Born in Perth on 12th October, 1900, Norman Barnett Tindale life spanned 93 years and although he was not of Aboriginal descent, as an anthropologist and etymologist, he gather genealogical information about the Aboriginal people, contributing enormously to what we know about the history of Aborigines in Australia.

In 1921 Norman began collecting information on Aboriginal people living on missions and government stations. By the end of the 1960s, he had collected many photographs and recorded detailed genealogies of Aboriginal people all over Australia. The genealogical information includes up to three (3) generations of family names and, in some cases, tribal names, relevant moiety and totem. Much of the information of course, was gathered from non-aboriginal people (station owners, stockmen, farmers etc), whilst other information was gathered from observing Aborigines and recording an interpretation of what he saw and heard.
 

Today it is recognised that the cultural differences is often a barrier when recording by observation and can lead to misinterpretation. Hence in a European society that gives more value to a written language than that of an oral language, Tindale’s version of history can be and is questioned. This is not to deny Tindale’s contribution to the history of Australia and especially that of Aboriginal Australia.

Tindale’s career encompassed a number of research paths across several decades, one of which started on his first field trip, developing a project towards the concept of bounded tribal territories. When he began that project in the 1920s, the popular view was that Aboriginal groups roamed across the landscape, with no fixed territories. His tribal map of Australia (Tribal Boundaries), first published in 1940 and revised in 1974 together with his encyclopaedia of Aboriginal tribal groups, became a crucial document in Australian cultural history. It was radical in its fundamental implication that Australia was not terra nullius, empty land.

Tindale pioneer work as an Australian archaeologist, was one of the first to successfully challenge the orthodoxy of the 1920s, that Aboriginal occupation of Australia had been relatively brief. His meticulous excavation of a 5,000 year old Aboriginal rock shelter at Devon Downs on the Murray River in 1929 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.

Source: South Australian Museum - Norman B Tindale