University of Melbourne writing wrongs of colonial shame

The University of Melbourne announced it was ready for difficult conversations about early benefactors, its role as the centre of eugenics science in Australia and its practice of collecting Aboriginal body parts.

Marcia Langton with James Waghorne and Ross Jones at Melbourne University. Picture: Aaron Francis

Veterinarian Daniel Murnane was a volunteer in a police patrol that was found to have killed four Aboriginal men and three Aboriginal women, burning their bodies in separate locations near the West Australian port of Wyndham in 1926. Then he lied about it, according to a royal commission held soon after.

The University of Melbourne’s Ormond College Daniel Murnane Veterinary Scholarship was renamed after his daughter in March as the university prepared to publish unprecedented research about its relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

On Tuesday, the university announced it was ready for difficult conversations about early benefactors, its role as the centre of eugenics science in Australia and its practice of collecting Aboriginal body parts.

The work begins with the book Dhoombak Goobgoowana, which means “truth-telling’’ in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung ­people of Melbourne.

More than 60 authors have contributed. The book is edited by the university’s Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Marcia Langton and historians Ross Jones and James Waghorne.

It is the first of two volumes commissioned by Melbourne University Publishing, with the second about Indigenous Australians who have made ­significant contributions to the institution.

University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell said: “To move forward, we must tell the truth about the university’s history and engagement with Indigenous Australia.”

“We can no longer look away from this difficult history and its legacy. We need to face up to the effect (it) has had, and continues to have, on the Indigenous community,” Professor Maskell said.

The book includes writing by elder Jim Berg, a former Borthwicks slaughterman who took on the university over the Aboriginal remains in its anatomy department. When Mr Berg won a court case to have the remains buried on homelands, the university stopped inviting him to talk to its medical students about his then work at Victoria’s peak Aboriginal health organisation.

The relationship was “distant and cold” for 25 years but has since healed.

“Having Koori students at the university and having Kooris working there made a big difference,” Mr Berg wrote in the book.

Professor Langton said the book showed how the university had been wrong to teach and promote “discredited eugenic theories and racial scientism to generations of impressionable students and publics, lending the authority of the academy and the sciences to theories and tropes that in the 21st century have been shown to lack rigorous evidence”.

She said “The perpetrators of injustice should be named, and their roles in historical events fully recounted (but) merely deleting their names from buildings, rooms, courtyards and roads, and not explaining why, compounds injustice with acts of denial.”