Truth Telling: Colonial and Racial Legacies of the Universities of Edinburgh and Melbourne
In 1905 the Edinburgh-trained anatomist Dr Richard Berry (1867-1962) left Scotland to take up his duties as Professor of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne (est. 1853). Inspired by Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum, Berry began to develop Melbourne’s own ‘collection’ of human remains – including those belonging to Indigenous Australians. The Edinburgh Medical School alumnus became one of Australia’s leading eugenicists, whose legacy to this day remains deeply contested in Melbourne.
On 13 November 2024, the Decolonised Transformations project, in partnership with the Edinburgh Centre for Global History and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanites, held a webinar to discuss how projects at Edinburgh and Melbourne are investigating, and finding ways to repair, their universities’ colonial and racial legacies – and what they might learn from one another.
Dhoombak Goobgoowana (Melbourne University Publishing, 2024) traces how leading University of Melbourne professors across multiple disciplines constructed and applied ideas of race, and the harm that this has brought to Indigenous people. It also shows how Indigenous knowledge contributed silently to many early research projects, and the ways in which it is being adopted by today’s universities. Several stories connect to the University of Edinburgh through commercial and knowledge networks, most particularly in the medical and anthropological fields, showing the international foundations of settler-colonialism. This pioneering truth telling initiative is the first of its kind internationally.
To view the webinar please follow the link: Recorded Webinar
Speakers:
Dr Simon Buck (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh)
Dr Nicola Frith (Decolonised Transformations, University of Edinburgh)
Professor Cressida Fforde (Australian National University)
Malcolm MacCallum (Anatomical Museum, University of Edinburgh)
Professor Marcia Langton (University of Melbourne)
Professor Zoë Laidlaw (University of Melbourne)
Dr James Waghorne (University of Melbourne)
Dr Ross Jones (University of Melbourne)
Rohan Long (Curator, Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, University of Melbourne)
