Good history is not static. It is intrinsically up for challenge. And this long-overdue truth-telling opens up ripe ground for a reckoning

Eugenicists, white supremacists and Nazi apologists. Cowardly perpetrators of frontier massacre against Aboriginal people. Body snatchers and professorial hoarders of hundreds of sets of ancestral remains in academic vaults in the interests of voodoo racial science. This is all an intrinsic part of the University of Melbourne’s shameful history of racism.

And so it is that Dhoombak Goobgoowana – A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, Volume 1: Truth – lands with a heavy historical thud to further expose the deep genealogy of acute racism that pervades one of Australia’s oldest and most internationally revered academic institutions.

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