Hear from Uncle Jim Berg, Gunditjmara Elder

Uncle Jim Berg, a Gunditjmara Elder,  is a pivotal figure in the Indigenous history of the University. It was Uncle Jim who laid the challenge for the institution to attempt a fuller account of its role as an instrument of colonisation at a research colloquium on Place and Indigenous Cultural Recognition in 2019.

Uncle Jim has been challenging the University for decades. In 1984, he won an injunction against the University to have Aboriginal Ancestral remains repatriated from the University’s possession. For this, Uncle Jim was not welcomed back to campus until 2019 when he was invited to present at the Research Colloquium.

Uncle Jim is a member of the project steering committee.

“Now, all these year later, I am really enjoying being able to contribute to the work of the University on committees in areas such as reconciliation, repatriation and cultural heritage, but I have noticed that it is mostly only academics who are on these committees. As a Koori Elder, I think that it is really important to always have people from the Koori community who are not academics on these committees—to keep the academic world connected to the Koori community, and to make sure that Koori academics are always being reminded of who they are, where they come from, and their responsibilities to our Ancestors and to the future generations of our People.”

^{Uncle Jim Berg, A Memoir, Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia Volume I, Truth (2024)}

The story of Uncle Jim’s legal battel with the University is told in ‘The Murray Black Collection of Aboriginal Ancestral Remains’ by Marcia Langton, Louise Murray and Antony Sinni in Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne.