‘Noble savage' and ‘ritual spearings': Melbourne University race row re-ignites
Melbourne University has offered counselling to staff and students after a racially charged email from an academic at the prestigious institution went public.
University officials say the material written by law school academic Eric Descheemaeker in 2023 was leaked and posted around the Parkville campus this week, and that it may have upset or offended people who read it.
The law professor wrote to his boss, Matthew Harding, who was then dean of the law school, in August 2023 in response to news of an Indigenous cultural safety review, which Descheemaeker described as 'an ideological re-education camp'.
'Celebrating the 'noble savage' is already the main, if not exclusive, thing [Melbourne Law School] appears to exist for – with just a bit of space to spare for every possible sexual or gendered minority vying for claims to victimhood,' Descheemaeker wrote.
The cultural safety review at Melbourne Law School was ordered after a series of resignations of Indigenous academics, culminating in the high-profile departure of former Northern Territory discrimination commissioner Eddie Cubillo from his role as associate dean of the nation's top-ranked law school, which he described as 'the most culturally unsafe place I've worked'.
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Descheemaeker, who is also a visiting research fellow at Oxford University, claimed in his email to Harding that it was 'Blak activists' who were dictating the direction of the school.
'They have made us start every meeting with ritual prayers,' Descheemaeker wrote.
'Their (non-existing) claims to land are now 'acknowledged' about every 10 feet in our corridors. They want me to teach that Australian law is only 'settler law' and that there exists a rich body of 'indigenous law' alongside (what are indigenous private-law remedies, I wonder. Ritual spearings?).'
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