Norman Tindale

One critic of Tindale's work on Aboriginal people wrote in 2018 that it "contributed to a larger landscape of objectification and categorisation of racialised ideas about Aboriginal people and was part of a global movement of analysis using the ideologies of eugenics, concerned with racial purity, blood quantum and hierarchies of race, and phrenology".

A 2007 article looking at Tindale and Birdsell's 1939 expedition to Cape Barren Island reserve argues that this "was the last major eugenic research project to be undertaken in Australia".

David Horton later used Tindale's map as a basis for the maps included in his Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society and Culture (1994) and the separate map published in 1996.

During 1993 Tindale received unofficial confirmation of his appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO); this was presented posthumously, to his widow Muriel. Also in 1993, the South Australian Museum Board's named a public gallery in his honour.

Aboriginal Legal Aid lawyer and land council lawyer Paul Burke, first in his book Law's Anthropology, and in a later essay, argues that Tindale's map of Australian territories had not only achieved "iconic status", but had begun to exercise a deleterious impact on native title judgements made in suits that have been brought to court by indigenous peoples following the landmark Mabo decision of 1992, and negatively affect their rights to land tenure in a number of cases.

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, at the age of sixty-six, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado. He was eventually honoured with a doctorate by the Australian National University in 1980.

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.

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.

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".

When Tindale was writing up his work on Aboriginal people at the University of Virginia in the 1930s, he worked alongside eugenics scientists who supported a proposed law on involuntary sterilisation of women with disabilities or mental illness, and who influenced the Nazi program in Germany. He also wrote of his attendance at a Nazi rally in Munich, writing of Hitler as an "impressive figure".

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 E. O. Stocker.

Other have noted that the editor of Tindale's paper on Groote Eylandt in 1925, Edgar Waite, changed his drawn boundaries as dotted lines, obtrusively insisting that Aboriginal people were nomadic, and not place-bound. When Tindale finally managed to print, unaltered, his own map, he represented the Aboriginal peoples as filling every nook and cranny of what became colonial Australia, avowing their former presence, much to the unease of many cartographers, everywhere. In doing so he placed a disappearing people back "on the map", much to the later discontent of mining corporations, which fund research that would revise Tindale's approach and restrict Aboriginal territoriality.

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 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.

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.

The family returned to Perth in August 1917, and soon after moved to Adelaide 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.

Norman Barnett Tindale AO (12 October 1900 – 19 November 1993) was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist.

Tindale was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1900. 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.