Norman Tindale

Norman Tindale
Tindale holding a child from Monamona Mission in Queensland, 1938
Born	12 October 1900 Perth, Western Australia
Died	19 November 1993 (1993-11-20) (aged 93) Palo Alto, California
Citizenship	Australian
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	University of Adelaide
Notable awards	Verco Medal John Lewis Medal AO

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

Born 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, and Norman attended the American School in Japan. The family returned to Perth, and in 1917 moved to Adelaide where Tindale took up a position as a library cadet at the Adelaide Public Library. 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 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 is best remembered for his work mapping the various tribal groupings of Indigenous Australians. This interest began with a research trip to Groote Eylandt where an Anindilyakwa man gave Tindale very detailed descriptions of which land was his and which land was not. 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 While Tindale's methodology and his notion of the dialectal tribe have been superseded, this basic premise has been proved correct.