Politics & Society
Why we are Walking for Truth
‘What version of the past is promoted and what’s obscured?’
As the Yoorrook Walk for Truth travels through western Victoria, we reflect on the colonial pastoralists from that area who dispossessed Indigenous people while enriching our university
Published 5 June 2025
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 in Victoria as Yoorrook Justice Commissioner Travis Lovett set off on the Walk for Truth.
The Walk is a 25-day, 400 kilometre journey across Victoria’s Western District to draw attention to the work of the commission, and to continue the momentum toward truth and treaty that has developed in Victoria.
The University of Melbourne is a key partner in the Walk for Truth as part of its own truth-telling and justice project, building on the two volume history of the University’s relationship with Indigenous Australia, Dhoombak Goobgoowana.
While the University’s support for this initiative reflects its contemporary movement toward truth-telling and justice, its involvement on the Walk also draws attention to its historic relationship with the First Peoples of this part of Victoria.
As the Walk for Truth makes its way towards Parliament through towns like Noorat, Camperdown and Pomborneit, it will traverse vast areas of unceded land appropriated for the enrichment of the pastoralists – riches that were in part donated to the University.
Western district donors
In the 1870s, the colonial government refused to fund a ceremonial hall of ‘suitable dignity’ for the new University of Melbourne.
But in stepped the University’s most significant early benefactor: Samuel Wilson of Ercildoune (later Sir Samuel) promised £30,000 towards what became known as Wilson Hall.
Wilson had made his pastoral fortune in the Wimmera, at Longerenong, on the country of the Wotjobaluk nations.
He cemented his wealth on Wadawurrung Country at Ercildoune, north-east of Ballarat.
Wilson's gift, while the University’s most ‘munificent to date’, was not the first act of generosity from a Western District pastoralist.
On his death in 1866, squatter John Hastie of Punpundhal, near Camperdown, left more than £19,000 to fund exhibitions (prizes for the top student) in philosophy, logic and ethics, as well as funding for Trinity College.
The Walk for Truth passes just to the south of Punpundhal, which sits on Kirrae Wuurong country and has been known since the 1870s as Leslie Manor.
Nearly two decades later, another Western District squatter, John Dickson Wyselaskie of Narrapumelap, bequeathed £12,000 to endow six university scholarships across the sciences and humanities.
Wyselaskie, a Scottish Presbyterian, also left £30,000 to the University’s Ormond College for theological education.
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Narrapumelap, near present-day Wickliffe, lay on Djab wurrung country.
Wyselaskie’s fellow Scottish Presbyterian, Francis Ormond, donated more than £100,000 to the eponymous residential college, and made another important and direct contribution to the University itself: £20,000 to establish Melbourne’s first chair of music.
Ormond’s wealth, too, derived from a series of Western District estates, lying just to the north of the Walk for Truth’s path.
Other late-nineteenth-century donors and benefactors who enjoyed pastoral fortunes were William Mollison of Pyalong, who left £5000 for scholarships in modern languages, and David Aitchison of Kurucaruc (near Portland Bay where the Walk began), who gave £13,862.
Two other long-established pastoral families of the Western District, the Blacks of Glenormiston and the Ritchies of Penshurst, made philanthropic contributions to the University in the early twentieth century.
Just over £2000 was bequeathed by Niel Walter Black in 1909, while RB Ritchie donated £30,000 to found a chair of economics in 1926.
The Black family wealth was made from properties surrounding Mount Noorat, a significant meeting and trading place for clans of the Kirrae Wuurong.
The Walk for Truth stopped at Noorat on the afternoon of Sunday 1 June for a Welcome to Country from Eastern Maar Traditional Owners and a circuit of Mount Noorat.
Niel Walter Black's father, Niel Black, who bought the property, was fully aware of the murderous violence that underpinned his pastoral fortunes.
Just months before he laid claim to the property in 1839, the previous manager led what became known as the Puuroyuup massacre, involving the killing of more than 35 people of the Tarnbeere gundidj clan.
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Walking for Truth in the Western District
With the bicentenary of colonial settlement in Victoria and the 175th anniversary of the establishment of the University of Melbourne, both the state and the institution continue to benefit from exploitation.
Confronting this history, long framed in ways that have diminished the historical and contemporary impact of Indigenous dispossession, is long overdue.
It presses us to ask, when the University awards scholarships in the name of Wyselaskie or Hastie, or appoints a professor to the Ormond Chair of Music, or conducts examinations in Wilson Hall (rebuilt after fire destroyed the original in 1952), what version of the institution’s past is promoted, and what obscured?
As the University of Melbourne starts to look beyond the generosity of these benefactors to the sources of their wealth, it is our responsibility to understand more about the Traditional Owners of the lands they took, without payment and in the knowledge of the violence and injustice of those seizures.
That history has a geography: it connects the University to the Western District and its peoples.
In walking alongside Commissioner Lovett and supporting the work of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, the University can continue working to ensure these truths – about the impacts of colonisation on First Peoples and the benefits that have accrued to the University – continue to be told.
This article draws extensively from ‘Settler Colonial Philanthropy and Indigenous Dispossession’ by Zoë Laidlaw, in Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, Volume I – Truth.