Nazi apologists, massacre perpetrators, grave robbers, racists and eugenicists were hugely influential across the entire history of the University of Melbourne, according to its own research.
The university has published a shocking account of the dark side of these erstwhile heroes of Australian academia in a book it hopes will tell a greater truth about the institution and its dealings with Aboriginal people.
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.
In one account a university graduate, Daniel Murnane, whose name until March this year graced a veterinary science scholarship, was among a group of men who perpetrated a 1926 massacre of Aboriginal people at Forrest River in the Kimberley. A subsequent royal commission into the killings confirmed that at least 11 Aboriginal people had been killed and their remains burned in three purpose-built stone ovens.
But these words and deeds have, until now, been absent from their official biographies.
Dhoombak Goobgoowana – translated as “truth-telling” in the Woi Wurrung language of the owners of the land on which the university was built – is the first of two volumes. The second is due early next year. With more than 60 contributors from architecture to zoology, its editors say it is a book about “some of the worst failings of our intellectual leaders”.
Words by Lorena Allam and photography by Tamati Smith for @guardian
