Black Books - Kevin Cook interview

Black Books was a Tranby outreach program – but it was really in reverse. It was Tranby – as a community organisation – reaching into the educational institutions of the state. As Tranby’s knowledge of the secondary education system deepened, and as Aboriginal Studies entered the mainstream curriculum, it became clear to Kevin and others at Tranby that the resources had to get much better in schools if the existing teachers were to be able to deliver the new curriculum. Many of Tranby’s staff and students were drawn on to develop better resources for school education by reviewing books which could be used as the basis for Aboriginal Studies teaching and learning.

Kevin: This Black Books idea got started with Kathy Campbell. Kathy’d come from Victoria where her father was a union organiser. Her politics clashed with his and so she did her university training at Armidale where she worked on the campaign that successfully got an ALP candidate up for the first time in that electorate. She went back to Victoria and worked in schools where there was a large migrant group and the schools were very progressive in that time. Then she came to Sydney, because her husband worked for a newspaper as an editor and we were looking for teachers, so we grabbed her! She had a lot of great ideas!

We used to go over to Stanmore where the teachers were doing courses on Aboriginal Studies. That was a Department of Education place where they sent teachers for inservicing. I was a speaker over there and Kathy came over with us. And we started talking to teachers. All the time they were saying to us they were going through their school libraries and there was nothing for them, or they’d been reading through stuff and they didn’t think it was right. So we come back and Kathy started working on how we’d set up an information centre. That’s what it started out to be really. And the bookshop idea sort of developed from that.

Kathy approached Dave Morrissey, who was an anthropology honours student when he first became involved with Tranby, initially to help in the Land Rights Support Group. In this group, white students and others took some of the organising burden off Aboriginal activists by picking up the jobs like, for example, seeking support for the campaign from non-Indigenous organisations or of publicising Aboriginal rallies. Later the Land Rights Support Group published the early land claims to assist the campaign for further political reform. Having graduated by then, Kevin asked Dave to work with a specific community, at Nambucca Heads, in their attempt to secure their land, using other legislation. At the same time he was doing anthropological work on land claims for the Central Land Council in the Northern Territory.

Dave: Kathy Campbell came to me in 1981. This was the time when Aboriginal Studies was just getting going in the NSW curriculum, and she wanted Black Books to be able to cater for the school libraries and history programs. What Kathy needed was someone to actually vet the books that Black Books was going to list in its catalogue. The whole premise was that the books that Black Books would have on sale would be worth having on sale.

Kevin: So she got Dave to read through the books we wanted to put on the catalogue to come out from this information centre. And the thing was, while Dave was reading the books to make sure they were factual, Kathy’d be on the phone to the communities the books were written about, making sure that it was alright, you know that everything in the book was okay? We said that if it was written about a community or a person, then we’d have to get in touch with that community or person before we’d sell the book. And that’s what gave us a really big plus in front of all other bookshops, ’cause people could trust that what they were buying was alright by Aboriginal people.

Dave: Many of the school libraries had some books but they were all old. Ones like AW Reed’s Legends of Australia were still around. None of them so totally offensive, but all of them were pretty useless. And a lot of the newer ones were too academic. So you can’t give the Year 6 kids the same book you’d give to a university student. But the teachers wouldn’t know till they got it on the shelf. So then it’s not much use. Kathy asked me to help her by reading the books and putting together the catalogue, while she was putting together the shop. I read all the books she wanted, about 110 in the first catalogue. Went through them and put the catalogue together and it enabled Black Books to start marketing to schools. We were able to tailor orders for them.

That would have been from mid ’81. Then I guess about early ’82 we started trying to sell books in a more serious way. And Kathy then moved on to do something else, and so I was persuaded to stay. I was only there about a year or so and then I think Maria Mackell came in from Gleebooks and other people came into help run the show and there was a CDP1 employee in there too and we had students reviewing for us.

Kevin: And there was that great volunteer, Joyce Lambkin, she came every day for years.

Judy Chester: And we used to do the proof reading you know? The women in the NOW program out at Liverpool. Dave Morrissey would come out when he was teaching in the course with all these books and hand them out and say ‘read ’em’. So we’d read them and just write what we thought of the book. So we were the reviewers for Black Books! ... It’s still really missed, Black Books, I used to go and buy all my presents there for kids.

Interview from:
Making Change Happen: Black and White Activists talk to Kevin Cook about Aboriginal, Union and Liberation Politics. By Kevin Cook and Heather Goodall (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2013), pp.145-148.