A warning: This column quotes from historic sources, and as a result, some of the language in this article is considered offensive today.
On May 28, during National Reconciliation Week, there was an event at the University of Melbourne that was both hugely significant and, at the same time, shocking in its content.
The event was the launch of a new book, Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. The book — a key outcome of the University’s truth-telling project — is the first of two volumes. Volume one is titled Truth.
‘Dhoombak goobgoowana’ means ‘Truth-telling’ in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people, on whose land the university was built.
Truth is such a small word, but it holds much power, especially in the telling.
It is this telling of the story of the establishment and influence of such an internationally well-regarded educational institution as the University of Melbourne that has laid bare some shocking facts.
That has laid out the truth of the insidious power of many academics who have shaped the public discourse in the colony, influencing education and public policy in so many areas over so many generations.
That has revealed the deeply racist prevailing view of successive academics that Aboriginal people were considered little more than ‘specimens’ for collections.
As Lorena Allam from The Guardian reported: “Some of Australia’s most celebrated scientists, including a Nobel laureate and others of world renown — along with doctors, historians, anthropologists and other academic staff — advocated breeding out ‘lower’ and ‘deficient’ ‘races’, particularly Aboriginal people; others exhumed, collected and later concealed Aboriginal remains; while yet others supported Nazism, even after the second world war.”
It is in the acknowledgement — and public accounting — of the long, complex and troubled relationship between the Indigenous people of Australia and the University of Melbourne that we start to appreciate the long-term and ongoing negative impacts this influence has had on First Nations peoples across the continent.
The introduction notes: “The university has supported injustices called progress, half-truths presented as facts, and prejudices pretending at objectivity.”
As Dhoombak Goobgoowana chronicles, there are stories of racists, thieves, body snatchers and a participant in a massacre. At times, it is shocking and chilling reading.
Starting with the appropriation of land from the Woiwurrung people — and funded with donations from settler-colonisers whose wealth came directly from the taking of land — the university was opened in 1855. The first chancellor, Redmond Barry, stated that the university was supplanting Indigenous knowledge with what he considered superior Western knowledge.
But most pervasive and influential was the long-standing promulgation of an academic worldview based on the now disproven and discredited study of eugenics — the science of improving a race by selective breeding — that not only banishes Indigenous culture but considers that Aboriginal people are not even worth studying as history.
It became almost universally accepted that different races had different evolutionary pathways and that the “black” races were at an earlier stage of development than the “white” races, with the “yellow” in between.
On the university’s research website, Pursuit, senior research fellow in Indigenous history Dr Ross Jones wrote: “The university was to be central in this intellectual justification of the racial superiority of the white races, and in the program that effectively removed from the Indigenous population any consideration of fair or reasonable treatment or acceptance.”
These racist ideas were found across many disciplines at the university: anatomy, biology, zoology, genetics and psychology.
Walter Baldwin Spencer — who took up the chair in biology in 1887 and later became the Special Commissioner and Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory — believed that “half-caste” children were genetically superior as they had white blood and should be separated for their own benefit.
Richard Berry — the university’s first professor of anatomy — shared Spencer’s interest in eugenics and became a leader of the increasingly influential eugenic movement in Australia and, in particular, of the Victorian Eugenics Society.
Berry was also a prominent collector of skulls, believing that their size was related to mental capacity. He published his theories of a racial hierarchy, including one study in which Indigenous adults were classified as “feeble-minded” and at the same level as criminals and the “mentally defective”.
The Berry collection of ancestral remains, along with that of pastoralist and amateur anthropologist George Murray Black, was held by the university until the 1980s, when Gunditjmara Elder Uncle Jim Berg won a case about their ownership, making it illegal for the university to retain human remains. Even then, the university failed to declare other remains, which were “overlooked” until 2002.
In 1943, at the height of World War II, Wilfred Agar, geneticist and dean of the Science Faculty released a booklet — published jointly by the University of Melbourne Press and Oxford University Press — that argued for the use of sterilisation programs for the “mentally deficient”, and publicly announced that inferior races should be bred out. He was a Nazi sympathiser. He was also president of the Eugenics Society from 1936 to 1945.
Spencer, Berry and Agar all have had buildings at the university named after them.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Barry Judd, speaking on ABC Radio recently, said: “I was shocked by some of the information uncovered in this volume, particularly the fact that after the second world war, after the world knew about Nazi war crimes, the University of Melbourne and its academics continued to speak in the narrative of eugenic science.”
The university was a world leader in eugenics, and this continued until long after the world came to know about the eugenic horrors of the Nazis.
It makes uncomfortable reading, but it’s necessary that these truths be brought out into the open and their ongoing impact examined.
The insidious influences of these discredited eugenics views are still being felt today.
But perhaps the most shocking revelation in Dhoombak Goobgoowana was the involvement of university researcher veterinary scientist Daniel Murnane in a massacre at Forrest River in the Kimberley in 1926.
The commissioner investigating the killings concluded that during the time Murnane was a member of the patrol, four men, three women and, in all probability, another nine Aboriginal people had been killed, and their bodies incinerated in fires that were “restricted though intense”.
The university’s Ormond College offered a scholarship honouring Murnane to a rural or remote veterinary science student. In March this year, as the university prepared to publish the first volume of the outcome of its historic truth-telling commitment, the scholarship was renamed after Murnane’s daughter.
The University of Melbourne is filling in gaps in the histories that have been told in the past. Most of the official histories, particularly the biographies of the eugenicists who worked at the university, failed to mention their racist eugenic views.
The truth-telling work of Dhoombak Goobgoowana has brought to light the shameful part the university and many of its academics have played in the marginalisation and mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
As Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell explained, “We can no longer look away from this difficult history and its legacy; we need to face up to the effect this history has had and continues to have on the Indigenous community.”
For a university whose motto is Postera Crescam Laude (I shall grow in the esteem of future generations), this is an important step.
You can obtain a free e-book version of Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, Volume 1: Truth Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton (Eds) MUP 2024 at https://www.mup.com.au/books/dhoombak-goobgoowana-hardback