People Australia

McDonald, Audrey June, née Petrie (1937-?) [alive in 2025] trade unionist, Communist and peace activist 

Birth: 4 May 1937 at Tenterfield, New South Wales, daughter of native-born parents Francis (Frank or Ike) Petrie, farmer, and Pauline, née Curvey (1901-1986). Marriage: 30 April 1960 at the Registrar General’s Office, Sydney, to a divorcee. Thomas Arthur Albert (Tom) McDonald (1926-2022), a carpenter born in Sydney. They had one son. Death: alive in 2025. 

• Audrey was raised on a farm at nearby Sandy Flat where she attended a bush primary school, then moved with her mother to Sydney to continue her schooling. They lived at the Salvation Army’s Peoples’ Palace, her mother working there as a housemaid and Audrey worked in a milk bar after school.
• They joined the Hotel, Club and Restaurant Union. Audrey was an active member of the union and was a delegate to the World Youth Festival in Warsaw, Poland, in 1955.
• She and Tom lived in Housing Commission flats in Maroubra after their son's birth in about 1962, and was a full-time home-keeper and felt unsettled.
• She studied at the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Moscow with Tom for 6 months in 1965. She was national secretary of the Union of Australian Women from about 1970 to 1993, working mostly full-time and in a voluntary capacity.
• Both Audrey and Tom left the Communist Party of Australia in 1968 after Russian troops entered Czechoslovakia.
• Peace activist and anti-apartheid campaigner.
• Published Dare to Dream; the memoirs of Tom and Audrey McDonald (2016) with Tom.
• In 1989 she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the trade union movement and to women’s affairs.
• Her husband was an official for the Building Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia for 41 years including national secretary, and was the Australian Council of Trade Union's first Communist vice-president.
• Lived on the NSW central coast, where she and Tom were active in the community. 

Sources
Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald 28 November 1998, p 12; Bob Broughton, Danny Blackman, Mike Donaldson, Carmel Shute and Beverley Simons, Comrades! Lives of Australian Communists (Sydney, 2020), pp 312-315.