resources instead of getting on with what we should have been doing, developing credit unions to cater for everybody, everybody not just the few that we were doing.
There were a lot of credit unions started in 1964, when Stan Arneil was the Development Officer.
RB: Yes and how many subsequently were in trouble six or nine months later, or twelve months later down the track. You know it was a great idea going around and getting fifty people together, telling them all about a credit union and they’d say, ‘Oh we think that is a good idea. Come back next week.’ ‘Right oh, you’re the Secretary, you’re the President, sign this and you are formed.’ Great. ????????????? years later.
But lots of the ones like the Shire and Municipal ones were successful. The community ones as well.
RB: True. But I don’t think the large groups that Stan went into were all in size or whatever. A lot of the ones that he formed gave trouble, not trouble in the meaning of doing something wrong, but people just did not know. In effect credit unions were formed, he lasted six months as Development Officer and in my opinion did not follow the rules laid down by the Registry, he wanted to run his own ship and of course he just decided he was going to do it this way and you’d move and he moved. But having formed thirty or forty ??????? credit unions then the limited resources of the New South Wales Credit Union League had to then go out and try and service these and straighten them out and put them back on the way they should be operating. Yes he created credit unions, but that is not everything.
Well he is reputed to have started a hundred credit unions. Now Clarrie Murphy is reputed to have started fifty-eight, what about the ones he was involved with? I know he was Manager of the League but I know he was also acting as Development Officer.
RB: Well I don’t think I have ever had any inclination to clarify in my own mind what happened, because Clarrie is an entirely different person to Stan Arneil. Clarrie would be more methodical. I don’t say Clarrie is an administration person, I think he is a book-binder by trade, but Clarrie would be more patient with what he was doing and I have no recollections of Clarrie in forming a credit union. Because, over the period of time he was there as Manager he would be able to give them services, whereas Stan Arneil he was just flitting from group to group and he’d form the group and that was it. There was no follow-on service behind Stan Arneil I am afraid, in the ones that he formed. At least with Clarrie there was something, you could at least ring up and talk to Clarrie and find out something. Maybe that is different from the recollections of other people, but that is my impression anyway.
Of course Stan Arneil became Manager of CUNA Mutual, CUMIS, in Australia.
RB: Yes for some years, and he also became Manager of STA Employees Credit Union, but that didn’t last too long.
As you said, you weren’t directly involved, or were you directly involved at the time when the insurance business occurred?
RB: I think I was on the Board at the time.
Just before I think.
RB: Yes just before. We had to make recommendations and the recommendation came forward. I know that there was comments in one of the League’s Annual General Meetings about the group of people who made these decisions and were ill-informed. But I think history has proved that the decision made to stay local was right, at the time, and we have had the benefit of that.
Were you involved at all at the start of AFCUL?
RB: No.
You weren’t at Newport that year that they discussed starting it up?
RB: No, I was never in on that. By about that time I was just still, as an excuse, still Chapter-orientated, everybody seemed to call Rob Birch ‘Mr Chapter’, for better or for worse.
So what were the issues which you were involved with on the Board that you thought particularly important?
RB: Well we prepared the way back in those years, as I have said to other people but not in this interview, that a chap on the Board with me at the time was a man called Vince Martin who was the Senior Investigations Officer in the Australian Taxation Office, and taxation and mutuality was a good one. A lot of ground work was done on that at that time, by Vince Martin and yes a group of Directors. When you came together as a League Board we had to make decisions as to whether we would promote progress or not progress, if as one voting to say, ‘I will do a certain thing,’ at times. Yes we considered things. I’ve said the purchase of the building.
When you were first involved with the League where were they then?
RB: When I was first involved with the League it was taken literally, in 1959 it was Keith Young’s garage, literally. In 1962, I’m trying to think if there was any step in between, I think Keith Young, straight to Clarrie Murphy and upstairs 141 Devonshire Street.
End Tape 1B: 4432 Words: 1 hour 45 minutes.
ANSWCU 28: 10 MAY 1990: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH ROB BIRCH
I would just like to ask you one question. Do you remember a situation that developed at 141 Devonshire Street when you were upstairs from Universal when the League bought an accounting machine?
RB: No. I’ve got nothing in my memory banks about that one.
It is just that it mentioned it in the Minutes that they couldn’t get it up the stairs and they sent it back.
RB: No. That could be par for the course by now. Back in those days I would still be concentrating on Sydney Water Board. We had the Sydney Water Board Employees Credit Union, we might have dropped the word ‘Salaried’.
You weren’t a Director of the League at the two locations at Burwood before it bought the building?
RB: During my time of office the League headquarters was in the two flats in Burwood Road down toward Parramatta Road on the left hand side just past is it Jo Park, whatever the Park is there just past Westfields. It was in the two flats that they had and that is where we used to go for meetings.
They moved up further before, didn’t they?
RB: Yes, they were up in the shopping centre up in Burwood Road, up in the back of the shops and upstairs, yes. But I was in the first location which was in the flats down towards Parramatta Road.
When the new building was purchased, is that the one they are in now? What was it before?
RB: Yes. We bought it as new.
So you had it built for you?
RB: No, it was built more or less as a spec job. Both of them were side by side. We could have bought both. That and the one that is next door.
The TAB.
RB: The Lotteries Office. They were built by a developer and both were for sale and it was just bought. It wasn’t built to specification. It was just a spec job and it was bought. I think it was something like, less than a million dollars, round about $700,000/$800,000 from memory. Your research might find it somewhere in the Minutes the purchase price of that building, but just trying to recall far less than a million dollars.
It is more likely to turn up in the Annual Reports, I think. The Minutes are not very informative in that direction.
RB: I’ve looked at the Minutes for the first ten years and it is amazing what is not in Minutes. I find in some of them that they record the dates of omissions of credit unions in the ’60s. But I can’t find any set of Minutes where is says where the Water Board came in, can’t find that in the Minutes. That is why I said I can’t even say for sure whether we were 38 in the League or the 32nd. I know we were in the thirties.
So what were you involved with next after your time in the Board, or is there anything more that we should discuss about your time on the Board? Personalities, anything like that?
RB: Oh I was fortunate to serve with good people. Yes at the time Dermot Ryan was a Director, Ken Miller, Beresford Calverley, George McCreadie at the time from Macquarie at Dubbo.
How did you get along with him?
RB: He was a good chap.
Did you ever put anything up with him?
RB: I can’t recall that I did.
Do you remember anything that you put forward that became a fact accepted generally?
RB: As I said, no, because I was mainly concentrating on Chapters, activities and that. As I said there is nothing I can think of that I originated. Memory might fail me but I can’t think or recall anything. I am trying to think of other names, I’ve done Don ?????????, Lee Nash. I am trying to think of who else was there. Of course people came and went.
Tom Kelly was there.
RB: Yes. Tom became like part of the furniture. When wasn’t Tom Kelly there.
Kevin Yates?
RB: Yes.
When did you first meet Kevin Yates?
RB: I think it was just one of those things that developed. Because it was mainly Keith Young, but yes we came across Kevin Yates from Universal Credit Union and you got to appreciate Kevin’s philosophy on co-operation. You would listen to him about what he had done pre-War for the co-operative movement. Yes he was one of the … When you came into the credit union movement, we helped start off SWB Paul Bounds and myself, we weren’t any Messiahs or missionaries or anything, we just saw it as a good thing and said let’s do it with no background philosophy or social activities or anything like that. But when you came across the likes of Kevin Yates, and if you like Keith Young, because Keith was a person that saw good in doing things in his church and whatever, Kevin reinforced that if you started something off without a philosophy you got it from Kevin. I feel that he kindled within us as it came across him that yes you were going to get out there and do things. Just an anecdote I’ve just recalled about myself and Paul Bounds. Now Paul Bounds was a Methodist and he was an active churchgoer, as I am an active Catholic. Go to church every Sunday and so would Paul. Now at the time when we formed our credit union in the early ’60s Paul was living out at Ramsgate and he was worshipping at the Methodist Church on the corner of Bay Street and Princes Highway. So at one particular time he went up and suggested to the local Pastor or whatever his name is in the Methodist Church, the chap in charge of the Parish, ‘Why don’t we start a credit union.’ The answer he got was, ‘Why do you want to start one of those off? That’s a Catholic idea.’ That didn’t get to first base. Paul had an argument on that, ‘Why are you associated with a credit union, they are a Catholic idea?’ He said, ‘No they’re not. We’ve got one at work. They’re open to anybody.’ Just because they started off anywhere but in Catholic’s they might have been more receptive at the time but of course Paul countered by saying there was Dee Why Anglican with Frank Hoyle, there was Balmain Anglican with Harvey Dickinson and you know there was a couple of Anglican parish credit unions going, so it was wrong to call them just a Catholic idea. But I always remember that from coming over from a Methodist pastor or whatever it is, ‘Don’t want to be tied up with that it is a Catholic idea.’
Keith Young was much involved with starting the CSR as well.
RB: Well he was their office manager. I don’t know if he was at the time but he ended up as office manager at the company. I think anybody who is office orientated or in the administration area, you know you’ve got to start on if somebody comes in with the idea to form a credit union you’re more receptive than the poor battler. Nothing wrong with being a blue collar worker but you just don’t learn that way.
So you carried on with training and Schools and Chapters.
RB: Mainly the Chapters, as I said until about 1974 when I ceased. I pulled out something the other day just to refresh my memory and I am shown in 1974 as still being Secretary. At the time Gordon Riley was President. But I am quite sure I would have ceased about the twelve months after that. One of the reasons for that of course was that I’d been Chairman of my own credit union from about 1971, about 1972, I’d started off on that and I had a growing family. By 1974, 1975, I had been put into an area in the Water Board where it was a semi-specialised area. Again I was only in the middle of the group.
Which area was that?
RB: Well it wouldn’t mean anything, but it was called Development Services. But it was a specialised group to deal with a person who might be sub-dividing his property into two blocks and he has got to have water and sewers put on to it and pay for it. Or it might be a large developer of two thousand lots and you’ve got to pay for water and sewerage services. It was a specialised area and I had been put into that. It was at the stage when my wife had said to me, ‘Look, you are doing so much in the credit union movement, you’ve got a family, you’ve got a lot in SWB as Chairman. Something’s got to give or there are going to be ructions in our family.’ So, yes, I backed away from extra activity outside what was in the Water Board credit union and I concentrated, if you like, on my career for a while and this credit union. I run through until about 1978, 1979, then I stood down voluntarily. I thought it was time for a change after about eight years. By that time I had been promoted and became in charge of that particular group I mentioned in the Water Board, the Development Services, I was supervisor of it. I had been considerably up the ladder in the Water Board in the career structure. So I concentrated on that area until the early ’80s. It is only in the last four years that my penchant for educating people, or organising people to doing things, has come to the fore again. That is as a result of my wife being stimulated by me to apply for a job, part-time secretary of the Institute of Credit Union Directors.
I am told they got you as well for nothing?
RB: Well it is by default, if that is the word. My wife had a by-pass operation in November 1985. Up to that time she had been working full-time. She is a gifted person by what she has done in her life. She is not just a shorthand-typist. She has done import and export, she has done some books, she has done the bookkeeping, she has been the Girl Friday at the start. She has been the confidential secretary to the Managing Director of Companies. But my wife would never stay in one place more than twelve or eighteen months. She would always move on for experience and go round and get things. She has worked all her life up until something was radically wrong and she had four by-passes in March 1985. When she was recovering from that it was obvious she wanted to fill her time in and we saw advertised that this Institute of Credit Union Directors wanted a part-time secretary, please apply to John Gormley. So whilst I knew of John Gormley and John Gormley knew of me, what I said to Joan was, and this goes back twenty years before, in the ’60s you could take any of the wives of any of the credit union people in this movement of the ’60s and I would defy you to find anybody who knew anything more about the credit union movement and what was going on than my wife. Where we were situated in Belmore we had like Ken Miller over at Ashfield, we had Clarrie Murphy and we had Tom Kelly over at Hurstville, we had Lee Nash in South Terrace at Punchbowl, we Don ??????? just over at the other side of Burwood. Everybody seemed to be within two or three miles of our place. When we had meetings, mainly on this educational thing to plan things, what was going on and how we were doing things, we were the centre place for meetings. The meetings were held in our lounge room and Joan did all the typing for us. She did all the Minutes of Meetings and she had a terrific feel for the credit union movement all through the ’60s. She knew people first hand. She came to the functions and so she had the advantage that she knew what was going on in the credit union movement. So when she applied for the job I just said put in what you’ve done. This was fifteen years ago, or whatever it was when we stopped in the ’70s, but I said write it down, put in what you’ve done. Anyway she got the job as part-time secretary of ICUD. At the time it was just to go in once a month, take their Minutes and do the odd correspondence. Then we started to show them what they should do. Six or nine months later she used to come over to the Gap and say, ‘Look, they are thinking of doing this a certain way, or thinking of running a meeting this way, or talking about this, what do you reckon?’ I would give her my impression and she would sort of relay it as if it came through from her. In the end she said, ‘Why don’t you join them?’ So I became an Alternate Director. You are only supposed to be there so that if one of them is not there you can attend the meeting and vote. But I don’t think that up to then in their eight or nine years of life since 1978 they had ever seen an Alternate Director come in straight away and say this is how we are going to run different meetings. This idea of having four meetings in the City and nothing else was for the birds. There are two hundred and fifty, or two hundred members of credit unions in the country, there are other people out in the suburbs of Sydney, they all don’t want to come into the League’s Club four times a year. So I sort of shocked them by having the temerity to say, ‘Why don’t you run a meeting at Parramatta?’ Which we did. We had forty-odd people there. So much so they have become an institution over the last three years. There are meetings at Parramatta, meetings at Rockdale. Yes, going back eighteen months ago when I analysed their records and Joan had done a publicity drive and membership drive, the membership jumped from under one hundred and fifty to over three hundred, twelve months ago it was over five hundred. But when we got to over four hundred-odd we analysed the members and found there was about two hundred and twenty members in the City and two hundred and twenty members outside Sydney. I said, ‘What are we going to do about these people out in the country?’ The answer was, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well you know, all they get is our four times a year magazine and nothing else. We have to start doing something else.’ So at my pushing we have had a series of one-day seminars, the fifth one comes up next month. If I am going to pat myself on the back, I think the stimulus for that has come from me. Again showing what should be done, or what can be done.
What about the regional meetings that happened of the Association, were you involved in the starting of that?
RB: No. That is just one of those things that developed when I was just in my own particular credit union. That came about a need. They were having Annual General Meetings of two days and a lot of it, again, were motions that had come forward that were ill-thought out and you would argue on the day. Waste time arguing about it, or tidying it up by a series of amendments and Lord knows what. It was one of those things that developed. It was recognised but I had no part in it. But it became so obvious that you needed somewhere to keep contact with your members and I think the League at the time recognised it and brought this into play.
I think it was Bill Howe’s idea that it was brought out.
RB: Yes. The credit union movement is like Topsy, things have just grown.
They brought the various League’s Associations back together again.
RB: That has been one of the on-going fights, not fights, needs, problems. That again that was there during the two years I was on the League Board. It has always been there until it happened. Please let’s get the departed brethren and bring them back together into the fold. You could argue for years, but there has always been the credit union that wanted to do it their way and you could talk to them until you were blue in the face and they didn’t want to come in. But that was an on-going thing for years and years. Just have one common body representing credit unions in New South Wales. Yes, we achieved, or the Association by a lot of hard work achieved it. They didn’t achieve it by bringing everybody in, you know you’ve still got the big ones who stayed out, the CBOA, the QANTAS, Electricity Commission at the time. But credit unions over the years, some have come and gone, some have joined the League and for some reason other, quite a lot of it again personalities of individual Directors at the time, credit union personalities had a lot to do with it, as to why they leave. The reasons for leaving the League at times have been very, very faint.
Were you involved at all on your own credit union or on the League in computerisation?
RB: No I am not user-friendly. All I’ve noted is that from the time in my own particular credit union we used to for the first four years do it manually. Paul Bounds. We had the ledger cards, we had passbooks. Of course we didn’t get pay-roll deductions until 1 July 1963.
Were you involved with the negotiations for that?
RB: No. I was a very appreciative recipient of the news that we got it.
They charged you I understand, as well?
RB: They tried to but it was wiped by Government decree. It was going to be on a charge for service basis but it didn’t happen. Paul Bounds had acquired a retired Water Board clerk, Ed Drover. A magnificent gentleman, a most scholarly hand. He used to do the part-time postings for Paul in a little tiny office we had given to us by the Water Board for the credit union. Our first move into things other than hand-held records was a National 32A semi-automatic posting machine. We advertised for an operator and we attracted a retired Commonwealth Bank lady, Mary Brossnan, she was the supervisor of their section at the time, had all the postings and everything. She retired on her 65th birthday and she came to work for us for three years and she was our operator and everything.
Did you use the Water Board computer at all? The credit union?
RB: No.
That is a bit of a baffler, because the people over the road, the Town Hall were using your computer. The Town Hall was using the Water Board’s computer. The Rating System over at the Town Hall. Ron Preston set it up through your computer.
RB: It has always been acknowledged that the Water Board itself, not the credit union but the Water Board itself, was one of the leading organisations in the southern hemisphere to bring in computerised links. Like they brought it in 1948 they brought in this punch card system to do salaries. I think it was one of the first applications in Sydney. This great big machine and they used to prepare the salaries on it, all done by cards. The Water Board has been one of the leading ones for years.
Given that, the Sydney City Council Employees Credit Union, they claim that they were the first people to go into batch, the first financial institute to go over to batch computerisation. Admittedly they didn’t use the Water Board’s then, but Ron Preston has said that when he learnt about it via the credit union, that was when he went over the road on behalf of the City Council and used the Water Board’s computer.
RB: He may well of done. I couldn’t comment on that. But, no, the first application of computers in our credit union was through that system that the League brought in. We stayed on that for a while and then we brought our own and of course we have now developed. We are one of the big six and in some cases been criticised by some and we have now set up our own co-operative and we have set up our own bureau at Granville up the road.
That is with City Council too, isn’t it?
RB: Yes, well six of us are in it: Metropolitan; us; Police; Sydney. There are six. The reason for that was we were all looking at upgrades and in some cases they were over a million dollars so we have been able to save money by putting in a machine about which we were laughed at initially. It hadn’t been used in Australia before a Sequoia. Laughed at by a lot of people but there was about eighteen months of research went into it. We’ve done it. We’ve put it in. And if you like we can now pat ourselves on the back, the Association bought a Sequoia. The big credit unions are criticised by the small ones, that we want it our way. But we are the ones that have identified the need and we do things when we want it. If we don’t identify the needs, if we were held back always just to cater for the little small ones, this movement wouldn’t have progressed to where it is today.
Now were you involved in any mergers, transfer of engagements, with your credit union?
RB: I took part in the initial discussions when we took over the original Transair Credit Union, that was one of the first ones. Gee that’s ten years back or more. Our credit union, as I said, has always been one for getting out. We recognised early in the 1970s that the Sydney Water Board itself was not going to be the biggest construction authority in the southern hemisphere forever, you can only lay so many water mains and then you have fulfilled the need. We didn’t know what year that was going to be in the future. So we decided that we were going to change, we were going to go into the community. So we decided to go to Penrith, we identified an area where we thought Sydney would develop in the years to come, so we thought that was going to be Penrith out in the western region. We applied to the Registrar for permission to take in groups in the Penrith area on an industrial basis. We were given that permission and of course it was like a leg-rope that it had to be an enterprise of five hundred employees or more, they had to give you pay-roll deductions. So that is where we started. But before we did that, we went to the then League, we sat down and told them what we were going to do. It is not as if we just only did it. At the time the League was trying to develop community credit unions and we said this is what we are going to do and I recall that, not on the floor of the League’s Annual General Meeting, but amongst some people outside of our credit union once we started to do it and twelve months down the track, we got a nickname at one stage, ‘The Piranha Credit Union’ because we had the temerity to be one of the first credit unions to go outside your host area. Albeit if you started off in a community and had the temerity to go into the industry area, we were an industrial credit union to everybody that is where we should have stayed. But we said no the Water Board isn’t going to last forever. Back in those days there was a classic example, there was a credit union called Dunkley Credit Union, purely and simply it had been Dunkley Hat Mills, used to make Akubra hats in Sydney. Well they shifted the place, Akubra Hats. Men suddenly didn’t wear hats. They went out of business within twelve months, finished. The credit union was gone. We saw that a one industry credit union would never survive so we decided to change. That is why today we are 34,000, 35,000 member strong. We progressed from Penrith, we gradually whittled down the then Registrars of the day where we got any group of ten people or more who worked in a place. Eventually we got anybody who resides and is a property owner, so if you were a property owner in Penrith we have now got anybody who resides in Penrith. We did the same in Liverpool five or six years ago. We’ve got the same that will allow us to expand in the Hawkesbury if and when we want to. Then again, we identified an area that we could see there was a reason for service, we could see there was a particular credit union that wasn’t doing much, and we applied for Bankstown because they weren’t moving. We applied for Bankstown, we have upset our colleagues in the Bankstown City Council Credit Union. They thought it was wrong that we should come in and fight them. We said we hadn’t come in to fight them we had come in to complement them. Anyway. But we have tried to grow into a community credit union.
End Tape 2A: 4350 Words: 1 hour 35 minutes.
ANSWCU 28: 10 MAY 1990: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH RON BIRCH
RB: You were talking about mergers. About mergers in my particular credit union. Well we took over Wool Brokers Credit Union and they merged with us. Some twelve or fourteen months after the merger we had a vacancy and their last Chairman has now joined us on our Board and he is the first Director to come from outside not directed with the Water Board directly. We had had prior to that, we were fortunate at one stage, to have had a lady from TAA serve with us for a couple of years, but in the entire period of time of all the people on the Board of Directors of SWB, there have only been two who haven’t been directly employed by the Water Board. In some ways it is bad if we are trying to be a community credit union. But every year we go through the motions of advertising vacancies and calling for nominations and you know you get that resounding gallop. You can hear it coming now, silence, that’s the gallop of defeat, you know nothing happens. But it has been said that you can stay too long. I have to think about that this year. My term of office is up in September, do I renominate for another three years? I think I’ve got three years left in me.
Do you approve of the extensions of the Bond that have been happening, involving your own credit union as well?
RB: Obviously.
What do you think they do to the philosophy of the credit union, do you think you can still keep that up?
RB: Well I don’t see anything wrong. It depends which way you are talking about philosophy. Isn’t the basic philosophy that we are trying to bring credit union principles to everybody. Now there are credit unions in selected areas that aren’t moving. They are areas where there is no credit union. So you have got to extend your Bond. Now I think you might have been asking me indirectly if I think big is beautiful or small is nice.
Not necessarily. I’m asking you two things in actual fact, about the principles and whether they have stuck to them?
RB: Oh well I believe that one should stick to the principles that we understand, that we are there for the common good, we are there to serve our members. We are not there to build an empire which is purely and simply for the Board of Directors or the staff of a credit union. That the members who come to your counter are not just a number. They are the owners of the credit union. As long as you try and keep the common touch, you keep in touch with your members, you don’t remain isolated, you keep in contact and literally these days with the way the society is the way you keep in touch is by the written word. As long as you don’t be like some of the building societies who used to hold their Annual General Meeting at 11.00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning when nobody could get there, as long as you have your Annual General Meeting at a time convenient and try and encourage members to come to it. Admittedly you might have to have a gimmick like a dinner-dance at $2 a ticket. But as long as you are trying to get to your members and talk to them and encourage them to talk to you and not just be up in the clouds as a super finance company, I believe I’ve still got that philosophy, I believe my Board has still got that philosophy, and I think quite a lot of the credit unions in New South Wales and around Australia are still within what we should be doing given credit union principles to try and get the best deal to manage your own money for the good of the common man.
The people with money. The superannuated people with money. You’ve got the money to spread around.
RB: Well if we take it as it is now, forgetting the question of the ethics of the interest rates and everything, if you can get a pool of people to pool their money together at no cost, we could run a credit union possibly on a half a per cent. We could make loans of almost nothing just the cost of administration. That is if we get down to what we really should be doing. But of course we know that people these days have got to live. You can’t lend money, put money in the common pool for nothing, so the rate that you charge for loans is governed by the fact that you have to pay the hirer money. We can talk about whether we are usurers or whatever, but as long as we try to keep everything to the cheapest way prudent to run an organisation, to give members the service that they should be wanting, to try and give them control of their own financial, not destiny I suppose, but their own financial requirements, be it cheque books or Visa Card or all this multitude of things that this present-day society seem to want, as long as we are doing that efficiently and with purpose and with the human touch, I think we are doing what I think is the modern version of credit union principle. Now I know that Dermot Ryan, twenty years ago, was back in the days when we were making $3,000 loans and everything was done manually. But you have got to be a realist. We live in a different society these days and I think I’ve still got the philosophy that I had thirty years ago.
My point I was really making was that generally speaking credit unions seem to be addressing the people who, I mean your credit union, you’re addressing people who work at the Water Board. OK, they’ve got superannuation, they’ve got a regular job, they work at the Water Board.
RB: No, not so, because the percentage of Water Board direct employees now is less than thirty per cent of our membership. Our membership is out there. Twelve thousand members out in Penrith, eight thousand out in Liverpool, residence of those local government areas.
What sort of percentage run pay-roll deductions?
RB: Couldn’t answer. Substantial. We’ve got over a hundred groups on pay-roll deductions.
Do you do service calls on them? Service calls around those groups?
RB: No we don’t have anybody going around. We’ve given away that idea. We have Branch Offices. We have people who go round to the different groups talking about the credit union. We have a Service Officer. But it is not a large part of our activity.
Now what shall we cover now that we haven’t already covered? I have asked you about Chapters and we’ve pretty well covered that. Institute of Credit Union Directors, you’ve covered that. Have you been involved with the Institute of Credit Union Management?
RB: No that is strictly for Managers. My good friend Graham Humphries. As said to you when I filled that in some time ago, the Credit Union Directors via John Gormley assisted in the forming of the Victorian Institute. We have as I said like Topsy things grow, we have now got the Institute of Credit Union Directors in every State. The stimulus came in 1988 via Victoria, a chap called Helmut Winsler from the Police Credit Union in Victoria. It came out of the WOCCU meeting of August in that year, that they form the Institute of Credit Union Directors, Australia. Helmut became the first President but unfortunately two months later he was put in charge of a complete reorganisation of the Victorian Police Force costing some $400 million, so he retired as the first President of ICUDA (Institute of Credit Union Directors, Australia). Nothing happened through from February to the May until we put them physically together, all the State Presidents got together and they elected Elton Ray from New South Wales as the incumbent President. For reasons best known to himself he seemed to be slightly impressed by a certain bloke he knew for the last couple of years on the New South Wales Institute and he sort of encouraged me to become his first National Secretary/Treasurer. So much so, that I accepted the position. Then we had the problem in my house that Joan, my wife, being Secretary of the New South Wales Institute and I’m National Secretary and sometimes we have trouble identifying what area we are talking about. But between that in the meantime the New South Wales Institute had run a convention down at Canberra in November 1988 and when ICUDA got formed one of the things they thought they wanted to do was have a National Convention. It was on the agenda, it was picked up by Elton Ray when he became President and New South Wales became, in my parlance, the sub-contractors because we had run one in 1988. We became the sub-contractors to run a convention under the banner of ICUDA and that was just completed on 27th to 29th April down in Canberra. We had one hundred and eighty-three Directors of credit unions from all around Australia. Admittedly one hundred and five were from New South Wales but there again that is where the strength is. We had a very successful one down there.
Have you been involved with the World Council at all?
RB: No.
The other thing that I wanted to ask you, were you involved with the restructuring project?
RB: Renewal? No, only as a member of my own particular Board. Very keen to see something happen. Recognised the deficiencies of all this plethora of crossing over of Directorships in that most magnificent dining room, it looks like a set of railway tracks gone mad when you look at it. The only other thing to talk about which may be on your list, my wife and I did at one stage go on Stan Arneil’s Study Tours to Fiji. We went in 1968. A good twenty-nine went over to attend the Annual General Meeting of the Fijian League and we had two weeks over there and we went down to the grass-roots area. We were going through villages and meeting people. My wife has got a few stories about what happened to her, particularly on what is needed when you go out. You see you are miles away from Suva and at night time you’ve got to find somewhere to use the toilet and it doesn’t exist in a village. She has got a few more stories about being led out, she asked through Gene, another couple of Australia ladies wanted to go to the toilet. He took them through the village out into the dark and they asked, ‘Where is it?’ They were under this great big tree and he said, ‘You’re here,’ and he left them. That was her story about the Fijian toilets. We were there.
Did you meet Father Ganey?
RB: Oh yes. Both when he was out here and when he was over there. What can you say about Father Ganey that hasn’t been said already. Magnificent. Dedicated person. Completely at one with the Fijian environment. You know he would have done anything for them.
Not a paternalist?
RB: No, I think he was terrific.
Well, I don’t know if there is any other areas we should cover. Did you have anything to do with central banking?
RB: No. Central banking was one of the things that Don Harvey first brought back from ????? when he went over as a League Director and he brought back the first concept of central banking.
But it was Les Robinson who sort of made it work didn’t he?
RB: Yes, but somebody has got to do the initial leg work and things.
What about other co-operative services, do you think the Association or whatever body is going to come out of restructuring should go into any further co-operative services on behalf of membership of credit unions?
RB: Well without digressing that is one of the things the Institute of Credit Union Directors are wondering. A survey was done in 1986 by AFCUL amongst all the Directors of credit unions in Australia. They got some eight hundred respondents and what came out of it, at the time you have to realise there was only the State ICUD in New South Wales, but what came out of it the Directors were saying that the education of the Directors should be in the hands of Directors by an organisation like ICUD. Forty-four per cent said it should be ICUD. Then there were other percentages. Fourteen per cent said part AFCUL, part ICUD. So when you halved it, it came out at sixty per cent said it should be done by ICUD but there was only one State ICUD. Now what they didn’t say, they said it should be done by Directors, but they didn’t say who was going to pay for it. How were you going to raise the money to provide the education. Yes the State Association said they don’t want to be in the education of Directors, there is no provision in their budget, it has been left to a voluntary group set up representing five hundred members, at the moment, in New South Wales to educate Directors in New South Wales. There are one hundred and sixty credit unions affiliated with ANSWCU in New South Wales. If we accepted that the average Board is seven, some have got eleven, if we accepted a minimum of seven you can multiply seven times one hundred and sixty. As I said we are an Institute only covering just over five hundred members, we’ve got a long way to go and this Institute has been going ten years. One of the things we are looking at on this national scene is what is going to come out, whether anything is going to develop about who is going to educate Directors. Is it going to be left to the volunteers. I’ve got a personal one that maybe every Director in New South Wales, in Australia, should contribute to a central fund which is not administered by the national body, it couldn’t be hog-tied, but there should be a national fund where money is passed over to this volunteer group to provide education. Not to be governed by an annual hand-out, because how can you plan. But so far the education of Directors still interests me after thirty years. I hope it’s going to be done but who is going to pay for it.
Has anybody proposed the setting up of a permanent School?
RB: Facetiously I’d answer you by saying that we have just come away from the Australian National University of Canberra, we used the Academy of Science, you know the dome-shaped building down in Canberra, the Becker Building it is called now. We used that for plenary sessions and on one of the evaluation sheets they asked where should we hold the next convention, if we hold it in twelve months or two years. One chap wrote on it, ‘buy the Becker Building for a national ICUDA headquarters’. So there is a facetious answer. No it hasn’t got to that stage yet. Like ICUD New South Wales is the two bedrooms in my house. My wife is the part-time Secretary with five hundred members. We’ve got the PC, there’s our computer in the bedroom, there is the Canon photocopier, one of the things we are deliberating over at the moment do we put a fax machine in, is there a need for a fax machine. Technically I can get one in but do we need it.
Get another photocopier and make it a photo-fax machine.
RB: Well as it develops my wife has said she doesn’t want our house to be an office at the end of 1991. If ICUD New South Wales grows, we have given a notice of motion that they have got to be thinking about setting up an office. Now whether it is in a user-friendly credit union at a nominal rental or whether we’ve got to go out into the open market, that has still to be addressed. But things grow. Now maybe this Institute is going to grow in New South Wales, maybe from that in tandem the Australian one will grow, but I have got a couple of years to devote to it not much longer.
Speak to Tom Kelly. He will let you have a room down at the Railway Institute.
RB: Done.
Is there anything further that I should ask you.
RB: I don’t think so. I think I’ve raved on enough haven’t I.
Well thank you very much Mr Ron Birch.
Tape 2b: 2829 Words: 1 hour 10 minutes.