The year 2025 marks 40 years of the Australian Mutuals Archives (AMA). The Archives began life in 1985 as the Australian Credit Union Historical Co-operative (ACUHC). AMA holds around 40,000 records (analogue and digital) pertaining to Australia’s customer owned banks including annual reports, meeting minutes, correspondence, oral histories, photographs, video and artefacts. These records date from the 1940s to the present.
ACUHC was started by credit union pioneers such as Dermott Ryan (the first meeting was in his backyard in Lidcombe, Sydney), Kevin Yates and Tom Kelly and counted co-operative historian Gary Lewis and MP and historian Race Mathews as members.
The founders of ACUHC were motivated by a desire to preserve the ‘tribal memory’ of the Australian credit union movement. The initial focus was on oral histories and historian Richard Raxworthy was employed to conduct oral histories with movement personalities big and small. He eventually conducted over 600 oral history interviews that provide the backbone of our oral history collection that we continue to add to today.
Gary Lewis was a preeminent co-operative historian and was the most important credit union historian in the country. He produced several books using the archives most significantly he wrote People before Profit: the Credit Union Movement in Australia (1996), onsite at the archives in Surry Hills in 22 months of feverish activity.
In 1996 the Australia Credit Union Archives Trust was established by Cuscal to oversee the running of the archives. The ACUHC continued to function alongside the Australian Credit Union Archives which employed a professional archivist. In 2005 the ACUHC was disbanded, and all the work was taken over by the Australian Credit Union Archives.
In 2017 our name was changed to Australian Mutuals History as this was seen to better reflect our broader collecting remit of the entire financial mutuals sector (including mutual banks). In 2024, the name became Australian Mutuals Archives.
The AMA remains an important institution that continues to promote Australia’s customer owned banking sector. At the time of writing, we are sponsored by nearly 30 customer-owned banks as well as the industry peak body COBA. Our Trustees are all long serving current and former mutual bank staff. Some of our recent work has included assisting with the research of the books A History of Australian Co-operatives 1827–2023 and two editions of COBA’s Banking with Purpose.
We hope to continue to assist the mutual sector and researchers long into the future …
