Eugenicists, white supremacists and Nazi apologists. Cowardly perpetrators of frontier massacre against Aboriginal people. Body snatchers and professorial hoarders of hundreds of sets of ancestral remains in academic vaults in the interests of voodoo racial science. This is all an intrinsic part of the University of Melbourne’s shameful history of racism.
And so it is that Dhoombak Goobgoowana – A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, Volume 1: Truth – lands with a heavy historical thud to further expose the deep genealogy of acute racism that pervades one of Australia’s oldest and most internationally revered academic institutions.
Dhoombak Goobgoowana illustrates starkly via 70 contributions (one-third from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) how the racial imperatives of white western supremacy were imbued across scientific, medical and arts disciplines well into the 20th century.
“Right up until the last decade or so of the twentieth century material relating to the involvement of such public supporters of the eugenic movement was forgotten or ignored in biographical publications,” it reads.
This is critical. It references the historical blindfold. The cover-up. The turned backs and the awkward crab-walking away without too much of a glance backwards.
For good history is not static. It is intrinsically up for challenge. For revision. For owning the embarrassment of past omissions. For additions and subtractions consistent with the evidence. But in relation to the many university scions Dhoombak Goobgoowana mentions, the historiography and biography have been atrophied in memorial aspic, with some exceptions, mainly those by leading Indigenous thinkers and writers. Biographers, resharpen your pencils!
That is why so much university nomenclature has celebrated the names of the seriously discredited. Racists.
Take, for example, the deeply shameful case of Daniel Murnane, a first world war veteran who graduated in veterinary science in 1924 then embarked on a research career at the university and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later the CSIRO). In 1950 he obtained his PhD in veterinary science and later became an industry representative on the university faculty.
But back in 1925 he had gone to research buffalo fly in the Forrest River area near Wyndham in Western Australia, a place rife with frontier violence and where summary justice was common against dispossessed Indigenous custodians. In Dhoombak Goobgoowana the lawyer and historian Kate Auty recounts how Murnane volunteered to join a police hunt for an Aboriginal man, Lumbia, the alleged murderer of a station owner, William Hay.
The 1926 patrol, including Murnane, carried out a series of massacres in which police and volunteers killed at least 11 Aboriginal people and burnt their bodies. A subsequent royal commission found that Murnane had been present at the massacre sites, though he was not charged.
“Out of the concocted and conflicted narrative that unfolded before him, the commissioner concluded that Murnane, like all the whites in the police party, lied about the mass killings perpetrated by the patrol,” Auty writes.
After the royal commission Alfred Ewart, the university’s “profoundly racist” first professor of botany, published a series of articles supporting the police/volunteer reprisal massacres and defending his colleague Murnane.
As Auty writes, perhaps with some understatement, this all “sheds an uncomfortable light on the relationship between scientific researchers and the frontier wars, where racial prejudice took on a mantle of academic authority”.
Indeed. This is ripe ground for further historical investigation and, yes, soul-searching and reckoning.
In 2011 Melbourne University’s Ormond College saw fit to create a scholarship in Murnane’s name to support a rural vet science student.
Carelessness on due diligence at best – or wilful ignorance? Regardless, this is in many ways emblematic of the university’s blithe racial prejudice and offhand offensiveness to Indigenous sensibilities for its history – and most pertinently, perhaps, since Margaret William Weir became its first Aboriginal graduate in 1954.
This year Ormond College – “in line”, according to a college spokesperson, with its “commitment to truth-telling and reconciliation, and following research undertaken by the University of Melbourne” changed the name of the scholarship to the “Dr Merrilyn Murnane Veterinary Science Scholarship”.
Merrilyn Murnane – an eminent former paediatrician, university alumna and philanthropist – is Daniel Murnane’s daughter.
While the name change is commendable, the apparent opacity surrounding it (the change was not promoted) seems less so amid such a vast institutional truth-telling exercise.
History can be accidentally remiss. It can also be wilfully blinkered, racialised and nationalised, as it has been in Australia and other postcolonial societies where violent dispossession in the name of “progress” and white “civilisation” is too often unquestioningly justified.
In this sense Dhoombak Goobgoowana takes up where some Indigenous people – specifically the academic historians and activists Tony Birch and Gary Foley, and the Gunditjmara elder Jim Berg – laudably and courageously began decades ago when it came to taking on their alma mater.
For the most part their complaints about the university’s ignoble historic racism and its contemporary reverberations were dead-bat dismissed by the institution and its leaders, who should have done far better. And this must be seen as a self-fulfilling proof, if you like, of the veracity of complainants’ concerns.
Perhaps the greatest case in point here is the chapter about Berg’s long legal fight to liberate the university’s vast and insidious Murray Black collection of Indigenous remains (and the comically unscientific and macabre “illegal” Berry collection, which the university seemed to hide) for repatriation to country. That the university fought so stridently as recently as the 1980s, and so fallaciously in the name of science, against Berg’s move to free and repatriate the remains represents a shamefully immovable reputational stain.
At a colloquium in late 2019 at the university to parse how the institution might deal with its deeply racist history and painful legacies, Berg spoke of how the place where he stood had always been hostile.
It was deeply moving. But also disturbing. A reminder of how history had been cauterised and subverted.
The colloquium was meant to be the first of many. But the pandemic interfered.
Dhoombak Goobgoowana is nonetheless the result. It is an impressive work of scholarship, replete with an at times seemingly endless litany of deeply disturbing – and in some cases hitherto unknown – acts of university racism.
This truth-telling book necessarily begins with the dispossession of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung from their traditional lands around Carlton and Parkville, where the university was established in 1853. It recounts how its earliest architecture was designed to highlight white “superiority” while relegating “black races”. It then continues to chronicle how practically every element – from the names of buildings to some of the most lionised 19th and early 20th century academics – “celebrated the ascendancy of Western knowledge over an alien, primitive land”.
The embrace and/or academic promotion of eugenics through the Eugenics Society of Victoria (and later via the curriculum) by a who’s who of leading alumni, university leaders and Melbourne society members up to the mid 20th century – “the majority of whom had close ties with the university” – is a stark reminder of just how shockingly pervasive discriminatory racial science was at the institution, and how extant are its legacies.
The volume highlights, among many others: Wilfred Agar, one-time professor of zoology and dean of science; Sir David Rivett, chief executive of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research; Sir John Medley, university vice-chancellor; Sir Keith Murdoch, celebrated journalist; Sir Peter MacCallum, of the pathology department; GS Browne, of the department of education; and Sir Sidney Sewell, president of the Royal College of Physicians.
Instructively Dhoombak Goobgoowana notes that the prominent inter-war academics Rivett, WA Osborne, an associate professor of German, Augustin Lodewyckx, and an associate professor of physical education, Fritz Duras, were Nazi apologists. (It’s worth noting here, perhaps – and this is not in the book – that as late as 1939 as the 12th prime minister of Australia, alumnus and prominent Melburnian Sir Robert Menzies, said history would remember Adolf Hitler as a “great man”.)
This book will – given the prevalence of contemporary institutional and societal Australian racism – provoke some howls of disapproval. Let them come. For just how the bitter truth can hurt!
It is incomplete, of course. And it comes way too late for far too many Indigenous people who have suffered acute racism at the university.
But it significantly advances history. And it restarts a critical conversation about racial power and prejudice, and society – and who gets to tell its truths.
