{"id":138119,"date":"2025-08-11T23:03:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T23:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/138119\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T23:03:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T23:03:11","slug":"breaking-down-the-walls-the-long-journey-towards-indigenous-inclusion-at-university-of-melbourne-indigenous-australians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/138119\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Breaking down the walls\u2019: the long journey towards Indigenous inclusion at University of Melbourne | Indigenous Australians"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took more than 100 years after universities were established in Australia for an Indigenous student to graduate.<\/p>\n

Margaret Williams-Weir, a Gumbaynggirr and Malera Bundjalung woman, completed a diploma in physical education at the University of Melbourne<\/a> in 1959.<\/p>\n

Since Williams-Weir, more than 1,400 Indigenous students have graduated from the sandstone university, and a record 536 were enrolled in 2023. But that is still only 1.27% of students, compared with 3.8% of the general population who are Indigenous. The university has also failed to reach its targets for Indigenous staff.<\/p>\n

Amid efforts to improve Indigenous representation, the university has released the second volume of Dhoombak Goobgoowana \u2013 translated as \u201ctruth-telling\u201d in the Woi Wurrung language of the traditional owners of the land on which the university was built.<\/p>\n

The first volume, published last year, laid bare the dark side of the university\u2019s history<\/a>, revealing how Nazi apologists, massacre perpetrators, grave robbers, racists and eugenicists had been celebrated as hugely influential heroes of academia.<\/p>\n

The second volume, Voice, does not shy away from the the university\u2019s troubled historical relationship with Indigenous people, but shifts its focus to stories of resilience, resistance and reform, which its editors hope will contribute to reconciliation.<\/p>\n

The deputy vice-chancellor (Indigenous) , Prof Barry Judd, says Voice is about \u201cwho gets to speak, who gets heard, and what it takes to create space for Indigenous leadership in systems not built for us\u201d.<\/p>\n

Prof Marcia Langton, who co-wrote and edited the book, says the work of Indigenous staff and students to turn the university towards respect for Indigenous knowledge \u2018echoes across history\u2019. Photograph: Tamati Smith\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cThis volume documents progress, but also calls us to go further,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is both a record of progress and a foundation for ongoing cultural transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work was commissioned as part of the university\u2019s commitment to truth telling. Both volumes were submitted to the Yoorrook Justice Commission<\/a>, the first formal truth-telling process into injustices experienced by Indigenous people in Victoria.<\/p>\n

Prof Marcia Langton, who co-wrote and edited the book, says the works of Indigenous staff and students to turn the university towards respect for Indigenous knowledge \u201cecho across history and continue to inspire\u201d.<\/p>\n

When Langton was hired in 2000 to construct an undergraduate program in Australian Indigenous studies, she was the first Aboriginal professor at the university and among only a handful of full-time Indigenous academic staff.<\/p>\n

She says Dhoombak Goobgoowana would have been \u201cimpossible to write\u201d when her tenure began.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were no Indigenous studies programs at all,\u201d she says. \u201cToday we are the only university in the world that has reckoned with its Indigenous history and its engagement with Indigenous people honestly and truthfully.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore we were able to do this, it was a matter of great shame to many Indigenous people that our university had this past and didn\u2019t acknowledge it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n

White students in blackface<\/p>\n

When Williams-Weir began at the university, campus racism was overt. In 1951, the book recounts, first-year students were greeted at the university\u2019s official welcome by white students in blackface dressed as \u201cspear-waving \u2018aborigines\u2019\u201d. Six years later, when a fundraising body for Indigenous tertiary education, Abschol, advertised it would sell buttons, a group of students hung an effigy of an Indigenous person from a tree outside Union House.<\/p>\n

An article published in the student newspaper Farrago in 1959 mocking Abschol\u2019s work said attempts to offer charity to Indigenous people produced an \u201capathetic, disease-ridden, violent, metho-drinking community who have no other values than the satisfaction of their desires\u201d.<\/p>\n

Abschol students\u2019 own efforts also demonstrated a limited connection to the Indigenous community at the university. Their float for the 1956 Moomba parade featured five white students who had blackened their skin and wore headdresses taken from communities in far north Queensland.<\/p>\n

This was the environment the university\u2019s first Aboriginal liaison officer, Destiny Deacon, entered when she began her role in 1975. She resigned a year later over \u201cintractable disagreements\u201d about her autonomy and under-resourcing.<\/p>\n

Deacon went on to complete a bachelor of arts degree in 1979 and became a celebrated artist, broadcaster, academic and political activist, but during her tenure she came up against persistently racist ideas about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.<\/p>\n

Launching the first Black Week of the Students Representative Council in 1974, Deacon lamented:<\/p>\n

Photograph of Destiny Deacon from Dhoombak Goobgoowana. Photograph: University of Melbourne Archives<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of us think the dishonest acquisition of our land by the whites happened because we, at the time, had no concept of the white man\u2019s irrational notion of his divine right to plunder the lands and property of human beings whom he considers to be \u2018primitive\u2019, \u2018barbaric\u2019 or \u2018uncivilised\u2019,\u201d she told the crowd. \u201cThey conned us into believing that they were superior\u201d.<\/p>\n

Langton says Deakin did an \u201cextraordinary job\u201d supporting the students and \u201cbreaking down the walls of exclusion\u201d at the university.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Her speech] represents the tipping point from the view of Aboriginal people as primitives, which had been the subject of so much pseudoscience at the university,\u201d she says. \u201cChange really began to accelerate from the advocacy of a few enlightened individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the efforts of students such as Deakin, the university\u2019s colonial past remained evidenced in the names of buildings promoting eugenicists, and tucked behind closed doors.<\/p>\n

In 2002, a collection of more than 800 Indigenous remains was discovered by chance in a locked basement storeroom.<\/p>\n

The remains had been collected by Richard Berry, a professor of anatomy at the university in the early 1900s and prominent eugenicist. He was one of multiple academics who took remains from Indigenous communities as late as the 1950s.<\/p>\n

After amendments to the Victorian government\u2019s Relics Preservation Act in the 1980s, Gunditjmara elder Uncle Jim Berg arrived at the UoM with the legal injunction to repatriate the stolen items. The book recounts Berg\u2019s recollection that the <\/strong>then vice-chancellor, David Caro, met him in his office and shouted: \u201cWho in the hell do you think you are, taking on the University of Melbourne?\u201d<\/p>\n

A collection of about 800 Indigenous remains, excavated from gravesites on the Murray River by George Murray Black, was returned.<\/p>\n

But despite the injunction explicitly including Berry\u2019s collection as well as Black\u2019s, it would sit in the Medical Building for another two decades, and even now families are waiting for their ancestors to be repatriated.<\/p>\n

A subsequent audit by the university found about two dozen Aboriginal remains and cultural artefacts, including the skull of a tribal leader stored alongside animal specimens and Aboriginal stone artefacts stored in a service duct.<\/p>\n

There were some academics who championed Indigenous knowledge, including Dr Leonhard Adam, Baldwin Spencer and Donald Thomson, whose collection consists of more than 10,000 Indigenous objects.<\/p>\n

Excerpt from Dhoombak Goobgoowana, Page 166: The Abschol float for Moomba, 1956. Photograph: National Library of Australia<\/p>\n

This year, the university\u2019s Potter Museum unveiled the jestingly titled exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, featuring more than 400 artworks and cultural objects from the university\u2019s collection, many of which had rarely been seen by the public, including segments of Thomson\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n

Co-curated by Langton, the exhibition confronts Australia\u2019s colonial history and the process of collection from Indigenous lands, as well as the belated acceptance of Aboriginal art into the fine art canon.<\/p>\n

Langton says academics such as Thomson were \u201ccollecting vast amounts of Aboriginal cultural heritage, but after they retired or passed, those collections sat in storerooms and were rarely seen by the public \u2026 Our exhibition puts their collections in their historical context.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, co-editor Dr James Waghorne says, is what a history of inclusion looks like: \u201cImperfect, overdue and then often painfully slow, but marked by stories of courage and hope.<\/p>\n

\u201cDhoombak Goobgoowana traces a series of beginnings,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen academic leaders repudiated race science with growing insistence, when pioneering Indigenous students made the most of their chances, and their allies in student clubs and societies championed their cause.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the first staff broke through, and when the university established partnerships with Indigenous groups beyond its gates.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took more than 100 years after universities were established in Australia for an Indigenous student to graduate.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":138120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-138119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115012632971479057","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}