The University of Melbourne has renamed the prominent Richard Berry building for maths and statistics after a long anti-racism campaign by a group of staff and students.
Until his retirement in the 1940s, Berry was Australia’s leading voice in the pseudoscience of eugenics, which aimed to produce a superior human race by having suitable people breed, while at the same time sterilising those with “rotten heredity”.
Berry lobbied for “sterilisation, segregation and the lethal chamber” for Aboriginal people, homosexuals, poor people and prostitutes.
Early this year, the building was renamed the Peter Hall building, in honour of world-renowned mathematician and statistician who worked there before his death last year.
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