MURIEL BARASSO

   Muriel Barasso is a true pioneer of the strata industry in New South Wales. Not only was she a driving force behind the formation of a professional body for strata managers, the Institute of Strata Title Management, (ISTM), but she became a Foundation Board member. Several years later, she became the second President of ISTM, now known as SCA(NSW), and, to date, the only woman to hold that position.

    Muriel Barasso was born in the Sydney suburb of Earlwood in 1942, in the midst of World War II. Her father, William Dibley, was a tiler by trade but, during the war, he worked as a fireman on steam locomotives throughout New South Wales. Her mother, Mavis, as was the case in those times, stayed home to bring up Muriel and her younger brother and sister. After the war, William got a job as a storeman at Oakdale Collieries and, so, Muriel attended Oakdale Public School and, later, Camden High School, where she gained her Intermediate Certificate.

    Her first job after leaving school was as a typist at Camden Hospital in 1959, but she soon transferred to Sydney Hospital as the head cashier, a very responsible position. At this time, she was residing at Earlwood with her grandmother and was studying Accountancy at the Metropolitan Business College by correspondence. She then completed a course to qualify her as a Company Secretary, one of the most important positions in any company at that time. By now, Barasso was employed as the Assistant Accountant at Australian Tesselated Tile Company, but was also continuing to indulge her passion for musical theatre and acting.

    Barasso had begun her interest in live, amateur theatre whilst still at school and had hopes of making it her career. After leaving school, she was involved in choirs and other amateur theatre groups, such as the Genesian Theatre in Newtown and the All Nations Club Theatre group at Potts Point. Barasso also scored a couple of parts on television programs in the 1960’s but, unfortunately, making a full time career of acting was difficult and, during her time with the All Nations Club Theatre group, she met Julius Barasso, a Hungarian refugee, and married him in 1967. Julius, who had been wounded in WWII, had arrived in Australia as a post war migrant in 1949. He was fluent in several languages and, as part of his two years compulsory employment, became a translator with the Commonwealth Public Service (CPS), assisting migrants, who were employed on the Snowy Mountains Scheme and the construction of the Bowral to Cooma railway. After that time, he continued with Post Master General’s Department in the customs clearing section.

    After the birth of her daughter, Julia, in 1968, the family moved to Paddington and, gradually, Barasso moved back into employment. She found that there was a great deal of prejudice at the time towards employing married women with children. As she says, “Employers thought that having a child had killed my brain,” so she was forced to take lesser jobs at first. Eventually, she found work as the Accountant with the Student Representative Council at the University of Sydney, a role which she really enjoyed. In 1972, she was head-hunted to work as the Company Secretary at Progress and Properties Ltd and Dainford Ltd, making her the first woman to be appointed as a Company Secretary of a publicly listed company.                     

  It was whilst fulfilling this role at Dainford Ltd that Barasso first encountered strata title management. The company developed and built many blocks of units and retained many of them for rent. Barasso was, at first, responsible for finding management companies to handle these buildings, but she quickly realised that she could do the job herself and, so, save the company money. After carrying out this task for six years, Barasso saw the potential in strata management and felt confident that she could establish her own strata management company and run her own business. Working from her home, near Trumper Park in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, she established Barass Strata Management in 1978. At the outset she managed no more than ten buildings, most of them newly built.

    At that same time, she became a client of Gary Bugden, a partner at Blackshaw, Lindsay and Bugden in Double Bay. Bugden was the preeminent strata lawyer in Sydney at that time and ran regular seminars for his clients on strata issues. At one of these seminars, in May 1978, Bugden issued a challenge to all the strata managers who were in attendance. He challenged them to establish a professional association for strata managers. Consequently, after a similar seminar in November 1978, Bugden convened a meeting of interested strata managers to discuss the formation of such a professional association. More than 25 attendees at the meeting unanimously resolved to form a steering committee and Muriel Barasso was one of the five managers elected to this committee. When the new organisation, ISTM, was duly incorporated in November 1980, Muriel Barasso was elected as a Foundation Director and appointed Treasurer. The first registered office of ISTM was at Barasso’s home and office in Cecil Street Paddington.

    In 1981, Barasso’s business was growing and, so, she moved her office out of her home and into commercial premises in New South Head Road Edgecliff, which continued to double as the registered office of ISTM. It was at this time that Barasso hired her first employee, Helen Barry, who worked for Barass Strata Management until it was sold in 2013. Barasso continued to hold the position of Treasurer until 1984, at which time she was elected as the second President after the retirement of Foundation President, Don Cameron. Barasso served as ISTM President until 1989, when she handed over to Max Dunn. However, she continued to serve on the Board until 1992.

    Barass Strata Management continued to expand and in 1984, Barasso moved the business to Miranda. That move was short lived and, in 1985, Barasso purchased a large house in Rockdale, which had a huge garage attached. For the next 20 years, this large space became the headquarters of her ever expanding business. However, in 2007 the business finally outgrew the extended garage, as there were 10 employees by that time. Barasso moved her business to spacious commercial premises on the Princes Highway at Rockdale, where it remained, until she sold the business to Body Corporate Services in 2013.

    Although Muriel Barasso was a Foundation Director of ISTM and its second President, she always believed that there was room for improvement and development in the organisation. In the early 1990’s, whilst still on the Board, she began to agitate for reform of ISTM, believing that the time was ripe to expand the organisation by allowing staff, who worked for licenced strata managers and all service providers, to join as full members. This idea was seen as revolutionary by most managers of the day and was fiercely resisted at both Board and member levels. Barasso was joined in her quest for change by several other strata managers from Sydney’s southern suburbs, namely Richard Holloway; Peter Bryant; and Graeme Perkins, and, after multiple submissions to the Board of ISTM advocating this major change were rejected, they established a rival body called Strata and Community Industry Association (SCIA) in 1995. Early adherents and supporters of this new group were strata stalwarts Bill Coles and Francesco Andreone and the new group gradually increased its membership, particularly amongst service providers. The two organisations continued to coexist for five years, constantly in a war of attrition, with various attempts to join together rebuffed on each occasion.

    However, such a situation could not continue and, after ISTM commissioned a review of the industry by Alastair Smith in 1999, Smith’s major recommendation was that the two organisations should reunite with a structure allowing both service providers and associates to join as full members in a Chapter system, the very structure, which exists to this day. Thus, Muriel Barasso was once again at the forefront of major changes in the strata industry. The changes wrought by allowing all the stakeholders in the strata industry to be full members, have allowed SCA(NSW) to become the preeminent representative of the industry today, with more than 3,300 members.

   Deservedly, Muriel Barasso was awarded Life Membership of SCA(NSW) in 2011 and, in the Australia Day Honours List of January 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Medal in the Order of Australia for her services to the real estate and strata industries. Muriel Barasso was, indeed, a true pioneer in the strata industry in this state. She was amongst the first to start her own strata management business; she was a Foundation Director of ISTM, now SCA(NSW); she was its second President, and to date, the only woman to hold that position; and she led a “revolution” which shaped the present structure of SCA(NSW) and helped make it the powerful and effective organisation it is today.