Ben Woods, Assistant Archivist, Australian Mutuals History
In December last year, we heard the sad news that Victorian credit union trailblazer Bryan Kelly had passed away. The news of the passing of Mr Kelly was transmitted online by BankVic, as Mr Kelly’s biggest achievement in the mutual banking sector was his founding of the Police Credit Co-operative in 1974. In 2013, what was the Police Credit Co-operative and then Police Financial Services Limited, became a mutual bank and began trading as BankVic.
Bryan first learned about credit unions in 1957 when he was visited at home by a representative of his local Catholic Church (St. Agnes Highet, Victoria) who persuaded him to join St Agnes Credit Union. As he wrote in his letter to us in 2015, outside of credit unions, loans for many were either difficult to source (from banks) or came with exorbitant interest via high purchase – for example, it was not uncommon in the late 50’s to pay 50% on small loans for new-fangled items like television sets.
As a police officer who moved a lot, wrote Mr Kelly, banks in the 50’s and 60’s considered him an ‘’itinerant” and would not provide him or any other police officer with a loan. In the early 1970s as a Sergeant at the City Watch House in Melbourne, Mr Kelly approached the Victorian Police Association (the union for Victorian Police Officers) regarding the formation of a credit union servicing Victorian police. In August 1974, a meeting was held to decide whether the Victorian Police would form a credit union in their name. The motion to form a credit union was upheld and the name Victorian Police Association Credit-Co-operative was selected for registration.
Mr Kelly was selected as foundation Chair of Victorian Police Association Credit-Co-operative and he continued in this role until 1984. Post-1984, he remained as a Director until 1994. As BankVic noted in their tribute to Bryan, he helped create an organisation that “today services the needs of over 110,000 Victorian police, health, emergency and public service members”.
He had some experience to draw from when running the Victorian Police Association Credit-Co-operative as he was a founder of St Keiran’s (Moe) Credit Union in 1962. Mr Kelly wrote that the Moe area at the time was particularly disadvantaged and had great need for a credit union (or credit co-operative).
It would be remiss of us not to pay tribute to Mr Kelly’s career as a police officer as it was most distinguished. He became a Sergeant in the early 1970s as mentioned and in 1980 he was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for “his outstanding dedication and contribution to the welfare of police families”. Indeed, Bryan Kelly lived a life of dedicated community service.
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