The legacy of Norman B. Tindale at Princess Charlotte Bay in 1927: Lamalama engagement with museum collections

The cultural record of the Lamalama people of far north Queensland is well-represented in the Norman B. Tindale Collection held at the South Australian Museum (SAM). This record derives from the Expedition to Princess Charlotte Bay in 1926–27, a collecting trip sanctioned by the SAM’s Board of Governors to expand ‘the hitherto meagre Museum collections’ from southern Cape York Peninsula. Norman Tindale would establish his reputation as the Museum’s ethnographer on this trip, and despite spending only a few days at Port Stewart, he and expedition leader Herbert Hale recognised Aboriginal people camped in the bed of the Stewart River as having diverse clan-estate, language and genealogical relationships. A vast quantity of artefacts was collected and many still images and a small amount of moving image were taken. The latter collections, together with their written accounts and documentation, provide compelling testimony of the lives of those people who survived the violence and displacement of the nineteenth century colonial frontier in north Queensland. Over recent decades, the Lamalama have worked closely with the authors to access their cultural patrimony in museum collections, including making two trips to the SAM (1997 and 2010). The aims of this paper, therefore, are to demonstrate the importance of engaging Indigenous people in a dialogue about their cultural patrimony in museums such as may be found in the Norman B. Tindale Collection, consider Lamalama responses to the record created by Tindale and Hale and investigate the nature of Tindale’s archive and its continuing relevance to Lamalama people