About the room
This gallery calls out the trade in Indigenous remains and eugenics that were practised in the University’s Melbourne Medical School, as well as in other related faculties across Australia and internationally. The display is disturbing, but the archival material and artists’ responses to the subject are critical to this truth-telling exhibition and to the University. Eugenicists also had great influence beyond academia and their theories were used to validate Australian government policies that dismissed Indigenous people as fully human until the 1967 referendum, when for the first time they were counted in the Australian population. Pejorative classifications of Australia’s First Peoples also led to the marginalisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art as mere ethnographic and ‘primitive’ art.
Until well into the twentieth century, the University of Melbourne collected, measured and stored the bodies and skulls of Indigenous people without their permission for teaching purposes. Indigenous remains were stolen from burial sites across the country. In the University’s Medical School the remains stolen from burial sites across Australia were examined and lectured on by professors of anatomy including George Halford, Richard Berry, Frederic Wood Jones and Sydney Sunderland.
The Murray Black Collection at the University was repatriated in 1985, following an adverse judgement in the Supreme Court. It took almost two decades until the other significant collection of Indigenous remains, the Berry Collection, was ‘discovered’ in the Anatomy Department. The work of these eugenicists did violence to Indigenous people, who were subjected to measurement, pejorative labelling and systems of sinister, evolutionary thought.
Content Warning
Please note that this part of the exhibition is not recommended for viewers under eighteen years of age.
Viewers are advised that this gallery contains material related to the theft, examination, handling and trade of Indigenous remains, practices undertaken at the University of Melbourne. There are also references to the discredited ‘science’ of eugenics, the desecration of burial sites, violence, ‘blood quantum’ terminology and racism. Many of the archival documents contain derogatory descriptions, classifications and eugenicist theories that reflect the attitudes and circumstances of the period in which they were written.
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