The Memorial Margaret Barry Lecture is held in memory of an outstanding community activist, politician and Regional Council co-ordinator.

2009: "The global financial crisis: a severe challenge for social inclusion in Australia" Redfern Town Hall by Jock Collins, Professor of Economics and Co-Director Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Australia on the 22 September 2009.
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2005: The inaugural lecture was delivered by Andrew Jakubowicz, Professor of Sociology UTS, at Redfern Town Hall on the 27th April 2005.
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Marg Barry, Community Activist (1934 - 2001)

She was gut-strong, mind-quick, moral-certain. Therefore formidable. But also light of heart, vivacious, funny and a self-put-down merchant. She was single, single-minded, singular. She was a young woman who had grown old trying to make things fairer and had, therefore, grown fair. She was irreplaceable. She was what every community needs. If this society, Australia, hasn't got a front line of young Marg Barrys coming on, we're in trouble.

Barry, who has died suddenly at the age of 66, was officially the Coordinator of the Inner Sydney Regional Council for Social Development until 1999 (when she retired to the Central Coast). Unofficially she was a networker, a provocateur, a community activist, an organiser, more a barbed-wire fence in the path of bureaucrats than a thorn in their sides.

She was sometimes regarded as a character, as happens to those who do not conform. She was the survivor of an era in which the working class of Sydney and especially South Sydney, where she had lived and worked, was a community.

Click here to read more on Margaret Barry.