This month marks the third anniversary of the passing of a great Novocastrian.
Margaret Henry’s death from pancreatic cancer on 9 September 2015 at the age of 81 left a gaping hole in Newcastle’s public life and in this city’s progressive social change movement.
Margaret and I were close friends, and in preparing to introduce the inaugural Margaret Henry Memorial Lecture, delivered by prominent Novocastrian and founder of Renew Newcastle, Marcus Westbury, on 12 September, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect again on her legacy to our city.
Margaret’s six decades of activism reflected her passion, commitment and care for people with disabilities, Indigenous issues, women’s rights, built heritage, history, and arts and culture.
Margaret’s contribution to Newcastle was recognised when she was posthumously made a Freeman of the City, Newcastle’s highest civic honour, in January 2016.
Forthright to a fault, Margaret could be – and often was - brutally blunt and never shirked controversy; if you ever left her wondering what she thought about someone or something, you just weren’t listening.
This trait, and the usual reproval and acrimony that is the burden of those who speak truth to power, earned Margaret many enemies and detractors, who were quick to brand her with derogatory labels like “whinger” or “naysayer”.
In fact, much of Margaret’s personal life was spent helping people who had fallen on hard-times in various ways, and there’s no shortage of heartfelt testimonials from grateful recipients of her care and kindness, which often changed people’s lives.
These aren’t the stuff of news, but those who knew her best were well aware of this side of Margaret.
Margaret’s public life also involved helping people, whether in the form of shepherding through Newcastle Council’s disability access initiatives, or helping out Young People’s Theatre after fire gutted their building 1995, or the many other positive social and environmental initiatives for which she was partly or mostly responsible during her two terms as a Newcastle councillor, and in her many other roles in local community-based organisations over six decades.
But it is true that much of Margaret’s activist life was spent trying to prevent bad things from happening.
Margaret was no Pollyanna; she had a finely-tuned and well-practiced sense of outrage, and if something looked like it might happen that she thought shouldn’t, she was right there.
From the destruction of heritage buildings in the aftermath of the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, to the more recent controversies of the Laman St trees in 2012 and the destruction of our railway line , Margaret was a sentinel of the city, ready to spring into action when needed.
In the early ‘90s Margaret founded Save Our Rail, which for more than two decades valiantly withstood the relentless campaign by local vested interests to cut the Newcastle rail line, before it was sacrificed at the altar of vested interest by a captive and incompetent state government under the guise of “revitalisation”, amid reams of dodgy documents, corrupted processes, and cash-filled yellow envelopes to local politicians.
Margaret took her outrage about this to her grave, and I have no doubt that she’s rolling in it right now about what’s happened since.
Margaret was a strong believer in government and democracy.
By all measures, people’s faith in the institutions of government around the world is currently at seriously low levels, and this disillusionment is both the cause and the symptom of a pervasive crisis in democracy itself.
This finds its expression in many different ways, from Brexit to the election of people like Donald Trump who are demonstrably unfit for public office, and to the tacit - or even active - support for the appallingly inhumane treatment by governments (including our own) against refugees, in open defiance of their human rights, one of the supposed foundations of modern democracy.
At the local level, it’s reflected in matters such as the failure of Newcastle’s Labor dominated council to implement election commitments to improve community participation, and in the council’s recent decision to adopt a confidential proposal to shift council meetings from City Hall to the new City Administration building without any community consultation.
Some of these things hadn't happened when Margaret was with us, but it's not hard for those of us who knew her to imagine how she would have responded in these cases.
I can just imagine the outrage that Margaret would have felt if she’d been around when the news broke that Newcastle Council officers had negotiated a formal agreement with the Supercars organisation to prevent elected councillors from accessing information in the council’s contract with Supercars, and at the apparent failure of the elected council to do anything about this even after this was known.
Margaret knew the value of dissent in a healthy democracy, and her outrage about such matters would have spurred her to action.
Another of Margaret’s characteristics that her close friends came to know, is that she could have a devilish sense of humour.
I fancy that Margaret would have shared a hearty laugh at the ironic appropriateness of the acronym that has emerged from Newcastle Council’s recent rebranding from “Newcastle City Council” to a name (to quote the Council’s public statement) “befitting the city’s stunning revitalisation”: City of Newcastle.
Stunning indeed. Margaret would have dined out on that one for a long time.
