LEARNING IN GLEBE | Students

Islanders + Mainlanders

The South Pacific Islands are a large part of Australian history. Australia enslaved South Sea Islanders from Vanuatu and the Solomons in the later 19th Century and brought them to Australia - called 'blackbirding'- to be indentured to work in sugar cane and other industries. Then Queensland annexed the Torres Strait Islands in 1872 and so Islanders from the Torres Straits became Australian citizens, as were Thursday Islanders in the NT.

Today, many families have mixed ancestry, with both mainland Aboriginal and Islander forebears. 

In the early years of the Tranby Cooperative, Alf Clint had a strong interest in Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific Islands, particularly Vanuatu where he had developed a close friendship with the Independence leaders like Walter Lini. Alf - and Tranby - were offered support by some members of the High Church, like Bishop Edward Burgmann. 

Through Alf's interest in the whole of the South Pacific as well as Australia, as well as his work supporting community cooperatives in north coast NSW Aboriginal communities like Cabbage Tree Island, many of the staff at Tranby were of Islander background. These included Harrison George and Wally Mussing. Alf - and all the staff and students at Tranby - were active in the Referendum campaign in 1967 to support activists like Pearl Gibbs and Faith Bandler, Wally Mussing's sister.

By the early 1970s, however, the emerging service organisations in Redfern eg Aboriginal Legal Service and Medical Service were based on US civil rights models. 

Despite some of those activists having South Sea Islander as well as Aboriginal backgrounds, the rhetoric was mostly about Black Nationalism and Indigeneity. So these organisations were very focused on mainland Aboriginal people, with little interest in TSI let alone ASSI people or on the Pacific Islands themselves.

But the Aboriginal staff at Tranby wanted to continue the Coop's strong networks with the Torres Strait Islands, Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific.  Bob Bellear, who became Chairman of the Coop Board in 1982, was himself of Aboriginal and Vanuatuan ancestry. Kevin Cook, the General Secretary from 1980, was from the south coast where there had been much interaction with Maori peoples over many years and particularly with the whaling industry. There was also a growing attention to the national liberation movements – in Africa and in Pacific…. which meant there was an interest in the way that Aboriginal and Islanders concerns and issues overlapped. 

Our map shows some of the differences. Alf's networks can be seen in the student enrolments in the period from 1957 to 1978, when there were a number of students at Tranby from Papua New Guinea and other countries in the Pacific. After 1980, fewer people came from these other countries BUT there was a very strong representation of Torres Strait Islanders and Indigenous Australians who also had South Sea Island ancestry, particularly from North Coast NSW, where the coops were strong and where Bob Bellear had grown up. So in the period from 1980 to 2000, there were around 199 students - or 16.5% - whose names have been identified as being either from the TSI or of both Aboriginal and South Sea Islander ancestry (ASSI). Of these, 109 were from the North Coast of NSW, 69 were from Queensland, 6 were from WA, 4 from the NT and 1 from Victoria, with 10 students' state of origin not being clear.

As a student, Kevin Cook had wanted to change the image of Tranby as a charity, which till then had been funded in part by sales of a fairly pathetic-looking badge with a picture of an Aboriginal child. Early in 1979, a group of Queensland dancers from Arakun and Mornington Island (in the Gulf of Carpentaria) came to perform in Sydney and stayed at Tranby. Kevin was involved in negotiating their permission to use images of their legendary figure, Goorialla, the Rainbow Serpent as a symbol and the artist Dick Roughsey, a Lardil man from Mornington Island, design a badge to launch a new fundraising drive. So the Goorialla badge became a widely recognised symbol of Tranby and cemented the link with Islander communities.

There was a strong increase in the teaching around the experiences of Torres Strait Islanders from the time Tranby came under full Aboriginal management. TSI teachers were employed - Alan Lui was teaching through the 1980s and Josephine David-Petero during the 1990s. Students could take a course in Torres Strait Islander studies, taught by Alan from 1986 to 1988 and by Josephine from 1991 to 1994.

Another source of involvement was in the close links Tranby had with the Dance Company just down the road. This had been set up by Carol Johnson, an African-American and is now known as NAISDA - the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Dance Company. In the 1980s, many of the students enrolled in NAISDA were from the Torres Straits and Thursday Island, as well as from Arnhem Land in the NT, and this brought many Tranby students from southern Australia into contact with Top End people as well as those from TI and TSI.

Shepherding all this along was Nellie Inares, an Australian South Sea Islander raised in Tweed Heads, who had trained as a nursing sister and in the 1980s was living in Sydney. She was a good friend of Kevin Cook and a number of the Builders Labourers and other union activists. Nellie’s interest in culture and education made her a frequent visitor to Tranby as well as NAISDA. Together, they all made Glebe into a Black learning precinct where cultural heritage and politics came together. 

There was also a strong interest in the liberation and decolonisation movements of the South Pacific. Hilda Lini, from Vanuatu, came as a spokesperson of the South Pacific Women's Forum and taught at Tranby, while the Black Brothers, a high profile band from Jayapura in West Papua, came and stayed at Tranby as a residential base while they performed throughout Sydney. They spoke to Tranby students during that stay about the West Papuans' history and struggles for Independence from Indonesia. A similarly well-known popular music performer, Seru Serevi, came from Fiji in 2004 and visited Tranby, talking to students about the Fijian peoples' concerns and the role of Black Brothers as advocates of Independence in the Pacific. 

For the activists around Tranby, Independence and self-determination for the people of the South Pacific meant rejecting the use by colonial powers of all Indigenous lands as testing grounds for their weapons. The British had contaminated Aboriginal land in Central Australia in the 1950s and 60s for their bomb testing. Now Tranby activists supported the people of the French colonies in the South Pacific to declare their lands free from radioactive poison and testing. So the campaign for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific was a very strong presence in campaign at Tranby. Karen Flick, an activist and staff member at Tranby, went to the Philippines, including to the Independence movement campaigners in Moro, during her Tranby work, leading to representatives from the Indigenous peoples of the Philippines coming to visit Tranby.

Despite this strong interest in the people of the Torres Straits and Australians of South Pacific Islander ancestry, as well as in supporting the Independence and Nuclear-free movements of the South Pacific, there are few records of this interaction and what it meant for all the students who came to Tranby. The TSI flag is now flown at Tranby beside the Aboriginal flag, but the student records don’t record whether participants came from TSI or had a Pacific island background.

But the memories of people who were students at Tranby in those days open up a very different story. 

Fiona Smith was a student in the Tertiary Preparation course in 1988. Coming from Moree, she had not met any Torres Strait Islanders before and had no idea about Australian South Sea Islanders. So Tranby was the first time she had had the opportunity to meet up with and learn from Islanders themselves. (IV 2) Other Tranby Aboriginal students shared her experiences of getting to know TSI and ASSI people, culture and politics for the first time at Tranby.

Sue and Lindsy Fatnowna have a complex history. Sue comes from the Georges River in Sydney, where her family are related to the matriarch Ellen Anderson and her mother, Biddy Giles. Lindsy had been born and grown up in Mackay in far north Queensland, but his family had initially been blackbirded from the Solomon Islands. Sue and Lindsy met at Tranby, when they both took the Business Studies Course in 1984. They built up a close friendship over classes and excursions, and were married after they finished their courses. They moved to Mackay, where Lindsy felt at home, and both worked in the Public Service for many years. Although they lived in Canberra briefly, they both wanted to go back to Mackay to really settle down. 

Lindsy had found out a great deal about his Solomons family home over the years. He has never been to the Solomons himself but all his family have gone back and forth over a number of years. Lindsy now proudly displays a map of the Solomons on his living room wall, and reads avidly about the goings on of his family there. His father/uncle has the whole family tree – can go back 19 or 20 generations.