“...It's about being around lots of other Indigenous people, studying with them every day and from all different parts of Australia, that was the most valuable thing, it was just having a new family. To actually be in classes with Elders and people 10, 20 years older than me, was really different...”
- Michelle Blakeney
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“...I did Community Services and there's that support that exists in the environment when it's all Blackfellas in the class. There's this real comfort there. I relished my classes when there was Blackfellas in them because it was just this thing that happens without having to connect the dots or to fill in the backstory.”
- Fiona Smith
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“…We're just a different mob of people. We usually laugh a lot because if you don't laugh you cry, so we just make jokes about everything ... And embracing that diversity within our own mob that some have different degrees of it but on a grassroots level we all come from the same thing, we start talking about our mob and our family and how we get home...”
- Patsy Robertson
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“I learnt a lot of stuff here and Cathy Craigie [then teaching at Tranby] played a big part through the Aboriginal studies we did here. We never had that at school, they used to flog it out of us, if you dropped your aitches at a Catholic school, they used to hit you with the cane! .... So when we came here and did that, I'd never done that before 'cause our cultural awareness was just inside our family who shared everything.”
- Mark Spinks
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“… I enjoyed meeting new people. It's not often somebody from Grafton gets to hang out with Nyoongahs unless you come to a place like Tranby ... I think you're comfortable, you're able to speak your mind without any ridicule.”
- Nicole Phillips
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“Being here at Tranby with other Aboriginal people from all parts of Australia is really eye-opening. It enforces in us Aboriginal people that being Black is beautiful, being Black is wonderful.”
- Cheryl Parker
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