Recognising Tranby’s Significance as a Living Place of History

Around Australia, there are thousands of Indigenous graduates who know the deep value of Tranby as a place of learning and connection. For our local and national Indigenous
community, Tranby remains a significant place of cultural learning and community activism, as it has for sixty-five years.

In 2022 we have been working with the team at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research to formally recognise and promote Tranby’s archival significance of the past and present. This is a vital step in our journey of digitisation and cultural heritage maintenance.

Thanks to funding by the Community Heritage Grants Program (CHG) by the National Library of Australia, our team employed Indigenous heritage specialists Dr Kirsten Thorpe (Worimi)
and Lauren Booker (Garigal clan) from the Jumbunna Team to produce an extensive review of Tranby’s significance. Learn more by downloading the full report here.

Digitising & Celebrating our Deep History

Tranby is working with the Jumbunna team Institute for Indigenous Education and Research to implement the Mukurtu digital archives system. Mukurtu and Jumbunna will assist us to digitise our important collection of documents and materials, safeguarding some of Australia’s most significant Aboriginal political history. This is an extensive and ongoing project, that we know will prove valuable for our Indigenous community nationally.

Mukurtu is a Warumungu word meaning ‘dilly bag’ and is used in this context to represent a safe keeping place for sacred materials. Created in 2007, as a grassroots project, Mukurtu’s platform supports Indigenous communities around the world to safeguard their important cultural knowledge and publish it, while also respecting traditional protocols. To read more about Mukurtu visit the website

Respecting Indigenous Protocols

Unlike other online archives, Mukurtu emphasises Indigenous community empowerment and control, with the conservation and protection of sacred information being directed by the communities themselves. Mukurtu collaborates with Indigenous communities to assist in the management, sharing, narration, and exchange of digital heritage in culturally relevant, sustainable, and ethically minded ways. This process is significantly different to colonial archival approaches that have for many years ignored Indigenous community concerns and controls around traditional knowledge and its conservation.

Mukurtu has ignited a new era of Indigenous knowledge protection which, at its core, lies on a foundation of respect for cultural heritage maintenance and Indigenous community authority.

The Jumbunna team and Mukurtu platform will bring immense value to Tranby by enabling us to digitise and share our history. With Mukurtu’s unique tools, Tranby will capture alumni stories, and link them to photos, courses, and memories displayed on our Tranby Mukurtu archives page. Photos, student projects, course histories, and student artworks will also be publicly accessible.

Tranby’s Mukurtu project is ongoing, and we hope to share it with our community very soon. Once launched, our archival collection will be searchable via an independent webpage, where everyone will be able to explore the significant archival materials that reflect Tranby’s role in the social and political movements of the 1960s-80s.

Get Involved

We are always looking for passionate community volunteers to help with this important digitisation project. If you would like to learn more about Mukurtu and assist Tranby with this historic project, visit our volunteer information page.