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50-624: Norman Tindale estimated their territorial extension to range around 800 square miles (2,100 km). They were a coastal people, whose inland borders stopped in the highlands. They were present around Cape Bernier, as far southeast lower Lyne River and Vancouver Point. Their neighbours were the Miriwung on their east and southeastern flank, the Arnga , south and southwest, and the Yeidji directly west of their northern boundary. The Wirngir, like other peoples in

100-453: 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. The prevailing criticism of Tindale's influential overview of Australian tribes stresses the dangers in his guiding premise that there is an overlap between the language spoken by a group, and its tribal domains. In short, Tindale thought that speakers of

150-788: A doctorate by the Australian National University in 1980. 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 named a public gallery in his honour. 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

200-417: 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. In evaluating claims, there is, Burke argues,

250-443: 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". The Adelaide Board for Anthropological Research began a programme for filming Aboriginal life in 1926, and

300-488: 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

350-545: 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

400-454: A tendency to exaggerate the value of the earliest ethnographic reports of anthropologists like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, A. P. Elkin , Tindale and others, and privilege it over more recent scholarship, although the accuracy of many of these "classic" texts and papers has, over time, often come to be viewed sceptically by modern anthropologists. Specifically, Burke noted that in his magnum opus , Tindale had recognised and mapped in

450-552: 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

500-580: Is a community located on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory , Australia . The main spoken languages are Anindilyakwa , an Australian Aboriginal language , and English . Established as a Mission for the Church Mission Society , it is one of the three main indigenous settlements on the Groote Eylandt archipelago alongside Milyakburra and Umbakumba . According to the 2016 Census,

550-540: Is a key research tool for Australian Aboriginal people to discover evidence of their family lineage and connection with community. 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

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600-438: 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). Tindale

650-485: 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

700-517: Is suspect, since there is evidence he disregarded the in situ observations of reliable earlier ethnographers in favour of material he later gathered from informants among the remnants in places like Palm Island . Margaret Sharpe has found problems with Tindale's mapping in South East Queensland , since he generally located other groups where Sharpe puts the Yugambeh people . When Tindale

750-641: 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,

800-737: The Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Trust Fund on 28 August 1969, where the mining company would pay the royalty money. The population of Angurugu increased to 525 by 1971. Groote Eylandt became Aboriginal Freehold Land in 1976. In 2008, Angurugu became part of the East Arnhem Shire , and the Council took over local government. In 2015, a riot broke out between two rival clans in Angurugu, involving spears and machetes. Two people were speared and later died. Six people were later tried for

850-633: 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

900-557: 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 Mission , Mornington Island , Palm Island , Woodenbong , Woorabinda and Yarrabah . Tindale's genealogical collection

950-434: 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. David Horton later used Tindale's map as

1000-824: The Australian ghost moths. 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

1050-641: The Indigenous residents about the gruelling work, the state of the dormitories, the punishments meted out for infractions and the poor quality of clothing and bedding. Complaints were raised regarding the alarming cases of leprosy. A report by the Chief Medical Officer in 1934 stated that half of the adult population on the Mission had or previously had leprosy. It ceased to be a 'half-caste' mission in 1934. The CMS decided to turn their missionary activities towards

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1100-458: 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

1150-537: The Mission was 278. By 1956, the total number had grown to 400. In 1803, Matthew Flinders had recorded the presence of minerals on the island. Geological mapping in 1960 indicated the occurrence of manganese deposits on Groote Eylandt. The Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) obtained prospecting rights in 1963 and commenced and mining operations. The 200 square miles that the CMS had leased contained 14 main deposits. The CMS took out an authority to prospect and mine on

1200-587: The area, were deeply affected by the Forrest River massacre , which accounted for the disarray of their social organizations, according to the anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry when she visited with the Lyne River peoples to study them in the mid-1930s. Source: Tindale 1974 , p. 261 Norman Tindale Norman Barnett Tindale AO (12 October 1900 – 19 November 1993) was an Australian anthropologist , archaeologist , entomologist and ethnologist . He

1250-494: The authority of early ethnographers for the "extinction" of tribes and for their putative territorial boundaries weighs more heavily than modern anthropological studies of their descendants. If, for example, there are no "Jadira", but their ostensible land was mapped by Tindale, the actual tribes in that area face immense difficulties in proving their links to what is conventionally accepted to be "Jadira" territory. Ray Wood argues that Tindale's mapping of Cape York Peninsula tribes

1300-505: 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

1350-618: The community had a population of 855, a decrease from 882 in 2006. Reverend Hubert Ernest de Mey Warren of the Church Mission Society (CMS), the Superintendent of the Roper River Mission , was keen to expand his operations northwards to Groote Eylandt . From 1916, he led several expeditions to the island with the purpose of establishing a new settlement to relocate the Indigenous children of mixed-race descent . The Roper Mission on

1400-593: 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

1450-530: 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

1500-502: 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. Tindale's first ethnographic expedition took place over 1921–1922. His principal aim was to gather entomological specimens for the South Australian Museum,

1550-448: 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

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1600-548: The land and negotiated a treaty with BHP for mining rights with royalties at the rate of $ 10,000 per annum for any production up to 100,000 tons, and a rate of 1¼% of the value of manganese ore shipped per annum more than 100,000 tons. In 1964, the Groote Eylandt Mining Company was established and given a lease over the island for royalty payments to the Church Missionary Society. The CMS established

1650-486: The land of a Djukan people , despite the fact that it was absent from the map of the area prepared by Ernest Wurms . Tindale simply drew on Elkin's authority to do so. Again, Tindale conjured up, or made a separate entry for, a tribe, the Jadira , on the basis of very scant evidence, but there is almost no independent testimony that would allow the inference. Inaccuracies of this type compromise modern native title claims, since

1700-521: The last major eugenic research project to be undertaken in Australia". 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 ". With Harold Arthur Lindsay : Angurugu, Northern Territory Angurugu

1750-519: The local Warnindhilyagwa people . In 1940, a cyclone destroyed many of the older buildings at the Mission, including the boys' dormitory and severely damaged the new girls' quarters. CMS decided to move the Mission to the new site along Angurugu River. The Church Mission Society established the Angurugu Mission in 1943 on the southern bank of the Angurugu River. By 1947, the population of

1800-542: The mainland had become unviable and overcrowded. Granting the CMS request, the Secretary of the Department of Home and Territories declared the whole of Groote Eylandt an Aboriginal Reserve in 1921 and gave the CMS a 21-year lease on a large portion of the island. The government granted them 200 square miles (51,800 hectares) of land on the western side of the island for the construction of a Mission. The Groote Eylandt Mission

1850-481: The population of Angurugu and its surrounds in 2016 was approximately 855. The median age of people in Angurugu is 25 years. The most common ancestries in Angurugu were Australian Aboriginal 83.1%, Australian 3.1%, English 0.8%, Scottish 0.6% and Irish 0.3%. The traditional owners of Groote Eylandt, the Warnindhilyagwa people , have 14 clan groups, which make up the two moieties on Groote Eylandt. The clans maintain their traditions and have strong ties with

1900-631: The same language constituted a unified territorial group identity. It has been argued that Tindale's early familiarity with Japanese affected his hearing and transliteration of words in a number of Aboriginal languages, such as Ngarrindjeri . Japanese is written syllabically reflecting its phonetic consonant+vowel structure, and in writing down words like tloperi (ibis), throkeri (seagull) and pargi (wallaby) he perceived and transcribed them as toloperi , torokeri and paragi respectively. Aboriginal Legal Aid lawyer and land council lawyer Paul Burke, first in his book Law's Anthropology, and in

1950-518: 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

2000-555: 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

2050-484: 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

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2100-412: 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

2150-474: The violence, including one charged for murder. The local Anindilyakwa people called the location chosen for the Mission along the Angurugu River "Mungwardinamanja". However, as it was difficult for the European missionaries to pronounce, the local Anindilyakwa men guiding them chose the name of the Angurugu River mouth "Angurrkwa", which was later Anglicised to Angurugu. According to the 2016 Australian Census ,

2200-740: 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

2250-573: Was established in 1921 along Emerald River, 13km south of Angurugu; this is sometimes known as the Emerald River Mission. However, it soon became apparent that the location was unsuitable for its inhabitants. The settlement had to be rebuilt numerous times due to flooding and cyclones. In 1924, the Roper River Mission transferred 35 children to the Groote Eylandt. That number had dropped substantially by 1933. There were complaints from

2300-631: 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. 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. Tindale

2350-525: 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

2400-469: 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

2450-411: 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. Tindale made

2500-665: 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". A 2007 article looking at Tindale and Birdsell's 1939 expedition to Cape Barren Island reserve argues that this "was

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