Dhoombak Goobgoowana at the University and the College
The College is gaining a deeper understanding of its institutional and colonial past, thanks to a sobering work of scholarship about the troubled relationship between Indigenous people and the University of Melbourne.
Sunday 1 December 2024
Dhoombak Goobgoowana can be translated as ‘truth telling’ in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, on whose traditional lands the University’s Parkville campus, and Ormond College, are located.In May 2024, the first volume of Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne was published. This book, co-edited by distinguished Prof Marcia Langton AO and historians Dr Ross L Jones and Dr James Waghorne, delves into the earliest days of the University, including research on Ormond College founders Francis Ormond and John Wyselaskie.Both Ormond and Wyselaskie amassed significant wealth during the 1800s as settler pastoralists in the Western Districts of Victoria. Francis Ormond became one of the most prominent philanthropists of the 1880s, founding Ormond College, the Working Men’s College (now RMIT) and the University’s Chair of Music. John Wyselaskie gave significant funds to Ormond College and the Presbyterian Theological Hall.In acknowledging the generosity and legacy of these benefactors, it’s important to acknowledge at whose expense this benevolence was derived – specifically, the Wadawurrung and Djab wurrung Traditional Owners. Research shows that Indigenous peoples were violently displaced and mistreated during the occupation of the Western Districts of Victoria in the 1840s, around the time that Francis Ormond and John Wyselaskie arrived. It is also well documented that exploitative labour practices were almost universal for First Nations people in this region and era. The Ormond and Wyselaskie stations employed First Nations peoples.Zoë Laidlaw (1991) is a Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, specialising in British imperialism and colonialism. She’s also an Ormond alumna and contributed a chapter to Dhoombak Goobgoowana about the university’s 19th-century benefactors.‘While we already have official, institutional histories that have been written about the colleges, the university and their benefactors, there’s a very different body of evidence that we can use to understand who it was that they dispossessed and what the experience of dispossession was like for Aboriginal people at the time,’ Laidlaw explains.‘Colonial newspapers help with this, as do settler journals and letters. Some pastoral companies kept records that show who they were employing – even if they weren’t actually paying them. We have knowledge of differential rates of payment and of people getting paid by rations rather than money – and there’s a racial divide with that. We also have the oral histories of descendants, as well as government records because there was heavy government surveillance of Aboriginal people in the 19th Century.’A separate chapter of Dhoombak Goobgoowana discusses a scholarship established by Ormond alumna Dr Merrilyn Murnane Griffiths (1954) in honour of her father Dr Daniel Murnane, who was a graduate of the University of Melbourne and a veterinarian. The research reveals Daniel Murnane’s involvement in a massacre of Indigenous people in the Kimberley in the 1920s. The scholarship was renamed the Dr Merrilyn Murnane Veterinary Science Scholarship earlier this year.There is more work to be done. The College has begun work on its own, separate truth-telling project. This work, led by Dee Teao from the Indigenous Knowledge Systems consultancy, aims to facilitate open, candid and respectful conversations about the impact of Ormond College’s benefactors on First Nations people. It aims to document and acknowledge historical truths and provide recommendations for addressing injustices of the past.Laidlaw believes it’s important for the College and the University to acknowledge this painful history.‘As a historian who has worked on this subject matter for decades, I still find it shocking,’ she says. ‘But it’s important that people beyond academics engage with this history and consider its consequences. [The universities and colleges] rose to prominence on the back of wealth that came from dispossession.’ First Published in New & Old Magazine | Issue No. 104 December 2024
