Margaret Kittson
Nominated by Camp Hill Branch and QTU Executive
Margaret Kittson started her teaching career at a time when equal pay for women had only just been introduced, but married women were still required to resign at the end of the school year. She completed her Diploma of Education on a Commonwealth Fellowship and was bonded for 12 months, leading to her first appointment at Baralaba.
Her first industrial action with the QTU was in 1976, when rolling strikes were staged in support of Charters Towers teachers sacked for smoking cannabis.
Margaret has been a regular at Brisbane Labour Day marches since the late 1970s, and as the inaugural secretary of the Sunshine Coast Trades and Labour Council in the mid-1980s, organised the first Labour Day marches on the Sunshine Coast.
Since 2000, she has been the QTU Workplace Representative at Holland Park State School, been appointed as a Senior and Lead Union Rep for Brisbane South Area Council, and held executive roles for Camp Hill Branch and Metropolitan South and Metropolitan North and Central Area Councils. She has been a State Council Representative for Camp Hill Branch and Metropolitan South Area Council, a member of the AEU Branch Council Committee, and a delegate to AEU National Conference.
From the early 2000s, Margaret has led the charge to protect the professional position of teacher-librarians, at a time when many schools were using workplace reforms to trade these positions in. She took responsibility for the Teacher Librarian Special Interest Group in the QTU, shifting it to an online advocacy group, and continued her dogged defence of this often-forgotten corner of the teaching profession well into the 2010s. In this time, Margaret wrote numerous articles for the QTU Journal and made a personal submission to the Committee to Examine School Libraries and Teacher-Librarians in Australia in 2010.