Welcoming spaces

Tranby offered spaces – in its dining room, its classrooms and on the verandah – for unions and campaigns the co-op supported to hold fundraisers and meetings. Organisations that held their meetings regularly at Tranby included the Anti-Bases and Close Pine Gap campaigns, which allowed people in Sydney to support the protests in Jervis Bay, Fremantle and the Northern Territory against military bases and nuclear-powered ships. These Anti-Bases meetings at Tranby were where the progressive Leichhardt members of the Italian community met Tranby staff and students and became interested in supporting Aboriginal people in the inner city through their newspaper, Nuovo Paese. Find out more

Tranby often teamed up with AICD – the Association for International Cooperation and Disarmament – to hold fundraisers. One, in October 1981, celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the Spanish Picasso’s birth and it raised funds once more for Disarmament.

Then, in June 1983, Tranby teamed up with AICD again to raise money for Aboriginal delegates to go to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Conference in Vanuatu. Part of the evening was a film called ‘Yirawala: the Picasso of Arnhemland’.

Tranby often offered its rooms to unions to hold organising meetings as well as fundraisers, like this one for the electricity workers who had been attacked by the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland during 1985, until finally, in November, their union was temporarily deregistered. Only solidarity from unions and supporters like Tranby enabled the electricity workers to win out in the long run.

It was these type of alliances with unions, in which Tranby offered real support for workers’ campaigns, that strengthened TUCAR, the Trade Union Committee for Aboriginal Rights. In turn, TUCAR unions stood in support of Tranby, donating to ensure its education programs could continue and offering supportive voices in the long campaign for Land Rights.