 Fay Campbell spent many years in the union movement offering guidance to members and even today in retirement the recent recipient of an Order of Australia medal in the annual Queen’s Birthday honours is still helping put people in the right direction where their work is concerned.
She received her honour for outstanding service to industrial relations and the community and it will share pride of place at her Dapto home with a Centenary Medal she received in 2001 and a Certificate of Honour from the Australian Council of Trade Unions and life membership of the South Coast Labor Council.
Born at the Tarcutta Bush Nursing Hospital, Fay was educated in the area before she left the district at 16 and moved with her family to Warrawong.
 Her first job was with Metal Manufacturers, but when her mother died at only the age of 42 years Fay became the carer for her five brothers aged 8, 11, 13, 17 and 18 and, of course, her father.
She married Keith when she was 20 and they moved to Dapto, where they have lived now for 50 years. The couple had three children Michel, Dean who died at 18 months, and Todd.
Eventually Fay returned to the workforce at Wynn’s store at Warrawong as a shop assistant and it wasn’t long before she joined the union (her husband Keith was always an active unionist) and was appointed a welfare officer.
 Fay took an industrial relations role during the protracted court battle between the Australian Workers Union and the Storeman and Packers Union and continued her official work in the National Union of Workers which took her as far as the Victorian border and into Canberra and Goulburn and the fast developing Campbelltown area.
One of the success stories, she recalls, of the earlier times was the establishment of two worker medical centres and a child-care operation in Ellen St, which still operates today.
“We found that many of our members weren’t receiving adequate medical attention and with the wonderful help of two doctors we were able to better address their problems and what was happening to them in the workforce,” she says.
Along the way Fay served as vice president of the South Coast Labor Council, State President of the National Union of Workers and that body’s national vice president. Wages always an issue
She recalls that certain disparities in wages were always a thorn in the side of the workforce, particularly in earlier times where women were concerned.
Fay also remembers the major strikes the city experienced those many years ago, many of which lasted for weeks on end.
One, in particular, she recalls was the 13-week strike over no shift penalties for women canteen workers at the steelworks.
“There were times” she says “when I didn’t think some of these battles would ever finish.”
Fay says that another key element in company – union disputes back then - centred around worker safety and that it wasn’t until occupational health and safety rules were more firmly established that this scenario began to change, and for the better.
“I suppose you could say that when I was involved with the union I was in it right up to my armpits. It was full on or not at all,” she says.
Today, she has stepped away from the hurly burly but still provides over–the – phone advice to unionists and hopes she is steering them in the right direction.
She has shares in a 65-acre property at Wotton near Foster where she can indulge in her passion for gardening, and there is son Todd’s relaxing 10 acres at Bega where she and her husband Keith can get away from it all.
Fay also enjoys the company of her daughter Michel’s three children Dean, 23, Jordan, 18, and Shaun, 15. “They are the delight of my life,” she says.
Congratulations to Fay on an interesting life which has now been rewarded in the best possible way. | 
