About this project

Our project was called: Networking Tranby: Indigenous Student Experiences of Enrolment and Beyond. The aim of this research was to learn more about the experiences of students involved with Tranby over the first 20 years of Indigenous community control, from 1980 to 2000. We were particularly interested in the personal networks of friendships and contacts formed through Tranby and in how these affected enrolment periods and later lives. 

The research has been funded through an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, in a collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney and the not-for-profit Tranby Co-operative for Aborigines. The main investigators have been Heather Goodall, Heidi Norman and Belinda Russon. The research assistants on the program have been Fiona Smith, Helen Randerson, Judith Torzillo, Lynette Bolt and Emelda Davis. 

“We're just a different mob of people. We usually laugh a lot because if you don't laugh you cry, so we just make jokes about everything… And embracing that diversity within our own mob that some have different degrees of it but on a grassroots level we all come from the same thing, we start talking about our mob and our family and how we get home...” - Patsy Robertson

Our findings

We interviewed 21 people who had been enrolled at Tranby at Glebe over those years. They told us there were many things they valued about learning through Tranby and many spoke about enjoying learning in classes where all the students were Indigenous. You will find quotations from these interviews on this site, throughout all the segments. You will find a summary of this research in the Student Memories section of Learning at Tranby in Glebe. 

There are also many student voices to be heard in the Newsletters and Yearbooks section of Learning at Tranby in Glebe, as well as the videos about excursions to be found in Learning in the Community. 

Tranby ran classes in many different places for many different learning goals – from the formal classes at Glebe to management training for Land Councils. We did not interview people from courses outside Tranby but we tried to show how many different types of learning Tranby was involved in by drawing this diagram of Tranby Learning and Teaching. 

The Newsletters of TUCAR, the Trade Union Committee on Aboriginal Rights, founded by Kevin Cook when he was still a student at Tranby in 1977, give a good indication of these wider processes of learning – from learning in Land Councils to learning in Music Concerts to learning in Trade Unions – and the news about all these different types of courses can be found there. We have uploaded scans of all of the ones we could find.

Another of the things this project set out to learn where the students came from who had enrolled to learn at Tranby in Glebe. To do this, we looked at all the records Tranby had kept about each student. We found there were 1095 students who enrolled in courses in Tranby in Glebe between 1980 and 2000. Of these students, while many were from NSW (67%), there were students from every state in Australia except Tasmania. Students from the Torres Strait Islands recorded their home state as Queensland.

In the 20 years before, from 1957 to 1968, Tranby had offered only two courses and did not have majority Indigenous membership on its Board. There had been far fewer students who came to Tranby, with only 50% from NSW and 31% from Queensland but there were no students from Western Australia, Victoria or Tasmania. There were however 13 students (7%) from the Pacific including PNG, the Solomons and New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) with 9 identified as being from the Torres Strait Islands.

This research allowed us to draw the interactive map on this site. Over this time, Tranby had grown as a real national learning centre, drawing students from right across Australia and from more areas by 2000 than it had done before 1980.

“It's about being around lots of other Indigenous people, studying with them every day and from all different parts of Australia, that was the most valuable thing, it was just having a new family. To actually be in classes with Elders and people 10, 20 years older than me, was really different...” - Michelle Blakeney

While students from NSW were a significant majority, and many students were from the mainland, there were also Torres Strait Islanders in the student body and staff, as the student memories show, and Torres Strait Islander Studies was taught alongside Aboriginal Studies.

The former students we interviewed had come to Tranby because they wanted to learn about their culture and history in a safe and supportive environment, as well as to gain knowledge and skills and further their career. But many spoke about one issue in particular – they all valued being in a learning environment where all the other students were Indigenous. Some of their memories are here and you can read a summary of our findings in the Student Memories section of Learning at Tranby in Glebe.