ABOUT

About Tranby: a unique way of learning

Tranby began in 1957, driven by the belief that Aboriginal communities across the country could manage themselves best as cooperatives, making their own decisions and running their own self-supporting local economy as well as doing other work.

The goal was for students to feel that learning through Tranby was going to be nothing like they had experienced before. An independent cooperative, and Indigenous-led from 1980, Tranby worked in many places to support Indigenous people's learning and build community power.

Wherever it ran courses, Tranby aimed to be a meeting place - a safe, common ground where people could come together to share ideas and learn. A big old tree in the Glebe coop garden gave Tranby its logo in these years: 'The Meeting Tree'. Billy Wilson, a young man from Bourke, drew the logo when he was studying at Tranby in the early 1980s, shown below. 

This site gives a snapshot of the many ways that Tranby Co-op encouraged learning from 1980 to 2000. Whether in the city or on Country, Tranby wanted to create the spaces for ideas and conversations to cross barriers. The goal was to make 'meeting trees’ wherever people came together to learn from one another. 

The following comes from a conversation about the 'Network of Older Women' in western Sydney, a community organisation that Tranby supported to develop a learning centre:

Heather Goodall: You did such a lot of things. It’s really interesting the way that the Network of Older Women grew out of all that community activity, isn’t it? Women looking after kids, building up those sort of networks and then getting that organisation up for themselves through the idea of education. 

Robyn Williams (Aboriginal educator, TAFE Liverpool): ‘That’s the only way to do it! There’s always got to be an educational component to everything you do.’  

Kevin Cook (General Secretary, Tranby): ‘And that brings in the politics. If there’s no politics in education then it dies.’ 

Different ways to learn

Knowing the struggles

At Tranby, students learned about the struggles they and their communities had faced in the past and were involved in today.

Burnam Burnam – also known as Harry Penrith – was born in 1936 at Wallaga Lake on the South Coast of NSW. He was an active campaigner for Land Rights and civil rights, but as a child, he had been taken away from his family and spent long years in Kinchela Boys Home. So he knew about the problems many students faced. When he taught in classes, as he was doing in this photo, he talked to them not only about his activist campaigns but about the impact of the Stolen Generations separations and other government policies on Indigenous communities.

Learning together

It was a different experience for many of Tranby’s students to learn among other Indigenous students. Too many Aboriginal students had experienced feeling alienated, lonely and isolated in all-white schools. But at Tranby, among other Indigenous students, it was easier to learn and exciting to share ideas. 

One example of the creative and exciting students at Tranby in the early 1980s was Billy Wilson, the creative young man from Bourke, who designed the Meeting Tree image which became the Tranby logo for many years.

Elders as teachers

Unlike mainstream white schools, Tranby respected Indigenous knowledge and Elders. There were many experienced and knowledgeable people who came to meet students at Tranby or talk with them on country. 

Isabel Flick, an activist and elder from Collarenebri (born in 1927), was often at Tranby. She used the Tranby office to take part in her many campaigns - for Land Rights, for women’s rights, for a clean Darling River for nature as well as people, and to speak up against Black Deaths in Custody. She would give talks to students at Tranby about these campaigns, but she would also sit around with them – playing cards and yarning – so she got to know them and could support them in their own goals.

Building Communities in different ways

Tranby was first under the direction of the Rev Alf Clint, from 1957, a unionist and High Anglican priest, who believed that Aboriginal communities across the country could manage themselves best as co-operatives, making their own decisions and running their own self-supporting local economy as well as doing other work. Tranby Adult Education Co-operative was supported by the Union movement and by the Australian Board of Missions. Co-operatives had earlier been set up with Alf’s help in North Queensland and in villages in PNG, Vanuatu (New Hebrides) and the Solomon Islands. Alf established the roots of the Tranby experience: adult learning, respect for land and culture, co-operation, community and trade unions, justice and liberation.

Tranby came under direct Aboriginal management from 1980, when Kevin Cook, a Wandandian-Yuin man who had been an organiser with the NSW Builders Labourers' Federation, became General-Secretary of the Co-op. In 1982, Bob Bellear, a barrister and a Noonucal/Bundjalung man from North Coast NSW, became chairman of the Cooperative Board.  

Under Indigenous leadership, Tranby flourished with many learning experiences for adult learners through campaigns and courses at Tranby itself and across the country.

Tranby did not see itself as unique or isolated. Coming out of the cooperative movement, as well as the union movement, Tranby worked on the principle that 'unity is strength'. So Tranby saw itself as being closely allied with a number of other Aboriginal-led and community-based learning bodies.

The organisations that Tranby staff kept in close contact with were the Institute for Aboriginal Development (IAD) an adult learning centre in Alice Springs, and three community-controlled secondary schools: the Koorie Community School in Melbourne, Yipirinya in Alice Springs and Strelley Community School in the Pilbara in Western Australia. Tranby hosted the first conference of these and other organisations in its Glebe building in 1986.