Edith was on our Management Committee for six years and was always the first person asked to be a keynote speaker at our annual statewide forums. Edith is remembered by our organisation as a tireless campaigner for a range of human rights issues and she saw public housing as one of the central platforms to this aim.
Edith would come into the HAAG office at least once a week. Everyone would drop what they were doing and we'd have a cup of tea, usually also with Edith's close companion and HAAG founding member Mollie Hadfield.
Edith would want to know the latest goings on in housing, what issues we were concerned about, and whenever we had a dilemma about a problem she would always have a clear perspective on how we should deal with it. Edith's support and direction for our organisation gave us enormous confidence and stability.

Edith also made it clear that the housing privatisation plans of federal and state governments was a dangerous exercise that threatened the basis of housing justice that is public housing. She believed that any politicians who supported the sale or diminished role of public housing had sold out the community and she would express her view with appropriately colourful language.

It was also whenever HAAG's funding was threatened that Edith saw her role to guide us through the difficulties because she believed that HAAG is an important organisation that must survive to continue our vital work.

While we saw Edith as a great asset to us and felt very proud that she belonged to our organisation, it wasn't until we attended the celebration of her life at the Collingwood Town Hall that we realised the enormity of her contribution to the community over her lifetime.
Her involvement, and indeed leadership in many campaigns and causes was extraordinary.

Edith's obituary in The Age, by journalist Deborah Gough, captures some of her achievements:
"Edith Morgan had a way of getting noticed. Her work as Collingwood's first social worker, and her activities on a special guardianship board that looks after disabled people unable to make financial, legal and personal decisions, as well as the work for aged groups, gave her prominence but it was an early morning trip to the docks during the Patrick stevedores dispute in 1998 that many fondly recall.
Morgan and her long time friend Molly Hadfield had listened to reports through the night of the dispute and made their way to Trades Hall at first light.
Hitching the front line of a picket to stop a goods train trying to break the strike and shift wares from the docks.

The stand-off gained wide coverage and the pair-septuagenarians and grandmothers-emerged triumphant, arms raised after the train driver walked off the job.

Born Edith Coldicutt to an Essendon grocer, she learnt early in life about social injustice, and watched her father give away boxes of vegetables to struggling families during the Depression.

Morgan was a member of the Communist Party before joining the Australian Labor Party, and she was active in the socialist left faction. In 1972 she stood against Race Mathews for preselection for the seat of Casey, but was beaten by just one vote. She was also active in the Union of Australian Women.

When her four children had grown up, she returned to school at the age of 49 and later used her qualifications to become Collingwood's first social worker from 1972 to 1984. There she threw herself into her work helping the poor and those in the high-rise commission flats, and also helped with the establishment of the Collingwood Children's Farm and the North Yarra Community Health Centre. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Share care foster care program and Fitzroy Collingwood Rental Housing Co-operative.
During her time on the Guardianship Board, she was known to take a collection from her fellow board members to help anyone who turned up and had no money. She also sat on the Social Security Appeals Tribunal.

The office for which she was best known was her role as the president of the Pensioners and Superannuants Federation. She also helped start the Older Persons Action Centre and Housing for the Aged Action Group, after tiring of hearing younger people speaking on behalf of her age group.

Her husband, Bill Morgan, died in 1979.

She lost a substantial amount of her sight when she was in her 70's but many did not realise it. As a fiercely independent person, she went about her business as busily as ever. Morgan was awarded an Order of Australia Medal and was once Senior Citizen of the Year.

About 18 months ago she began to feel the effects of advanced dementia. Four days before her death, her last appearance was at the Australian Catholic University, where the new chair of aged care was named after her. She died at the Lumeah in Preston.

A wake and service were held at Collingwood Town Hall, which about 600 people attended. Morgan is survived by her four children Pamela, Jane, Alan, Ian, nine grandchildren and one great grandchild."

Edith Morgan is a woman who proves the truth of immortality.

Immortality means living forever in the hearts and minds of those who
knew her, loved her, and have been affected by her being, and by her actions.

If ever there was an activist, Edith Morgan was it. If ever there was a
woman of action, the woman of action was Edith Morgan.

Immortality means leaving behind not only memories, affection and love,
but memorials in the form of policies, positive changes to resource
distribution, strategies for effecting creative, caring and
compassionate advances, and these for the disadvantaged and dispossessed.

Immortality means creating and leaving behind - to go on, the impetus
for others to maintain the strength, to demand that government and business
listen to other voices, not just those of the powerful or would be powerful.

Immortality means giving to others the passionate power to make
governments and business do more than listen, and at least to know that there other
ways of doing, other ways of being, than promoting power for power's sake and
trampling on the poor, the poverty stricken, those without power, or
perceived to be powerless.

Edith Morgan had and did all this and more. She made dispossessed and
disadvantaged people know that there was hope, and that what they
believed and wanted was worth hoping for, worth fighting for.

She was a fighter, a creator of new ways of thinking, new ways of doing,
that had compassion and caring at the core.

I was truly affected by Edith Morgan's being and being here.
She made me feel valued, and valuable. I thank her sincerely for this, for the
strong and true affirmation she gave to me, as I know she gave to others.

Edith Morgan was one powerful woman who affected everyone around her,
and wrought creative difference by all she did..

I treasure her memory.

I salute her courage.

I thank her for being.

Thank you, Edith.

Edith Morgan - one spirited, tenacious, formidable WOMAN!

jocelynne a. scutt saturday 15 may 2004