Abstract
When reviewing the book Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne: Volume 1: Truth for the Australian Book Review (December 2024), I was struck by the pioneering spirit, intellectual expertise and resolve of Melbourne University and the Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars who edited this volume and contributed chapters to the book. Inside the covers is a major work that deepens the history of colonisation within an institutional frame; it also provides a detailed guide for other universities to consider from their own perspectives.
Universities have long been a cornerstone in the production, writing, publishing and promotion of research about Indigenous Australian cultural life, heritage and the implications of colonisation. But few have ventured into turning a transparent research lens onto the colonial history and engagement of their own institution.
A key strength evident in the work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors in Dhoombak Goobgoowana is the extent to which the University of Melbourne (established in 1853) was obviously and/or hegemonically complicit in cumulative years of damaging outcomes for First Nations people.
Another is in showing how the active establishment and development of museum collection policies occurred at the stark expense of Aboriginal people’s lives and material cultures. These are heavily scrutinised in the book, as are a range of academic disciplines and individuals.
In a contemporary spirit of reconciliation, several chapters reveal legal, cultural and ethical resilience and revitalisation, especially in the 21st Century, such as the return of human remains, a significant process guided by Aboriginal people in Victoria. You can read more of this ‘affecting and unsettling’ history in Rohan Long’s recent article in Pursuit.
Since the book’s publication, a public announcement has also been made that the UNESCO-inscribed Ethnohistory Collection of Australian Indigenous materials, gathered in the last century by the late Donald Thomson, will become part of Melbourne University’s Collection as a gift from Thomson’s family.
The odds of other universities across Australia following Melbourne University’s revelatory path is far from certain. Adelaide University (founded in 1874, and incorporating the South Australian Museum), having reported publicly a decade ago that their collection held thousands of ‘bodies and spirits’ which had often led to an odious scheme between collectors and museums in the ‘trading [of] body parts’, has yet to fully resolve the tragedy and the stain of its history with First Nations groups. Paul Daley’s 2020 article in The Guardian, ‘The room of the dead: how a museum became a halfway house for bones and spirits’, is a mind and heart opener.
Adelaide University’s website now states that it is ‘committed to working with our local Aboriginal communities, to reconcile the wrongs of the colonial past’, but promising to manage such a sensitive and significant task, and a vast and complex collection of people’s ancestral remains, is not the same as working towards an overview of its long-term historical relationship with First Nations people as the University of Melbourne has collectively and publicly done.
The widely known saga surrounding what’s generally known as the ‘Berndt Museum Embargo’ is also significant, and a matter in which I have been involved. In that case, The University of Western Australia (established in 1911) and the Berndt Museum withheld, for 30 years, cultural information provided by Indigenous people between 1940 to 1980 and recorded by anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt. Readers of this journal may remember my 2020 reflective piece on the subject, ‘Embargoes, a Queen and the Gurindji’, published in AltLJ 45(4).
A withholding of cultural and familial material occurred despite countless detailed requests from Indigenous people, a Trustee and advocates across Western Australia, the Northern Territory and South Australia. Legally rather than ethically compounded by what’s generally described as the Berndt Bequest and the ‘Thirty Year Berndt Embargo’ (1994–2024), it was not until May 2024 that Indigenous access requests gradually started to be considered. Waiting some 80 years is an extraordinarily long time for families, communities and supportive researchers to see material so generously provided by Indigenous ancestors. How, and by whom, this serious intellectual and cultural copyright matter has been managed leads again to a stark comparison with Melbourne University’s contemporary endeavours.
That Australian universities did not always stand tall publicly in support of the 2023 referendum in response to the Ulu
Growing up in Melbourne carried with it the widespread view that Melbourne University was the most valuable, scholarly and prestigious Australian university. Today it is still highly ranked. Dhoombak Goobgoowana, thanks to everyone involved in its evolution and publication, adds tremendous depth and breadth to understanding Australian life in the raising of epistemological and ethical curtains on so much that was not formerly or widely known and/or interrogated. In a way, the publication of such a book has restored that prestige in what’s increasingly known as Truth-Telling.
If Melbourne University’s reconciled blueprint is not picked up elsewhere, then future scholars from backgrounds across history, law, medicine, the social sciences and museums will undoubtedly want to know the ‘who, what, when and where’ of colonisation within an institutional framework, but the biggest question, ‘why were your university’s research lens not turned inward?’, might remain unanswered.
