Bindibu expedition

The Bindibu expedition was a series of three field trips mounted by anthropologist Donald Thomson to meet with and learn from Pintupi Indigenous Australians between 1957 and 1965.

Many desert explorers had captured Aborigines and used force and brutality to gain this vital knowledge – see for example, the history of the Canning Stock Route.

Thomson writes: Just before we left, the old men recited to me the names of more than fifty waters – wells, rockholes and claypans ... this, in an area that the early explorers believed to be almost waterless, and where all but a few were, in 1957, still unknown to the white man.

I realized that here was the most important discovery of the expedition – that what Tjappanongo and the old men had shown me was really a map, highly conventionalized, like the works on a message or "letter" stick of the Aborigines, of the waters of the vast terrain over which the Bindibu hunted.

As well as writing in scholarly, anthropological journals, Thomson often filed articles back to many mainstream publications, such as The Australian Women's Weekly, about his findings in the Outback with the world's oldest surviving culture.