Truth-telling and the Settler-Colonial University

I reviewed an excellent history of the University of Melbourne, Dhoombak Goobgoowana. Problem is, the settler colonialism it describes is not just in the past.

No longer employed in academia, the best way for me to maintain my scholarship now is by modest living. I am hardly alone. Ask every artist, actor, musician and many a novelist and this is how it is done. I have few regrets.

So, in order to reduce my annual book-purchasing expenses (which is typically around AU$1000 per year, which is more than 1/3 of what I earn writing this substack) I am currently writing a lot of book reviews. This is actually great and feels like the fulfilment of responsibilities I should have better shouldered in my academic job. The job, at least under the workload policy of the institution for which I worked, made that near impossible. I often feared I would not be able to put the effort required into such an important responsibility. But now I can and do - and also really value the free books.

So in the spirit of both responsibility and thrift I reviewed Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne – Volume 1: Truth for the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

This book, published by University of Melbourne Press, is in fact available for free online - as it should be, when one considers the university’s role in settler colonialism.

Dhoombak Goobgoowana is certainly the ‘most important history of higher education in Australia to date’, which is how I open the review. As it proceeds, however, the review gets darker alongside my level of discomfort. For Dhoombak Goobgoowana is the university’s mea culpa, an attempt at reparations without the financial implications (beyond the research for the book, which is itself a very good start) by a university whose alliance with money and power continues even to sustained research that supports militarised powers that continue to perpetuate settler-colonial violence.

I’m not wanting to point the finger at the University of Melbourne specifically. Indeed, the truth-telling embodied in this volume is praiseworthy and I hope every settler-colonial university embarks on something similar.

In one important example in the book, University of Melbourne researchers were involved in the testing of nuclear weapons at Maralinga, ‘forcing poison’ onto First Nations Elders. It is really important that the university tell this history with truth and honesty. That, as First Nations peoples often remind us, is the first step to setting things on the right path.

Image: https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/war/defence-equipment-and-weapons/nuclear-bomb-test-maralinga

But what I found difficult in reviewing this terrific book was the sense that the university - and maybe every settler colonial university - might be able to express sorrow for what they did in the past, both in terms of body snatching, cultural acquisition and appropriation, disrespect and their participation or complicity in settler colonial violence. But this sorry does not always extend to the present.

As one of its authors Zoë Laidlaw said elsewhere (emphasis mine):

Can Dhoombak Goobgoowana help to persuade non-Indigenous people associated with the University of Melbourne to own the problems and historical harms its pages outline? To make them more likely to trace the steps between the institution’s past and its present? Can it help the university itself generate a serious, substantial and enduring response? This is not to argue that Dhoombak Goobgoowana should inculcate feelings of guilt or shame. Rather, it should foster a recognition of the harms of settler colonialism and their enduring and specific resonances within the contemporary institution: an acknowledgement that the consequences of this history are not consigned to the past.

Settler-colonialism is not just something that happened in the past. It is a structure that continues to shape the present.

Late last year historian Dirk Moses wrote this for the Boston Review about settler colonialism:

Indigenous and occupied peoples, then, are placed in an impossible position. If they resist with violence, they are violently put down. If they do not, states will overlook the lower-intensity but unrelenting violence to which they are subject. Right now, Western and even many Arab states are prepared to indefinitely tolerate the unbearable conditions in Gaza and the West Bank while attempting to broker a lasting peace in the Middle East without resolving the Palestinian struggle for liberation, whatever form that might take. “There is violence in this insistence on nonviolence by the international community,” Abdaljawad Omar, a graduate student at Birzeit University in Ramallah, wrote on November 9, “because it is effectively an invitation for Palestinians to lie down and die.”

While acknowledging that universities do and must include a wide variety of political, philosophical and scientific perspectives, active complicity with violence and genocide does not seem like the sort of thing that a university should use its truth-seeking efforts to support. And it is certainly not the sort of thing they should punish their students for opposing.

And yet, I gather¹ and the University of Melbourne has confirmed it has received $3.5M for PhD students to collaborate with weapons and military tech company Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s website says it ‘is proud of the significant role it has fulfilled in the security of the State of Israel’. Let’s remember what that looks like.

I understand too that the university maintains further military links with Boeing, BAE Systems, Raytheon, and Leonardo. This is part of what Henry Giroux called the ‘military-industrial-academic complex’ - a set of financial and governmental interests that have shaped and been shaped by their entanglement with university research, especially (but not only) in the USA.

In relation to Australian universities’ links to military goals, ANU International Relations scholar Sian Troath describes the ways that under a military-industrial-academic complex ‘Each needs the other—for military advantage, for profits, and for survival.’

The concern here is (partly) that the university’s role as institutional foundation to democracy - since truth and democracy are interrelated (perhaps that is a matter for another day) - is impeded when it is so financially squeezed that they contemplate some fairly dodgy partnerships.² Profit is absolutely at the core of this. Considering the death, disability and long-term trauma that military tech produces for individuals and communities, we must surely respond, as usual: f*cking capitalism.

One suspects that the day will come where that university’s press will produce another volume of ‘truth’ about their continued support of settler-colonial violence, beyond Australia as well as within it.

For now, however, we should all remember that the purpose of truth-telling is surely not to cover up the perpetuation of the kinds of violence that it exposes.

My review is here: Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne – Volume 1: Truth for the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

1. I want to acknowledge the students of UM4P (which, full disclosure, includes my own daughter) for their efforts in holding their institution to account and thank them for sharing their research with me. Similar efforts were important in building opposition to the war in Vietnam - it is also important that the community supports those students now that the university (as many institutions also did against anti-Vietnam War activists) is rather shamefully bringing disciplinary procedures against some students (I am not related to any of these, as far as I know). See https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/02/students-recommended-for-expulsion-university-of-melbourne-pro-palestine-office-protest-ntwnfb

2. The University of Melbourne clarified that “Research at the University is subject to Australian law. It is compliant with and approved under the relevant research ethics and integrity codes and is reviewed by the Research Due Diligence Advisory Group as appropriate.”

As Dhoombak Goobgoowana itself exposes, that is not really sufficient to be on the right side of ethics, let alone history.