Tindale

Tindale Biography

Norman Barnett ("Tinny") Tindale

Born: 12 October 1900, Perth, Western Australia
Died: 19 November 1993, Palo Alto, California, United States of America

On his first major field trip after being appointed assistant entomologist at the South Australian Museum in 1918, Norman Tindale sketched the tribal Aboriginal boundaries in the Groote Eylandt and Roper River area of the Northern Territory. His map was edited before publication and the boundaries removed on the basis that Australian Aboriginal people were wanderers with no fixed attachments to land.

Tindale's reaction was to dedicate his research efforts for the next two decades towards proving that Aboriginal groups did relate territorially to distinct regions that could be successfully mapped. His tribal map of Australia, first published in 1940 and revised in 1974 together with his encyclopaedia of Aboriginal tribal groups, was radical in its fundamental implication that Australia was not terra nullius - decades before the Mabo judgement made it a national issue.

Over the next 70 years, Tindale played a crucial role in confronting this entrenched stereotype about Aboriginal people - that their nomadic lifestyle indicated a lack of enduring territorial relationships with the land. Tindale's daily work at the South Australian Museum brought a constant reminder of the public's perception of Aboriginal people during these decades; it is hardly surprising that his commitment to the tribal paradigm grew in response. This was so even as the applied anthropology of his academic colleagues in eastern Australia was suggesting that the complexity of Aboriginal social and territorial relationships was hardly amenable to Tindale's ambitiously broad categorisation. Despite this, Tindale's carefully sourced data and his commitment to a bibliographic method means that researchers may dismantle and test most of his conclusions, a course rarely open with the work of other ethnographers.

Tindale was also a pioneer Australian archaeologist. He was one of the first to successfully challenge the orthodoxy of the 1920s, that Aboriginal occupation of Australia had been relatively brief. His excavation of a 5000-year old Aboriginal rock shelter at Devon Downs on the Murray River in 1929 was a pivotal event.

Before that project, Australian archaeology did not exist as a discipline, largely because it was assumed that Aboriginal people were relatively recent arrivals. Tindale's meticulous excavation established not only that Aboriginal people had lived for several millenia in the Murray valley, but demonstrated that their strategies for subsistence had altered in response to environmental change. He showed how stone tools, animal bones and cultural remains could be used to piece together a previously untold story about Australia's past. His foresight in preserving charcoal samples against the predicted development of C14 dating has received scant recognition. Nevertheless, critics of Tindale's construction of an Australian cultural chronology based on his Devon Downs, Tartanga and even Noola Rockshelter excavations and his examination of 'Kartan' implements, acknowledge the precision of his work and the quality of his data.

Like several dominant figures in South Australian anthropology, Tindale's empirically-based research interests arose from his training in the natural sciences, particularly geology and biology. He completed a Bachelor's degree in Science at the University of Adelaide in 1933. Tindale's commitment to 'boundedness' in space (tribes) and in time (cultural chronologies) may be traced to this natural science paradigm and its concern with cataloguing and filling gaps in the record. At a time when anthropology had tended to contract into university departments, redefining iteself in the process, Tindale reinvigorated the profession within the South Australian Museum, uniquely blending empirical investigation with social enquiry.

Tindale's commitment to data-gathering was not an end in itself, but represented an attempt to build a picture of Aboriginal life within the frame of the Australian environment. This commitment was exemplified by his central role during the Board for Anthropological Research expeditions to remote Central Australia locations, organised from Adelaide during the 1930s. He was responsible for purchasing and documenting artefacts, making sound, cinematic and photographic records of daily life and ceremonies, recording sociological data, as well as collecting natural science specimens.

Despite this empirical emphasis, Tindale published widely in the field of Aboriginal art; he pioneered the practice (later used by Mountford and Berndt) of supplying Aboriginal people in Central Australia with brown paper and their choice of crayons, documenting the results carefully. He was one of the first anthropologists to articulate the fact that the art of the concentric circle represented a cryptic and endlessly flexible reference to place, the artist's own mythological locus.

Tindale's first passion was entomology, indulged as a boyhood hobby in the countryside surrounding Tokyo, after his father, an accountant with the Salvation Army mission in Japan, had taken his family there to live from 1907 until 1915. Through these butterfly-collecting excursions he was first introduced to the fieldwork methods of natural science collecting, later an integral part of his anthropological expedition routine. In Tokyo itself he gained his first experience of museums and the life behind their static exhibits.

On his family's return to Australia in 1915, Tindale gained a job with the Adelaide Public Library as a cadet, biding his time until a position at the South Australian Museum became available. A few months after taking up his position at the Museum Tindale lost the sight of one eye in an explosion caused while assisting his father with photographic processing. He later recalled the Museum Entomologist, Arthur Lea, telling him, 'Tindale, you'll never make a blind entomologist, but you might make a blind anthropologist!' Tindale nevertheless forged an international reputation during his lifetime for his work on the Hepialidae moths.

Because Groote Eylandt was still almost unknown by naturalists or anthropologists, prior to Tindale's 1921-1922 expedition the museum director sent him to Melbourne to learn the rudiments of anthropology from Walter Baldwin Spencer. Spencer taught Tindale the Geographic I method of language transcription, the basis for Tindale's later collection of parallel vocabularies across Australia. Apart from studious attention to Spencer's gift of his 1912 edition of 'Notes and Queries on Anthropology', Tindale followed one aspect of Spencer's advice for the next 70 years: to write a daily journal, no matter whether the events of the following day proved the previous day's record invalid. Tindale's systematic journal-keeping became legendary during his lifetime. These journals, bequeathed by Tindale to the South Australian Museum, join with his genealogical records, crayon drawings and maps, films, photographs, sound recordings and artefacts in constituting a unique, interlocking archive of data about the Aboriginal people of Australia.

Tindale and other Adelaide members of the Board for Anthropological Research were often criticised for their brief forays into Central Australia during the 1930s, in contrast to Elkin's students with their intensive periods of fieldwork. By this time though, Tindale had already served his fieldwork apprenticeship; the Groote Eylandt expedition saw him living in the field with Aboriginal people for a total period of twenty months during 1933 Tindale and the physical anthropologist Cecil Hackett spent three months accompanying Pitjantjatjara and Yangkantjatjara people through the Mann Ranges. Both experiences left Tindale with enduring respect for Aboriginal people's intimate knowledge of local environments.

Thanks to his mastery of 'street Japanese' during his Tokyo childhood, Tindale's career was interrupted by World War II - he was posted to the Pentagon in Washinton as an intelligence officer with the Japanese code-breaking unit. Assigned the rank of Wing Commander, he was flown to the crash sites of Japanese bombers in the Pacific region, with a brief to decode and translate any data which could identify the Japanese sources of vital parts and weaponry. Tindale used these forays to make additional journal entries about Pacific ethnography.

One day in the Pentagon during this period he encountered the South Australian nuclear scientist Mark Oliphant, with mutual surprise. The two had been cadets at the Adelaide Public Library in 1916, before Tindale's employment at the Museum. Both were working on different aspects of the Manhattan Project. At the end of the war, when Tindale was seconded to examine the effects of Allied bombing in Japan, he stood on the ruins of his father's Tokyo home, remembering his Japanese childhood friends and the insects and butterflies they had collected together.

Tindale's family came from Taratap Station near Mt Gambier and there his mother had played as a child during the 1870s with a Tangane boy of the Coorong Aborigines, Clarence Long Milerum. Years later, visiting the region for his anthropological research, Tindale met Milerum and a long friendship developed. As an old man Milerum worked with Tindale during the 30s, making basketry and weapons and explaining his culture and traditions to museum visitors. Tindale's great unfinished project was Milerum's biography. This was intended, like the Berndts' study of the Lower Murray Yaraldi (published by M.U.P. in 1993), to give an insight into the pre-European culture of the Tangane people of the Coorong through the eyes of a friend and principal informant.

Tindale's familiarity with the Aborigines of the Coorong and Lower Murray assisted him with an important research project, extended today by Aboriginal people working at the South Australian Museum. Tindale's aim, working with the American physical anthropologist Joseph Birdsell, was to build a genealogical and sociological profile of the Aboriginal population as it mingled with the European population across Australia. Through the Aboriginal Family History Project Tindale's name has become familiar to new generations of Aboriginal people.

Tindale's friendship with Birdsell, begun during his visit to the United States in 1936 on a Carnegie Fellowship, endured beyond his retirement from the South Australian Museum in 1965 until his death, and it contributed largely to his decision to take up a teaching position at the University of Colorado. Both men kept in constant contact until recently; Birdsell died on 5 March, 1994, just months after Tindale. Birdsell and Tindale shared common views of the prehistoric origins of Australian Aborigines. Like Tindale, Birdsell bequeathed his research library to the South Australian Museum and, recently announced, made an extremely generous bequest to the institution, establishing the Norman B. Tindale Memorial Research Fund, to be used for the purposes of 'research into Pleistocene man in Australia'.

Tindale continued to live in the United States after his retirement and the death of his wife of 45 years, Dorothy May, in 1969. She had accompanied him, together with the Birdsells, across Australia on the 1938-39 Harvard-Adelaide expedition. In 1970 Tindale married an old family friend, Muriel Nevin (who survives him, together with his son and daughter from his first marriage). Apart from occasional research trips to Australia and butterfly collecting trips elsewhere in North America, they continued to live in Muriel's Palo Alto home, a small wooden house bursting at the seams with his research materials, library, and butterfly specimens. An adjacent shed provided more storage space and a workbench for constructing his neat wooden butterfly boxes.

While Tindale relished the relative seclusion of his retirement in the United States, he was never aloof from family or friends. A boyish sense of humour, a readiness to engage with researchers on their own terms, and an enthusiasm for new information sustained him through accidents and episodes of ill health from his mid-80s.

He impressed all visitors during his later years with the same qualities recorded by earlier colleagues - an indefatigable commitment to making an enduring record of Aboriginal life before the transformations wrought by European contact. His career's output of several books and more than 200 scientific papers on anthropology and entomology were used by him as working texts for future papers; he did not preserve bookshelf copies of any of his publications. By 1989 he knew that he would not complete his Milerum book, nor several other projects. Unfazed, he scaled his work programme back and supplied data for Aboriginal place names to the South Australian Department of Lands. Another source of pleasure was his contact with Canberra and AIATSIS-based linguists during the 1980s, eager to draw upon the numerous Aboriginal vocabularies which he had recorded during his fieldwork. Tindale was never happier nor more animated than when confirming a new detail and putting it on the record for others to use.

Tindale was honoured during the latter part of his career with an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1969. The impetus for this was provided by Professor John Greenway, who later presented Tindale with a remarkable volume of more than 50 testimonial letters from his international colleagues. Australian recognition for Tindale's career was more halting than it would have been had he remained in this country; he received the Verco Medal and the John Lewis Medal from South Australia's Royal Society and Royal Geographical Society during the early 1970s, and an honorary doctorate from A.N.U. in 1980. During 1993 Tindale received unofficial confirmation of the award of the Companion of the Order of Australia; this was awarded posthumously.

Tindale remained an Honorary Associate of the South Australian Museum until his death, an association which spanned more than seven decades. During this time all of his former colleagues left the scene and he observed the gap between museum and academic anthropology develop, widen, but then, encouragingly, begin to close. His letters to the Museum were like those from someone who has stayed away in the field too long: they were always completed with the touching postscript, 'Please give greetings to all those who remember me'. The South Australian Museum Board's 1993 decision to name a gallery in his honour may have meant most to him - a 'museum man' to the last.

Philip Jones, South Australian Museum

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