LEARNING IN GLEBE
Kitchen + lunches
The dining room is a big part of everyone’s memories of learning at Tranby in Glebe. It was a time for relaxed conversations and getting to know people in other courses as well as catching up with friends. Most people who enrolled at Tranby were mature-aged students and coming back to studying was hard for all of them. The kitchen and dining room helped everyone to feel at home.
Edith Bostock cooking in the Tranby kitchen during the 1960s. One of her sons, Lester, was closely associated with Tranby as student, book-keeper and coordinator, before becoming well-known as a pioneer of Indigenous media. Photo used with the permission/consent of George Bostock (Edith’s son). Source: Shauna Bostock.
Photos from the Tranby dining room in the 1980s. Source: Tranby Archives
In the early 1980s, classes were on most days and courses ran in the school or university pattern, with terms and then semesters. Some courses ran for a full year and others for one semester only. More recently, when funding has only been available for short courses and block teaching, it has been harder to have the kitchen working all the time.
In the 1980s and 90s, however, food was prepared each day for lunches and everyone knew the kitchen cooks and workers there. In the early 1980s, Suss was the main cook, and later on, Patsy, Joyce, Dawn and Albert were all important contributors to those lunches. There are photographs of just some of these kitchen staff here. As well, in one corner of the dining room there was always hot water for a cup of tea or coffee when there were no classes on.
Suss, second from left, behind poster at this Tranby student demonstration against racism in the Bourke Public School, 1982.
Patsy Pitt and Joyce Wymarra at Tranby.
Dawn Mackay in centre in sunglasses, at Tranby sports day, La Perouse.
Albert Williams at Tranby.
At lunch times, there would be a steaming hot meal in a large dish – sometimes a stew and sometimes a roast – and then students could chose vegetables and salads out on the tables in separate bowls. Sometimes students who needed it were able to take a pack of extra food home for a meal in the evening. Students from the CAFE (Certificate of Aboriginal Further Education) also undertook cooking classes in the Tranby kitchen.
CAFE students, including Jackie Mason, (second from right) with teacher, Robyn Ridgeway (left) having cooking classes in the Tranby kitchen. The dining room can be seen behind them.
Many people talked about those lunches when they were interviewed in 2016 for the Networking Tranby research. These are a few examples.
Mark was forty when he first came to Tranby in 1992. He said:
I remember the excitement in the place, the people around the place. I remember they used to feed everyone, that stuck with me, it's rather funny because when we were kids in the bush, money was so scarce she'd [his grandmother] throw a piece of bread on the stove, in fact boil it up, pull it out, put salt on it and that was your dinner. And I came here and I thought this was amazing, everyone gets treated equally, everyone gets fed and there was that sense of family, extended family, which stuck with me.
Listening to him, Fiona, (who was 18 when she first came in 1990), said:
I can relate to what you're saying about like it's a sense of family when you come here. When I first came to Tranby I couldn’t believe it: you could sit out the front on the verandah there and you could have a cup of tea. It just used to remind me of my auntie and uncle's house.
Patsy had been 47 when she first came to Tranby in 2010. She had gone through some hard times in her life. The kitchen helped her to feel welcomed:
Coming here was wonderful because I found out there's an Aboriginal college and it's all free, get your food each day! Like it was just so easy to come here and be with all the other mob and learning and getting that support from them and seeing other Indigenous people studying and running co-ops and housing co-ops and all this type of thing. So I've met a lot of people from here and it was really enjoyable.