Norman Barnett Tindale AO (12 October 1900 – 19 November 1993) was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist. He is best remembered for his work mapping the various tribal groupings of Aboriginal Australians at the time of European settlement, shown in his map published in 1940. This map provided the basis of a map published by David Horton in 1996 and widely used in its online form today. Tindale's major work was Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names (1974).
Life Tindale was born on 12 October 1900 in Perth, Western Australia. His family moved to Tokyo and lived there from 1907 to 1915, where his father worked as an accountant at the Salvation Army mission in Japan. Norman attended the American School in Japan, where his closest friend was Gordon Bowles, a Quaker who, like him, later became an anthropologist.
The family returned to Perth in August 1917, and soon after moved to Adelaide, South Australia, where Tindale took up a position as a library cadet at the Adelaide Public Library, together with another cadet, the future physicist, Mark Oliphant. In 1919, he began work as an entomologist at the South Australian Museum. From his early years, he had acquired the habit of taking notes on everything he observed, and cross-indexing them before going to sleep, a practice which he continued throughout his life, and which lay at the basis of the vast archive of notes he left to posterity: he was observed writing by lamplight far into the night long after others had gone to bed, during an expedition to the Pinacate.
Shortly after this, Tindale lost the sight in one eye in an acetylene gas explosion which occurred while assisting his father with photographic processing. In January 1919, he secured a position at the South Australian Museum as Entomologist's Assistant to the formidable Arthur Mills Lea. He had already published thirty-one papers on entomological, ornithological and anthropological subjects before receiving his Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Adelaide in March 1933.
Early ethnological expeditions, 1921–1939 Tindale's first ethnographic expedition took place over 1921–1922. His principal aim was to gather entomological specimens for the South Australian Museum, the ethnographic aspect being almost an accidental sideline that developed, as his curiosity was stimulated, into close observation of the indigenous people he encountered from the Cobourg Peninsula to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Tindale's family background had qualified him to be taken on by the Church Missionary Society of Australia and Tasmania which was interested in proselytizing in the north. He spent half a year, accompanying the missionary Hubert E. Warren to sound out the area for an appropriate site for an Anglican mission, which as the Emerald River Mission, was subsequently established on west coast of Groote Eylandt. He followed this up with a further 9 months nearby on the mainland around the Roper River. Tindale wrote up his observations for the South Australian Museum in two continuous reports, which constitute the first detailed account of the Warnindhilyagwa people on that island.
In 1938–39, Tindale teamed up with Joseph Birdsell, an anthropological graduate student, who was under Earnest Hooton of Harvard University, after meeting the pair on a 1936 visit to the US. They were to undertake an extensive anthropological survey of Aboriginal reserves and missions across Australia, and the relationship forged between the two developed into a half century of collaboration. Tindale would study the genealogies, while Birdsell undertook the measuring, and with government support the pair travelled across south-east Australia, parts of Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania. In May 1938, the two men and their wives visited Cummeragunja Aboriginal reserve in New South Wales. A later study looking at their 1939 expedition to the Cape Barren Island Aboriginal reserve said that this contributed to their decision to advocate assimilation ("absorption") as a solution to "the half-caste problem".
Tindale's vast collection, held at the South Australian Museum, is made up of genealogical information about Aboriginal communities throughout Australia, journals, papers, sound and film recordings, drawings, maps, photographs, vocabularies and personal correspondence. Each State Library in Australia holds copies of Tindale material pertaining to their respective state; for example, the State Library of New South Wales has copies of genealogical charts and photographs from the communities of Boggabilla, Brewarrina, Cummeragunja, Kempsey, Menindee, Pilliga, Walgett, Wallaga Lake and Woodenbong. while the State Library of Queensland has genealogical sheets for the communities of Bentinck Island, Cherbourg, Doomadgee, Mona Mona Aboriginal Mission, Mornington Island, Palm Island, Woodenbong, Woorabinda and Yarrabah. Tindale's genealogical collection is a key research tool for Australian Aboriginal people to discover evidence of their family lineage and connection with community.
Wartime service On the outbreak of World War 2, Tindale tried to enlist, but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. When Japan precipitated war with the United States however, Tindale's knowledge of Japanese, rare in Australia at the time, made him an asset for military intelligence. In 1942 Tindale joined the Royal Australian Air Force and, assigned the rank of wing commander, he was transferred to The Pentagon, where he worked with the Strategic Bombing Survey as an analyst for estimating the impact of bombing on the military and civilian population of Japan.
In 1942 an Air Technical Intelligence Unit was established under Captain Frank T. McCoy at Hangar 7, Eagle Farm airfield just outside Brisbane, and on Tindale's initiative it was tasked with examining parts recovered from the wreckage of Japanese airplanes that had been shot down, working out whatever intelligence could be gathered from the manufacturing markings, and reassembling them where possible. Jones states that Tindale's unit's meticulous analysis of the metallurgical debris and serial numbers enabled them to arrive at the companies responsible for producing the components, deduce production figures and infer what crucial alloys the Japan military was beginning to suffer shortfalls in.
Tindale also played a major intelligence role in putting a halt to Japan's balloon bombing assault on the western coast of the United States. His team's forensic analysis of the debris enabled the U.S. Air Force to identify and bomb the production facilities in Japan. Jones adds two other key contributions by Tindale to the war effort: He was instrumental in cracking the Japanese aircraft production code system, which gave the Allies reliable information as to Japanese air power. More importantly, he and his unit deciphered the Japanese master naval code.
Later years On retirement after 49 years service with the South Australian Museum, Tindale took up a teaching position at the University of Colorado and remained in the United States until his death, aged 93, in Palo Alto, California on 19 November 1993.
Work Ethnology Tindale is best remembered for his work mapping the various tribal groupings of Aboriginal Australians at the time of European settlement, which he based on his fieldwork and other sources, leading to the publication of his Map showing the distribution of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia in 1940. This interest began with a research trip to Groote Eylandt where Tindale's helper and interpreter, a Ngandi man, impressed him with the importance of knowing with precision tribal boundaries. This led Tindale to question the official orthodoxy of the time, which was that Aboriginal people were purely nomadic and had no connection to any specific region. While Tindale's methodology and his notion of the "dialectal tribe" have been superseded, this basic premise has been proved correct.
His salvage ethnography also involved collecting by trade objects for his museum. He was meticulous in making notes on the provenance of each object purchased. Philip Jones writes: one of Tindale's key tasks was to record the names and sociological details of each of the Aboriginal people participating in the fortnight-long intensive survey. This had a crucial outcome in that each object, drawing, photograph, sound recording or even film record subsequently collected by Tindale during these expeditions could be keyed, not only to place and tribal group, but to their individual makers or owners.'
At the same time, these collections were often made using mere lollies or tobacco as barter goods for precious items, and at times exploited the dire conditions of undernourishment suffered by Aboriginal people. After one successful expedition at Flinders Island he wrote: "The Flinders Island people are hungry and in exchange for flour etc have been scouring the camp for specimens. We have pretty well cleaned them up, & nothing of much interest remains".
In historical context, Tindale's firm insistence on the unit of a tribe, with its set territory and fixed boundaries, flew in the face of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's dismissal of the idea of a higher integrating reality like the tribe, as opposed to the assemblies of hordes. Tribes did not hold land, each of their respective "hordes" did, and clan-attachment of land was Radcliffe-Brown's basic sociological unit for Australian groups. Neither notion has stood the test of time. In particular Tindale's notion of a fixed tribal territory proved inadequate at least as regards the nomadic realities of the Western Desert cultural bloc, as Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt implicitly argued as early as 1942, and in more detail almost two decades later by Ronald Berndt.
His major work was published in 1974, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names, which has found its place as a major work of reference even into the 21st century. He dedicated the book to German Pallottine missionary, linguist, and anthropologist Ernest Ailred Worms, with these words "To the memory of Father Ernest A. Worms whose active encouragement, beginning in the year 1952, led to the preparation of this work in its present form". Film making The Adelaide Board for Anthropological Research began a programme for filming Aboriginal life in 1926, and was the first to systematically do so. Over an 11-year period they produced over 10 hours of footage concerning many aspects of Aboriginal life, from material culture to hunting and gathering practices, cooking, love-making, and even ceremonies of circumcision observed during their field expeditions. Tindale produced the film while the camera-work was undertaken by Stocker.
Entomology Tindale made a particular study of the primitive Hepialidae or ghost moth family of the order Lepidoptera. In the 1920s he began to revise understanding of the Australian Mantidae (Archimantis mantids) and mole crickets. A point of departure was a meticulous analysis of the male genitalia of each species, as a guide to more precise classification, and, starting in 1932, over three decades he wrote several papers reordering the Australian ghost moths.
Recognition and honours Tindale was awarded the Verco Medal of the Royal Society of South Australia during 1956, the Australian Natural History Medallion during 1968 and the John Lewis Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia during 1980. In 1967, aged 66, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado. He was eventually honoured with a doctorate by the Australian National University in 1980.