The First Published Aboriginal Author, Uncredited for Seventy Years

David Unaipon was born in 1872 at the Point McLeay mission on Ngarrindjeri country in South Australia, the son of James Unaipon, the first Ngarrindjeri man in the district to become a Christian and later a preacher himself. He read widely and early, worked at various times as a bookkeeper and a boot maker, preached for the Aborigines' Friends' Association for decades across southern Australia, and pursued mechanics with a persistence that produced provisional patents on nineteen inventions, among them an improved shearing handpiece, none of which he could afford to carry through to a full patent.

In the 1920s the University of Adelaide commissioned him to collect Aboriginal narratives in South Australia, and he produced a manuscript of them. It was published in 1930 as Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals under the name of W. Ramsay Smith, who had edited it, with no acknowledgement of Unaipon at all, and it was read for seventy years as a white doctor's collection. It was reissued in 2001 by Melbourne University Press under Unaipon's own name and his own title, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker with the participation of Unaipon's descendants, which established him as the first published Aboriginal Australian author. He has appeared on the Australian fifty dollar note since 1995, with the Raukkan church behind him and a passage of his own writing reproduced in microprint.