Shillan Shebly

The University of Melbourne has always been a frontier of racial-colonial and imperial violence. First founded in 1853 on Country stolen from Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples, the University of Melbourne was historically recognised as a global intellectual centre for eugenics, and held the largest collection of stolen Aboriginal Ancestral remains. To date, many of these Ancestral remains are yet to be repatriated to their communities.

If there’s one thing that I learnt first-hand during the era of the COVID pandemic, it is that, in times of crisis, the way in which our most vulnerable members of society are sacrificed exposes the hierarchical logic that is always underpinning how society is governed.