‘What version of the past is promoted and what’s obscured?’

The fortunes of the early University of Melbourne were propelled by generous benefactors.

These donors’ wealth derived overwhelmingly from Australia’s pastoral industries, and especially from estates in western Victoria.

Like the University itself, the pastoral estates that contributed so much to colonial Victoria’s prosperity occupied unceded Indigenous land: pastoralists’ affluence was grounded in the violent dispossession and alienation of Indigenous peoples from their Country.

On Sunday 25 May, some 500 people gathered on Gunditjmara country (Portland) to hear truths about the historic and contemporary impacts of colonisation on First Peoples...