For many years, historian Gary Foley has been drawing attention to the racist past inscribed throughout the infrastructure of Melbourne University. Now, as the Melbourne Age reports, some staff and students, including Tyson Holloway-Clarke (the indigenous officer at the student union) and Odette Kelada (a lecturer in Australian Indigenous studies) are campaigning to rename facilities linked to particularly egregious individuals.
The university's Professor Richard Berry once stole the corpses of Indigenous people for research designed to prove the racial superiority of whites.
A leading eugenicist, he advocated a 'lethal chamber' to dispose of those he dubbed 'the grosser types of our mental defectives'. Gassing would, Berry said, be the 'kindest, wisest and best thing for all concerned.'
Today, Melbourne University honours Berry via the Richard Berry building near its main entrance.
Similarly, the Frank Tate student centre pays homage to an education reformer, who advocated forcible sterilisation of 'undesirables' such as Aboriginals, homosexuals and the poor. Other venues, such as the Agar lecture theatre, the Baldwin Spencer building and the John Medley building, also celebrate academics linked to racial theorising.
The renewed interest in the university's past comes in the wake of similar campaigns in the US. The massacre of nine people in a historic black church in Charleston eventually spurred the removal of a Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House. But the outcry against the ensign of the slave states also drew attention to other aspects of public history.
For instance, the State House gardens in Columbia also contain a huge statue of 'Pitchfork' Ben Tillman, who governed South Carolina between 1890 and 1894 and represented the state in the US senate for many years. Tillman was an avowed racist, who not only defended lynching but also personally participated in racial killings during the Hamburg Massacre of 1876.
The sculpture makes no mention of that: rather, it lauds a 'life of service and achievement'.
You can find similar monuments to confederate heroes, including leaders of the KKK and similar groups, all through the south.
Perhaps the closest analogy to the Melbourne University situation comes from Princeton in New Jersey, where students recently occupied the president's office in protest against the use of Woodrow Wilson's name on two buildings. Wilson was Princeton a graduate and later university president, before he became president of the USA between 1913 to 1921.
Though often remembered as a pioneer of American liberalism, he was also a white supremacist responsible for introducing segregation to