The Sites Course: Jacko Campbell taking on National Parks

The courses for parks rangers and sites protection officers reflect the way community leaders like Jacko Campbell shaped the way Tranby approached teaching. As the land rights movement gathered momentum, the early legislation to protect Aboriginal sites fell under National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) jurisdiction. Some National Parks staff, like Howard Cramer and Sharon Sullivan, were sympathetic to Indigenous interests, but overall the institution had few Aboriginal staff and few links to Aboriginal communities.

The NPWS tended to act without any consultation with Aboriginal communities. Elders like Jacko were incensed that despite Indigenous demands for land rights having finally forced some action to protect sites, the control over their sites’ management and interpretation was still in the hands of white government officials. Jacko seized the opportunity of offering sites training through Tranby, with an anthropologist like Dave Morrissey tutoring, as a chance to push for greater Aboriginal cultural control over significant sites.

Kevin: Jacko Campbell wanted us to train Aboriginal sites officers or rangers. He hated the National Parks didn’t he. He reckoned they were insensitive and basically he wanted Aboriginal people to be able to run things themselves.

Dave: National Parks ran their training at the time out of Goulburn, what was then Goulburn CAE. The idea was to put these six blokes, two from Wallaga Lake, two from Jerringa and two from Wreck Bay, through the National Parks and Wildlife Service course at Goulburn. But they needed a bit of a boost to get through it, a bit of tutoring, so I was asked to take that on. There was all those hassles in that sort of model of education where the students had to go down to the Goulburn College for periods and go home and practise it and so on. And they had a lot of schooling required, written assignments and essays. Now they actually did the official course: really all I was doing was a bit of extra back up and tuition on how they get their assignments done so they could get through the proper course. So Tranby didn’t get separate accreditation, it was the mainstream accreditation.

That was the first phase and then the second phase was that Jacko wanted to get something both more expansive and more appropriate. So those guys would have late ’81 into early ’83 and, by then the land councils were being set up, so by ’84 or so there were regional land councils being set up and we figured that having sites officers based in the land councils would be a useful thing to do.

Kevin: We worked it out and organised it through Tranby. Jacko was still the driving force behind it because we said that every regional council should have a person employed there who could do the site survey for the region. We wanted to have laws that wouldn’t allow the Department of Roads, or Telstra or anyone, to go anywhere without firstly going through the land council to find someone to check that what they wanted to do was alright in terms of protecting sites and important places. So that if there was a road to be dug, well that person would be employed, or the land council would be employed, they send out their sites bloke, and money should go back into the local land council or the regional land council, whoever employed them, so that they can you know cover their wages.

Dave: That was the plan. And the State Land Council which was then an office in the back streets of Redfern, they backed it and put in some dough and so did the then office of Aboriginal Affairs.

Kevin: So they all backed it and we designed a course, so each regional land council employed two people and give them a Toyota and an office to work out of and so on. Some of them were actually working for the local land council like La Perouse for example, where the regional land council wasn’t organised enough to do it yet, so La Perouse took it up as a local issue. Some of them worked and some of it didn’t.

Dave: I was still doing a bit of work for the CLC4 in the Territory, so I went for about six or eight months going up, up for two weeks, back for one, up for two weeks back for one, with site work in the Western Desert, up to three months. So, we put together a course and it probably would have been over ’84 and ’85 I think we ran that course. It was a separately accredited course, running out of Tranby and in cooperation with the State Land Council. We got it accredited with TAFE.

We put together a course with about five modules a year and it was based on recognising sites and what to do to record them and being able to organise yourself to work within management plans, how to write a basic management plan for a site. And some field trips. Lake Mungo was a good trip and another trip up the coast, and another one down the coast, so we did a few regional trips so they could get to look at other types of sites. And we got a lot of cooperation from Sharon Sullivan, who was in charge of National Parks down there on the South Coast. So they organised to get the doors to open up down the coast. And we got Ray Kelly, the Aboriginal sites officer with NPWS to help us. He was up on the North Coast. And Jeanette Hope gave us support out there in the west, where she was running the Willandra Lakes Research stuff.

Kevin: Yeah. But it was a good course wasn’t it, incredibly good.

Dave: Oh yeah, it was good, the problem was, the idea was to have people come down and do some course work, go back and practise it. But they weren’t getting the support, because the Aboriginal land councils were actually under such pressure it was hard for them to actually function properly. So some of our students would get back and find their bloody Toyota had gone. Or they’d get back and find their office had been left, and they didn’t have enough power at the local level so the land councils didn’t have the administrative capacity to actually support them in the work they were doing.

Kevin: But a lot of them did really well. Autry Dennison at Toomelah was one who was doing great for years before he passed away. And some of them are still going.

Dave: Yeah he’s alright, and some of the others too. Badger Bates did the sites course too...

Kevin: Yeah, he was a participant, he was the one from the Far Western Regional Council. See they had one person from each regional land council... So they had 13 on the course... A couple of them fell over, but that’s to be expected in any course... But the majority of them who did the course went back and they were employed by the regional land councils or the local land councils... and I think a couple of them are still going.

Dave: In fact one bloke who’s still running out of that is Barry Moore – still has tours of the Wreck Bay, showing people bush tucker. I think he’s their official Aboriginal ranger down there now, so he carried that one forward after he finished the course.

Kevin: Barry went back down to Wreck Bay and he worked as a ranger down there with the land council. And then he set up his own program down there, and he’s been going for quite some years now... He’s got a program down there where people go down and he takes them all around Wreck Bay, shows them sites, shows them food and resources... And he’s doing that now! ... That’s after he got trained with Tranby. He’d never have done that before.

Dave: I think the stuff that used to worry them was the writing side of it, because there’s a lot of that.

Kevin: Yeah, that killed everybody. But talking to people who were doing the course – and talking to their communities – they said they couldn’t believe the improvement in the guys when they went back to work. So I think a lot of people were looking at that course, not only in NSW but interstate, and it could have been taken up interstate. But the money wasn’t available to run a second course.

Dave: And, by that stage some of the land councils had started to come unstuck, because they weren’t handling their money well...