David Unaipon

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.

Unaipon preached Christianity for most of his adult life and wrote down Ngarrindjeri and neighbouring Aboriginal narrative, and he did not present these as competing loyalties. His retellings are recognisably his own: he wrote in an elevated English prose built out of Milton, Bunyan and the King James Bible, and he set Aboriginal narrative in a frame a British readership of the 1920s would recognise as literature.

Later readers have taken that two ways. One reading treats the Christian and literary framing as a distortion imposed on the material, and prefers narratives recorded in language and closer to performance. The other treats it as the point: a Ngarrindjeri man in the 1920s, in a country that would not let him hold a full patent or vote on the ordinary terms, chose the most prestigious available register in order to argue that Aboriginal narrative belonged in it, and made that argument in the writing rather than in a preface. This atlas homes him under Christianity, because that is the tradition he professed and preached and it would be wrong to assign him another. His standing in the Aboriginal material is recorded by an explicit link instead, and it is real and of a different kind: he is the first Aboriginal Australian to have written the tradition down for publication, and the man whose authorship of that record was taken from him and later returned. He died in February 1967, months before the referendum that changed how the Constitution counted Aboriginal people.