Biographers, resharpen your pencils! The University of Melbourne’s shameful history of racism awaits

The University of Melbourne’s Ormond College, which in 2011 created a scholarship named after a perpetrator of the 1926 Forrest River massacre. Photograph: B O’Kane/Alamy

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.