This is the tale of two colonial Australian institutions, both with deeply racist histories and instilled from inception with notions of white supremacy that led them to abuse and treat Aboriginal people as collection specimens.
The way each has responded to their individual pasts are, without doubt, examples to other colonial institutions the world over that have their roots in violence against – and dispossession of – First Nations peoples.
I’m referring, here, to the University of Melbourne and the South Australian Museum, both traditionally exclusive and ultra-conservative cultural institutions that were totemic pillars of the British colonies that grew around them.
For some years now the University of Melbourne has been undergoing a painful parsing of its deeply racist history. Part of the result was the recent publication of Dhoombak Goobgoowana, meaning “truth telling’’ in the Woi Wurrung language of the custodians of the land on which the university was imposed. It is an epic feat of exposure chronicling the university’s history from dispossession, its hoarding of Indigenous remains and employment (and celebration) of eugenicists, massacre perpetrators and Nazi sympathisers.
This is just for starters, really.
There is much more, besides, chronicled here and another volume is on the way. The first book considers the way white supremacy imbued just about every aspect of the Melbourne University academic endeavour for well over a century. Not only is it a shocking indictment of the university itself, but also of a Melbourne society whose exclusivity and privilege was (as it remains) deeply entwined with the university.
As a graduate of the university in the mid-1980s, I wandered beneath the sandstone arches and sat on the majestic lawns in the shadows of buildings that were dedicated to the university’s various racist bastards of history. I was blithely unaware of (and, to be perfectly honest, incurious about) the racial violence and discrimination at the heart of the university and its city more broadly. All of us, I believe, who have benefited from violent Indigenous dispossession are duty-bound to self-educate on its violence and terrible legacies. This I did much later. Dhoombak Goobgoowana is part of a reckoning that today’s students and academics – and citizens of Melbourne – will find invaluable, and shocking (always part of the process of genuine colonial enlightenment) to that end.
Imperfect by nature and coming after efforts by Indigenous activists in the 1980s and 90s to push back against the university’s eulogisation in nomenclature, and bricks and mortar, of its various racist miscreants, the publication is nonetheless a major step in the pursuit of decolonisation.
A lot of deeply conservative cultural and educational institutions (none more so than the golden exemplar – the big daddy, if you like – of colonial hoarding, the British Museum) pay lip service to the rhetoric of decolonisation while clutching hard and fast to their collections … and doing nothing to advance it. This is a big step for the university and others will – must – follow. Step up, University of Sydney, and then perhaps Macquarie University can seriously reconsider its moniker and namesake.
For seven years the South Australian Museum – perhaps Australia’s most stylistically Anglophile collecting institution, which has amassed the biggest collection of Australian Indigenous cultural material in the world – had embarked on an extensive decolonisation program. It was setting a global example when it came to conciliating with First Nations peoples who were, quite justifiably, deeply suspicious and fearful of what had always been a deeply dangerous space for them.
The historic pillars of Adelaide society associated with the museum (like those of Melbourne entwined with the university), besides some having links to slavery, included body snatchers and traders, and eugenicists. This led to the extraordinary situation whereby one of the museum’s repositories contained, at one point, the remains of 4,600 individuals – the vast majority of them Aboriginal.
The “room of the dead’’, I’ve described it when writing of the efforts of celebrated anthropologist John Carty and heritage manager Anna Russo – in close consultation with First Nations leaders including Major “Moogy’’ Sumner – to identify and re-bury the dead.
This was critical conciliation and healing work that was heartily backed by the (often conservative) doyens of today’s Adelaide who have and continue to patronise (officially and financially) the museum. This was the real work of institutional decolonisation in action.
But under new museum management, a proposed restructure has dramatically undermined the advance of decolonisation and fractured relations between the institution and First Nations people, including those who work for the museum. Under the restructure – now under review after an intervention by the South Australian government given public pressure and stakeholder outrage – the positions of Carty and Russo would be abolished.
The human remains still in the museum repository would, according to museum staff, reposition “ancestral remains in the restructure as a collection to be curated’’. Amid the advances during the past decade to respectfully dignify the remains, this ham-fisted restructure, as proposed, would be culturally and racially backward.
So, one deeply historically racist colonial institution in Melbourne University moves to open its sordid past to rigorous scrutiny. Meanwhile, another, in the South Australian Museum, is close to taking a seriously retrograde step into a dark and malevolent past.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
