Rona Tranby Trust

The recipient of The Rona Tranby Award - ‘Aunty’ Beryl Carmichael, was honoured at a function held at the Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst on Tuesday March 20^th.

The Rona Tranby Award was established in 1991 to encourage and support the recording of oral history of Aboriginal Elders. It is funded from a bequest in the Will of Thomas Rona and administered by the Rona Tranby Trust in collaboration with Tranby Aboriginal College and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. It links the Jewish and Aboriginal communities who have had parallel experiences. Both peoples share important values, have suffered persecution, dispossession of lands and attempted genocide.

Aunty Beryl Carmichael is an Elder of the Ngiyeempaa people she is committed to the preservation, renewal and passing on of Aboriginal culture and language. The Rona Tranby Award will enable her to collaborate with the writer and teacher Jennie Kerr in completing the oral history recordings of her life story. She is planning to produce a book based on these recordings, ‘The Footsteps of a Ngiyeempaa Elder’.The documentation of Aunty Beryl’s story will reveal a fascinating part of Australia’s culture and history. It is a narrative which should inspire and educate.

At the event, an eloquent tribute to Aunty Beryl was given by the Member for Canterbury, Linda Burney MP, whose speech also focussed on the continuing social justice crisis suffered by the Aboriginal community. Ms Burney presented Aunty Beryl with The Rona Tranby Award and a Jewish National Fund certificate for trees in Israel. Described as “true keeper of her people’s knowledge and wisdom”, a visibly moved Aunty Beryl spoke of her own struggles to survive as a child in Western New South Wales and then read two poems, one in tribute to her father.

Entertainment featured music from the Emanuel School Klezmer Band and a humorous demonstration of the didgeridoo by Koori performer from Redfern, Adam Hill. Other speakers were Trustee Roland Gridiger, Maurice Shipp from Tranby College, Jennifer Symonds from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and Margaret Gutman, Board Member of the Museum. Guests included Rabbi Jeffery Kamins from Temple Emanuel, David Knoll, President of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and the oral historian Di Ritch.