Learning on the job

Aboriginal Development Unit (ADU)

By 1983, Tranby had become a hub of people with strong experience and talents. Many of the students had substantial amounts of community experience. The staff members, Black and White, had been developing expertise on delivering adult learning in Indigenous urban and rural community settings.

At the same time, Aboriginal people at Tranby had been making a major impact on the political debate in NSW and across the country. The Land Rights movement in particular was one where Tranby staff like Kevin Cook and Board members like Jacko Campbell had been prominent from 1975 and before. From 1980, the support that Tranby had given to local land claims, such as for Aunties Phoebe Mumbler and Jessie Williams for the Stewart Island claim at Nambucca Heads, had begun to develop into teaching programs.

Jacko Campbell had seen the possibility of using Tranby teachers, like the anthropologist David Morrissey, to coordinate a learning program for young people to become custodians for the important sites in their areas. They could be employed by Land Councils, Jacko argued, so that Aboriginal communities could retain power over sites and did not have to turn to Government agencies like the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to employ sites officers.  For the first Site Recorders Course, Jacko recruited 6 young men from the South Coast to be enrolled at Tranby from 1982, with Dave as coordinator, to undertake formal learning in sites management but more importantly, to travel to sites across the state to learn from senior Aboriginal people and their communities what they wanted from site protection.

With the Wran Government’s Land Rights Act in 1983, Regional Land Councils were established and Tranby expanded its sites course. This second Site Recorders Course aimed to empower each Region to manage their region’s significant sites. Each region selected two people to enroll in the course – all young men at that stage – and these men took part then in a two-year program, facilitated again by David Morrissey. The people who took part in this were from across the state. There is a video of them talking about the course held in the Tranby Archives. You can read memories of setting up both the Site Recorders’ courses from Kevin Cook’s book, Making Change Happen.

Each LALC had to complete large amounts of paperwork to fulfil State Government regulations about accountability for its expenditure and projects. This required substantial levels of accounting and literacy skills which were often difficult to find in communities which had been denied access to secondary and often even primary education. It was clear that there was a major task for Adult Education in the area of basic skills and company management for all the Local Land Councils.

In 1985, the NSW State Land Council asked Tranby to be involved in delivering this training. The Site Recorders courses had proved that Tranby could deliver such skills at community level. Working closely with the Regional Land Councils, Tranby began planning to help land council members learn the new uniform accounting system. These courses were held in halls and clubs in towns central to each region, with Tranby staff delivering the teaching along with local accountants and other professionals organised by the Regional Councils. 

The experience of running these classes made it clear to Tranby that they needed to develop some structure at Tranby. This would allow Tranby to call on both staff and students based in Glebe to help plan programs, to tender for funds and to gather teachers from its Glebe courses and from its rural network to manage the implementation of the programs – and then evaluate the project at the end to revise it for next time. This led to the plan for the ADU, which came about in discussions between Kevin Cook, Dave Morrissey and Chris Milne. When it first got going, late in 1986, this was called the Action Development Unit – to make it clear that it would not just produce reports but would take action to make change. The initials were ADU – so before long, most people began to call it the ‘Aboriginal Development Unit’ and that is how it is known today.

The ADU oversaw many different types of projects involving adult learning, skills development, business planning and community development. Whatever the details of each project, the overall ADU goal was to change things on the ground by empowering communities.

The people who formed the Development Unit initially were Dave Morrissey and Chris Milne, both teaching staff at Tranby, but they drew on students and other staff to support the ADU’s work. Before long, Business Studies graduate, Ruth de Costa became a key organizer with the unit. Fiona Smith, a graduate of the Tertiary Prep course, took on a job with the ADU as an admin assistant. Ruth De Costa and Cheryl Corbett wrote a Report on the ADU in 1994, briefly explaining the work of the ADU. Its Training, Research and Business Planning projects are shown below. The ADU also organised events for Indigenous organisations. One was the international ‘Healing Our Spirit Conference on Addictions Free Lifestyles’ in November 1994.

→ Report by Rose Ellis [PDF 1.1MB] | Speech by Barbara Flick [PDF 259KB]

In an interview recorded in 2017 with Fiona Smith and Heather Goodall, Ruth talked about the ADU and its projects. Read the transcript [PDF 186KB]

The organising staff also included Warren Mundine, Jennifer Beale, Jack Gibson and Sasha Saunders. They all contributed to the project management team who planned, tendered and then managed each project to a conclusion and then evaluated it to strengthen the ideas they could bring to the same steps all over again for the next project.

The types of projects Tranby and the ADU ran can be classified as they are here as:  Training or Research or Business Modelling and Organisation Planning. Archivist Julia Mant catalogued the Tranby archives and included the records of all the courses that the ADU ran. Her catalogue of ADU courses is here.

The Site Recorders courses were underway before the ADU was developed and they are included in the Learning in the Community section. The records of each of ADU projects are in the Tranby archives in the Box indicated. Where a project report or evaluation report is available, we have scanned it and you can look at it by clicking on the link. 

Training

1. Land Councils Accounting Training: 1986-1987 [Box 17] (Begun before ADU established)

2. Land Councils Management and Planning Training: 1987 – 1990 Report 1989 [PDF 1.5MB]

3. Train the Trainer for Land Council workshops: 1989-1990

4. Property management for Land Councils: 1985-1995 including Homes on Aboriginal Land (1987-89), Housing Company management, Real Estate Institute (1988-96). [Box 18]

6. Community Organisation management training: 1987-1991: including Aboriginal Directors’ training, Industrial Relations, planning with ATSIC (1993) [Box 21], planning in Aboriginal organisations (1990-96), enterprise management. [Box 22]

7. Koorie Youth Organisation: 1991-1993: [Box 20] This was held at the South Sydney Policy Youth Club. As Ruth de Costa and Cheryl Corbett described it: ‘Young offenders were recruited to increase their skills and esteem to enable them to re-enter further education’

8. Early Childhood Education: Murawina: 1994 

9. SRA Indigenous Employees: 1993-1996: Skills and career planning 

10. Industrial Relations workshops

11. ATSI Hospitality Training: 1995

12. ATSI Tourism Training: 1995-1997

Research + feedback

1. Local Government and conditions of Aboriginal communities 1989

This project was a partnership between UTS and Tranby. Shire Councillors in 6 Shires - five in rural NSW and one in Liverpool city in urban Sydney. Each were surveyed about the conditions of Aboriginal communities in their area. Nine Indigenous Researchers administered and contributed to the analysis of the survey, including 4 Tranby students. Here is a full copy of the project report, including students involved in each Shire.

→ Read more

2. Black Deaths in Custody 1995

This project held a series of workshops to learn how Aboriginal Communities responded to the NSW Government’s proposed reforms to respond to the Recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. [Held in the Tranby Archives as Series 19]. Four booklets were prepared to assist the discussion, with explanations and comments on each of the recommendations, like whether the Government had accepted and then whether it had been implemented. Copies of these four booklets are in the Tranby Archives. Ruth De Costa spoke in her 2017 interview (see link above) about how, after all the workshops had taken place, a Retreat was held at Wollongong for families of those who had died in custody. A report was written on the workshops and the family retreat but it has not yet been located in the Tranby Archives.

→ Read more about this campaign

3. Cervical Cancer Prevention Finding culturally appropriate language to describe pap smears 1994-1996

The ADU held a series of Focus Groups to gather information about the most culturally appropriate ways to give Aboriginal women information about cervical cancer prevention.

Business modelling + organisational planning

1. Jeringa Museum Shop, Roseby Park

2. Boomali, Sydney

3. Gandangara Local Aboriginal Land Council, south western Sydney

4. South Coast Fishing Co-operative, Computer advice and support

5. Toomelah Social Plan

6. Gandangarra Lands Council Tourism Project

7. Western Australian Aboriginal Legal Service, planning workshop