Dhoombak Goobgoowana can be translated as “truth-telling” in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people from the unceded area now known as Melbourne, Australia. It’s also the name of the recently published two-volume work on Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne.
The books are an extraordinary read, not at all your usual institutional history. Made up of dozens of essays by different authors, it’s not so much a corporate history as it is a meditation on how Western knowledge-gathering and knowledge-defining practices have worked in a settler colonial society and how those practices have caused significant and accumulated harms to Indigenous people over time.
Among other things, it resulted in widespread grave desecration and the stealing of human remains by anthropology and anatomy departments the world over, and the teaching of various forms of race science, which explicitly taught generations of students about the superiority of the white race and the inevitable death and withering away of Indigenous peoples.
With me today is James Waghorne. He’s Principal Research Fellow and University Historian at the University of Melbourne, and he’s also, along with Ross Jones and Marcia Langton, co-editor of this two-volume set. We chatted extensively about the book, its origins, and why the approach taken in this volume was so different from what you tend to see in most books that try to reconcile institutions with their colonial pasts.
And since the book covers not just truth but also reconciliation, we also look at various ways that Indigenous knowledge has been and is being recognized at the University of Melbourne. A fascinating process that does not have easy parallels in the North American experience.
Altogether, this was a fascinating and exciting discussion about Australian academia’s journey towards reconciliation, which I hope will find some resonance on our side of the Pacific. And so, without further ado, let’s turn it over to James.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.30 | Universities, Colonialism, and Indigenous Knowledge in Australia
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): James, just to start out, this show has a mostly North American audience. They’re around the globe, but most of them are in North America, and they will have a very particular understanding of colonization and settler-Indigenous relations. Just to set the stage, what’s different between the Australian and North American experiences of these two things?
James Waghorne (JW) : I’d start initially, Alex, by saying that there’s probably much more that’s similar than different. These are two settler colonial societies. The Australian setting has some distinctive features, though, one of which is that the Australian land mass is claimed under a doctrine called terra nullius, which means that it’s no man’s land. So there are no treaties across Australia in the same way as there were in North America.
This has an enormous impact on how colonization operates in the country, where you see the taking of land to support the agrarian expansion of the country, but doing so on a very local level — individual squatters meeting resistance from groups of Indigenous people. In that sense, it’s a different kind of model. There’s not the same emphasis on fur trapping and things like that, where you might rely on Indigenous expertise in the Australian setting. It’s an agrarian economy that aims to replace and uproot everything that existed before with an idea of Western science.
In Australia, we also have the terrible story of the Stolen Generations, where Indigenous children — particularly mixed-race Indigenous children — were removed en masse from their family groups and families by welfare organizations and placed into Western families on the basis, actually — and this is something that Dhoombak Goobgoowana reaches for — that they were racially superior to their parents. It’s a terrible idea, isn’t it? But because they were mixed race, they were seen as somehow superior to their families. The consequence of this idea is that you have families broken up across the country.
AU: I found this book strikingly different in approach to what you tend to see in a North American context, right? And it has to do with the way that the University of Melbourne is treated as an institution. So if I think about the United States and you see books like Yale & Slavery, right, the focus is the university as a corporate entity. That’s kind of what’s being examined — what the institution does corporately, where it gets its money from, who its original donors are.
This book is different, right? It’s focusing instead on a number of prominent professors, and it’s dealing not exclusively, but primarily, with things like race science and the desecration of burial sites. Why the difference in approach? Is that something related to the nature of colonialism in Australia, or is it an editorial choice?
JW: I think it’s partly a response to the different structure of Australian higher education. It is not, in the same way, supported by — for example — the land grant institutions, which are supported through grants of land that was previously, in many cases, Aboriginal reserves or Native peoples’ reserves. So there’s not that same economic or financial connection to settler colonialism. Almost all the money that went to Australian universities comes from the government and from the students who go there.
But how Dhoombak Goobgoowana differs — and what I think is exciting about all of its contributors — is that it’s trying to embed the University of Melbourne in the story of Australia and in a wider worldwide intellectual culture.
Rather than asking how Australia shaped the University of Melbourne, we’re arguing about how the University of Melbourne influenced the development of Australia, and particularly this core idea of settler colonialism and colonial expansion. So it’s a story of influence outward as much as inward.
And the difference, once you start broadening it in that way — which is enormously broad in some of those studies — particularly the ones on Harvard and Yale and so forth, is that those are often quite narrow. They’re very focused. They address a specific issue and have a set of sources and resources they can use to inform that.
The broader question about how universities are embedded in colonialism, how they propagate ideas of race and race science, and how that supports colonial expansion — that’s a much bigger story. So to get at that, you need a bigger frame, and it becomes a story of case studies in some ways, where you’re trying to get across that larger story.
AU: You talk about influence stemming outward from the University of Melbourne, but I guess the University of Melbourne exists — and existed — within a global, or at least a Commonwealth, framework of knowledge and knowledge exchange.
One of the things that intrigued me about this book was the focus in that first 100 or 150 pages on Indigenous human remains that were in a number of different university collections or museums, and it was very shocking. Then I went back and looked at some of the work by Douglas Cole here in Canada, who’s looking at similar kinds of issues, and I found all these stories about Franz Boas, who was the founder of anthropology. That was how he paid for a lot of his expeditions. He’d just go dig stuff up in Western Canada or Northern Canada and send the remains to whichever university wanted to put them in their museum.
So is it really the University of Melbourne that’s — I think I’ve used the word “on trial,” though it’s not really on trial, but you know what I mean — is it really the University of Melbourne doing this, or is it just Western science, Western anthropology?
JW: It is both at the same time. It’s absolutely individuals at the University of Melbourne and their associates who are doing these things.
One of the things I expected when we talked about human remains was a discussion about the use of bodies. You go to museums and you’ll sometimes see bodies in glass cases — I was at the British Museum recently — and I thought that was the ethical question. I expected a discussion about whether universities had the right to use human remains and things like that.
But I think you’re right, Alex. What we had there was so shocking. It was so craven, the examples we have where human remains are harvested en masse, where bones deemed to be inferior are tossed aside and other bones are stacked up and then sent back to museums, traded on an international market. This is shocking — absolutely shocking — behaviour.
But perhaps you’re right that the most shocking thing is that the scientific leaders involved in this — really the brightest lights in anthropology, physical anthropology, and anatomy departments — saw no problem with it. They saw it as just par for the course.
That is an interesting idea, and I agree that it’s not putting the university on trial, or even these individuals really on trial. It’s trying to understand their mindset. Because once you accept that these individuals saw no problem with this issue, what other issues does it affect? How does it colour our understanding of them in other ways?
And the other dimension, of course, is that it forces us to reflect and ask, “Well, what about my own practice would similarly horrify people if they looked at it objectively in the future?”
It causes us to reflect on our own methodologies and approaches. So I think that is valuable in terms of understanding.
AU: The book does not focus on what you would call corporate institutional actions — really not very much — and it does not focus on a single social phenomenon the way books on slavery in the US or residential schools in Canada do.
The critique you’re making of settler colonial institutions in this book is therefore a lot more diffuse and, in many ways, more sweeping than what we’re used to seeing in North America. I went and checked the University of Melbourne’s 2022 apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Here, the University of Manitoba led the way in Canada by apologizing for its role in residential schools, and you’ve got lots of institutions in the United States apologizing for their role in slavery.
But the University of Melbourne’s apology was for “the historical and current injustices that have been and are to the detriment of the health and wellbeing and educational and living standards of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this country.”
That’s way more sweeping. It’s taking on a bigger debt, if I can put it that way. How did the University of Melbourne community react to that apology? Was it controversial?
JW: It came at a time when we’d had a long-running sort of faux debate — a phony debate — about whether people in the present can apologize for the actions of people in the past, and whether current people ought to take responsibility not just to acknowledge those actions, but to apologize for them.
So in some senses, it was quite courageous that the university said, “We are taking a position on this. We are acknowledging our role in all sorts of areas.”
But at that point, of course, the knowledge of the extent and dimensions of the harm done to Indigenous people was not clear. And that’s one of the reasons this book — which has a very wide scope — exists. It’s about truth-telling at the University of Melbourne. The title is Dhoombak Goobgoowana: Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, and that involves analyzing all those elements of harm, but also other forms of connection as well, in our editorial approach.
So in some ways, it was laying the ground for this kind of work. We needed to do a big scoping study to understand specifically how the University of Melbourne had involved itself in settler colonialism and in propagating race science across the world and across the different disciplines of the university.
So in education, in science, in medicine, in history — across all those dimensions — how does this idea of race science get translated across different faculties and disciplines? And then how is that applied in Australia?
So in some senses, I think it was welcomed. People argued that it was inadequate — they always apologize, I think — but it laid the groundwork for this broader study that we’re looking at now.
AU: What was the reaction to your book from the University of Melbourne community? Similar kind of thing? Was it supportive? Was it non-supportive?
JW: It’s been remarkably supportive, actually, and I think that’s partly because it’s so novel. As we know, there’s been a lot written in academic journals about aspects of this history, but to bring it forward and say, “This is an official history of the University of Melbourne — copyright University of Melbourne” — that’s a bold step. So in that sense, the university is being congratulated for it.
There’s a structural component to this as well. Because it’s an edited collection written by teaching academics from across all faculties at the University of Melbourne, it means it’s already embedded in the curriculum. These people can say, “Well, I’ve got something to teach now to add this dimension to my course offering.”
So it’s already been brought into the curriculum, and students are responding to it immediately. It prompted the development of reading groups. They offer campus tours that have generated enormous interest. There’s such enormous interest in this history in a way that is heartening.
One of the things this project has done is create space for these discussions. However, this history is also being criticized, as you would imagine. It’s been criticized for pulling its punches on certain issues, for not going far enough, and for omitting some things that people feel strongly should have been included.
But it can’t possibly do all of those things. Sometimes it’s criticized as an effort by the university to actually close off discussion — to say, “We’ve addressed this now. We can all calm down. This is what it is.” But in fact, the opposite has happened. There’s been a great deal of engagement and interest in it.
AU: James, this is diverting a little bit from what’s in the book, but another significant difference between Australia and North American countries with respect to Indigenous peoples is that there doesn’t seem to have been much of a movement in Australia for Indigenous peoples to create their own institutions of higher learning along the lines of First Nations University of Canada, the big tribal colleges in the US, or the wānangas in New Zealand.
It seems to me that that puts a bigger pressure on institutions like the University of Melbourne because if they bear the whole burden of bringing higher education into contact with — and being the expression of higher education for — Indigenous peoples, that’s tough. The University of Melbourne, I assume, is like universities here in Canada: it’s big, it’s bureaucratic, it’s scientific, if I can put it that way. It’s going to privilege certain types of worldviews.
Why aren’t there Australian wānangas? How did it come to be that big institutions like the University of Melbourne became, in effect, the main route into higher education for Indigenous peoples?
JW: Well, I think the Australian system is actually quite small, even though it has a few very large institutions. It has something like 39 universities. There are a few private universities, often associated with religious denominations, as I’m sure you’re aware.
What we have in Australia is a long-running effort to bring Indigenous people into mainstream higher education institutions, reaching back to the 1950s and the post-war period, where there were various schemes to introduce scholarships, encourage students to come through, hire staff, and create support networks and support institutions within mainstream universities.
So it’s been a long-running effort by mainstream universities because they actually want to incorporate Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is something that the University of Melbourne — as are other universities across Australia — is very interested in connecting with.
And they’re doing so in a way that ultimately aims to change higher education, to broaden the idea of what higher education is, who can participate in it, and what it means.
You mentioned the importance of science. This is, of course, in some circles, a controversial topic, and we could perhaps talk further about that. Sometimes there is a reaction against Indigenous knowledge in some circles, arguing that this somehow degrades the idea of pure science. We could talk about that. I’m not sure I have much sympathy for those views.
AU: You talk about it in terms of inclusion, and those are terms I’m familiar with in North America, right? At our universities, when we talk about inclusion, it’s a lot about numbers. It’s about attracting enough students from Indigenous backgrounds. Are we hiring enough Indigenous professors? That kind of thing.
So it surprised me how little attention that got in this volume. Maybe it’s in volume two, which I haven’t read. Your focus really is on Indigenous knowledge and worldviews, and that struck me as quite different, new, and fascinating. So, I think what you’re telling me is that that’s not just an editorial choice. It actually does reflect differences in the way inclusion is practiced in Australia and the Americas. Is that fair?
JW: So as you mentioned, Alex, there are two volumes to this history. The first one has the subheading Truth, and it is about truth-telling. The second volume is called Voice, and these are ideas that echo a noted policy document, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, created by Indigenous Australians in the 2020s.
But the second volume is much more about numbers, people, and Indigenous voices. So the difference between the two isn’t quite so cut and dried.
We deliberately placed Indigenous knowledge in the first volume as a counter to some of the race science presented in the earlier part of the book.
There’s an important chapter by the lead editor of the project, Ross Jones. The other editor, of course, is Marcia Langton, an Indigenous leader of enormous stature in Australia and internationally as well.
One of the arguments is that sometimes there’s a conceit in Western science — that it believes too much in its own objectivity. Indigenous knowledge is another way of thinking about the world, and pushing those two approaches together is a way of emphasizing that this is not just about the actions of individuals, as you suggest, but about ways of thinking about the world and being open and receptive to different understandings of it.
It’s also about interrogating our own personal prejudices, which runs throughout the earlier parts of the book, and showing how those things can undermine our claims to objectivity as scientists working in universities.
There are different ways of seeing the same thing. So placing that discussion in the first volume was absolutely a statement of intent.
AU: I was fascinated by some of those examples of attempts to include different worldviews, and I thought the passage on courses in Indigenous astronomy was mind-blowing. That was really, really interesting. For you, what are the most promising examples of the inclusion of Indigenous worldviews at the University of Melbourne?
JW: Well, astronomy is such a wonderful practical example, isn’t it? It’s a way of viewing the heavens that shows how ideas about the heavens are constructed, and this is a different way of doing it. It speaks to culture and cultural development as much as it does to the celestial bodies themselves. Science becomes a way of exploring that.
Some of the other examples featured in this book — and because it’s a history, they are somewhat backward-looking — are research partnerships. We have a few examples of those in the book. One is the West Arnhem Land Dog Health Program by Elizabeth Tudor and Cameron Rawle, where Indigenous leaders are working in partnership with university academics in a way that produces tangible outcomes.
So it’s focused on outcomes, but it’s also focused on collaboration — genuine collaboration. And that stands in marked contrast to the way Indigenous human remains were harvested en masse and taken by universities to study on their own terms.
It also differs from other forms of academic work that are extractive — where knowledge is removed from Indigenous communities, worked on privately, and then presented back as outcomes.
The most promising approaches are the ones that encourage genuine connection with communities and collaboration with Indigenous groups, organizations, and corporations in ways that fulfill both the objectives of universities and the needs identified by Indigenous people themselves.
AU: I was really intrigued by the extent to which Indigenous knowledge was portrayed as residing in works of art. And therefore, not only would fine arts faculties or departments have an important role to play in reconciliation, but non-fine arts programs — medicine being the one that receives the most attention — have also had to open themselves up to using art as a different way of knowing. How receptive have various disciplines been to this approach at the University of Melbourne? Have some been more resistant than others?
JW: I think some have been more resistant than others. At the same time, there has been great interest in understanding the history of eugenics in Australia and the ways Indigenous people have interpreted ideas about healing.
The example we have in the book is Jackie Healy’s extraordinary exhibition in the Medical History Museum about different ways of healing and different approaches to medicine. That exhibition toured across the world. There’s actually been a second Art of Healing exhibition as well, which shows the level of interest in this work.
If nothing else, it provokes the imagination and changes the way you see what you’re doing.
Has there been resistance from anatomists? I think yes, in some quarters. There is a hesitancy in some of the pure science disciplines, where people are anxious that Indigenous knowledge somehow degrades the pure effort of science.
Around the world, you’ve seen various position statements by groups of scientists arguing that Indigenous knowledge isn’t science and therefore has a different role in the academy and in scientific practice.
I think those kinds of absolutist positions — that’s how I would characterize them — misunderstand the role of Indigenous knowledge. The point is that it is collaborative, that it is based on partnership, and that it is ultimately aimed at enhancing our worldview and extending our imagination, rather than somehow being an attack on science itself.
AU: What’s the future for reconciliation in Australian higher education, or at the University of Melbourne? What kinds of initiatives do you think we’re likely to see in the next decade or so?
JW: Other Australian universities have expressed interest in developing similar truth-telling projects, perhaps not on quite the same scale as the University of Melbourne with two volumes of history that are a collaborative effort — 350,000 words — so it’s Anna Karenina. It’s a big undertaking.
But other institutions are interested in this because it’s so dynamic. While it’s looking to the past, it’s also about the priorities of institutions today in those areas such as inclusion that you identified.
And it’s been fruitful because it’s not — to come back to your point about whether universities are on trial — really about prosecuting members of the institution from the past. It’s about understanding how these universities operated in the past.
The story of Indigenous connections with universities is something other historians have often overlooked or said is not the main story. Dhoombak Goobgoowana, by contrast, shows that if you make this the focus — even if it’s not the main story — it’s still a really significant story.
And by focusing on it, you reveal all sorts of things about your own institutions and their place in the world that you otherwise wouldn’t.
So there is great interest in that kind of work, much more than a desire to prosecute people from the past.
There’s also the ongoing effort to recruit students, and Dhoombak Goobgoowana is an important signal in that area because it shows universities are open to this kind of critique and to understanding their connections with Indigenous people.
That’s a really powerful signal to someone considering university who might otherwise see the name of a eugenicist on a building and think, “What is this place? This is not for me.”
And of course, there’s also a growing connection with Indigenous communities through research and ongoing collaboration. That’s happening right across the Australian higher education system today.
AU: James Waghorne, thanks so much for being with us today.
JW: My pleasure. Thanks, Alex.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our readers and listeners, for joining us today. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or suggestions for future episodes, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week when our guest will be Christine Wach, Senior Vice President, Partnerships and Stakeholder Engagement for the USA and Canada at IDP Education. She’ll be joining us not just to talk about IDP and its rather unique corporate history, but also about the recent turmoil in international student markets and what it portends for the future of academic mobility. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
