BETTY MARGINSON
Community leader
3-2-1923 - 18-12-2015
"The quickest way to die is to spend your life sitting inside watching TV" was how former Hawthorn mayor Betty Marginson saw retirement. Back in 1992 she told The Age in an interview: "You have to remain active and keep involved with other people". And active she certainly was - as a mother, teacher and dynamic community leader.
Betty believed that the role of public services was to help people to better themselves and actively determine their own lives. In relation to the University of the Third Age, where she was president of the local chapter, she declared that it was "not other people doing things for the aged, it's the aged being given a chance to do something for themselves. It's the non-charity attitude that seems great to me". 
Betty   May Marginson, who has died aged 92, was the second female mayor in Melbourne, wearing the chains at Hawthorn in 1976-1977. From a shop-keeping family, she was a first-generation university student during World War II and then a teacher and the mother of four children - in the front lines at a time when Australian women were beginning to break through into a larger public role.
Born as Betty Reilly, the youngest of five children, she grew up in Footscray during the Depression at a time when more than one breadwinner in four was unemployed. A good student at the Geelong Road public school and Williamstown High, Betty enrolled at the Melbourne Teachers College, and later the University of Melbourne. Only one in 100 women, from any social class, went to Australian universities in 1939. Teaching was Betty's route into the professional middle class at a time when not many women were professionals.
In her early twenties Betty was vice-president of the Students Representative Council in 1946 and Victorian Minute Secretary of the Council for Civil Liberties, assisting Brian Fitzpatrick in the Victorian "Yes" Campaigns in the two unsuccessful referenda to extend Commonwealth powers in 1944 and 1946. No doubt the early lesson about economic deprivation in the 1930s, followed by fascism, war and the danger of invasion by Japan-one of her brothers was lost in the air on a bombing raid from North Africa into Crete in 1941-helped to shape her strong belief in a better world.
Betty made life-long friends at the University who shared her values. Her generation saw the solution not in terms of the market, which had failed in the Depression, but in the combination of responsible government and an active democratic citizenry. Roosevelt's New Deal had legitimated interventionist government in the United States, as did the war itself, and the influence of socialism and communism, before the Cold War took root. Also active in student politics was her future husband Ray Marginson whom she married in 1947.
Ray, a Commonwealth public servant, later became senior executive manager at the University of Melbourne in 1966 and part-time chair of Melbourne Water and the Melbourne Museum. Like Betty, his main associations were on the Labor side of politics, though they also learned to work both sides of the aisle. The Marginsons were married for 68 years but Betty's potential contribution remained largely on ice through the 1950s and most of the 1960s while she reared three boys and a girl. The family was not wealthy and in those days childcare services were non-existent. Betty was a driving force in the creation of the local pre-school and baby health centre. She lost one child soon after birth and nursed two others through persistent and life-threatening attacks of asthma.
Briefly working at Eltham High School in 1955 she helped teenage student Phillip Adams find a job in advertising, the springboard for his remarkable career in marketing, film, politics and media.
After raising the children she returned to teaching in migrant English at Hawthorn West school in 1969.
Betty soon became treasurer for the School Council, was active in abortion law reform, and in 1972, after some pressure from friends living locally, she stood for and was elected to the Hawthorn City Council.
She served on the council for nine years and was decisive in its transformation. Among her initiatives were the establishment of a day-care hospital and construction of a major recreation centre. In 1979 she became the first woman elected to the executive committee of the Municipal Association of Victoria in 1979.
After her retirement from Hawthorn Council in 1981 she was made chair of a Consultative Council on Senior Citizens set up by the State Minister of Health, and served on it and its successor body for a decade. Combining her interests in education and older people, she was the founding Hawthorn president of the Hawthorn chapter of the University of the Third Age and in 1993 she was elected President of the Victoria State University of the Third Age Network.
Nor did Betty neglect the education of the young in this period. For a decade from 1983 she was a member of the Council of the University College of Melbourne University and president from 1986 to 1991. Betty completed a graduate Diploma in Public Policy in 1985 and was a voluntary worker at the Heide Park and Art Gallery. She turned down the offer to enrol in a PhD at the University of Melbourne. There was not enough time in the day.
Betty was awarded the Queen's Jubilee Medal in 1977, made an AM in 1993 and received the Centenary of Federation medal in 2001. She was one of 200 women placed on the honour roll of "Women shaping the nation" at Victoria's Parliament House.