Cirrus@Austlit

Anthropologist Norman Barnett Tindale was educated at Tokyo Grammar School and Adelaide University. He held a cadetship for a year at the Adelaide Public Library before being appointed assistant entomologist at the South Australian Museum (1917). He carried out work with the Pitjantjatjara in the 1930s and studied territorial boundaries in the Groote Eylandt and Roper River areas of the Northern Territory. He published over 200 papers on diverse subjects in anthropology and linguistics. During World War II he was an intelligence officer at the Pentagon and then taught at Colorado University from 1965. In 1967 he was awarded DSC (Honoris causa) by the University of Colorado.

With Harold A Lindsay, he wrote three children's books on early migrations to Australia and New Zealand. The first in this series, The Walkabout (1954), won the Book of the Year Award of the Children's Book Council. Tindale also co-authored the non-fiction Aboriginal Australians (1963) for children with H. A. Lindsay (q.v.), and The Australian Aborigines (1971) with Beryl George.