Jack Coyne (8 March 1935 – 29 September 2009) was born and educated in Sydney. He was a talented rugby league footballer (as was his father before him) and he played for the South Sydney and Newcastle teams in the 1960s. He trained as a survey draftsman and worked for a variety of employers, including NSW Lands Department, Department of Main Roads, Brisbane City Council, Cairns Regional Electricity Board, ACI Glassworks and Sydney City Council.
At the Sydney City Council, Jack Coyne was involved in the establishment of the City Council Employees’ Credit Union in the early 1960s. Remarkably, he served for 41 years as a director of the City Council Employees’ Credit Union, which later became Sydney Credit Union Ltd.
Jack was actively involved in the wider credit union movement and he served on the Boards of the NSW Credit Union League and the Australian Federation of Credit Union Leagues (AFCUL). In fact, when he was elected in 1973 as the AFCUL president he was only thirty-seven and the youngest person to have held that role.
Jack was an Australian delegate to the World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) from 1973-79 and attended World Council meetings. He participated in credit union development projects throughout Australia, Fiji, Panama and Central America. In 1993 WOCCU organised an international conference in Russia at the invitation of the Russian Committee for Credit Union Development. Jack Coyne joined the WOCCU contingent in Russia.
In 1989, Jack Coyne recorded an oral history interview with Richard Raxworthy (the recording is held by AMH), where he talks extensively about his credit union career and the various “pioneers’’ he met, such as Stan Arneil, Dermot Ryan and Ken Miller. In talking about Sydney Credit Union, he states “We are making a profit for members. We are making a profit to improve things for our members. Service, interest rates and all that sort of thing. Which is a different philosophy altogether [from banks]. We are both using the same mechanism to make a profit, but we are doing it for different reasons. I think that is the very important thing of credit unions and while we can hang on to it, I think we have got a great future.”
Jack Coyne passed away in 2009, at the age of 74.
