Margaret Trask, AM: 27 April 1928-19 November 2002 (Obituary‪)‬

LIKE MOST OF US, MARGARET HAD TWO LIVES: A PRIVATE, AND A PUBLIC ONE. Margaret revealed her inner self to few but her public life is a matter of record. What follows is a broad outline of her; career in order to give some background to the more detailed contributions which make up the body of this special issue. Quotations (unless otherwise indicated) are from other contributions herein. She was born on 27 April 1928 in Camden New South Wales. Longtime Library Association of Australia (LAA) watchers will have observed that the half-decades 1923, 1928, 1933 and 1938--and for all I know the pattern may continue--have produced a striking number of high achievers in the Australian ranks of the profession. Margaret was one of these. Her mother was Mary Winifred Price, and her father Henry Kinsella from Baltinglass, County Wicklow, Ireland, an AIF--Gallipoli veteran. Margaret's Irish genes were manifest in her quick wit, her inability or refusal to tolerate fools and her repugnance for the pretentious and showy. Many bureaucrats and not a few of her colleagues learned this the hard way: as the chair of any meeting, she always knew what she wanted, and with the usual concessions to politesse, always took the direct route to what she saw, and eventually the meeting would perceive, as the logical conclusion: