David McKnight (4 March 1935 – 14 May 2006) was a Canadian-British anthropologist and ethnographer who specialized in the anthropology of Australian Aboriginal people, with particular regard to the tribes of the Cape York Peninsula.
[1] He was hired at Edinburgh University as a lecturer in Social Anthropology three years later, and then moved to teach the same topic at The London School of Economics.
In 1977 he earned his doctorate from London University with a thesis on the intricate marriage systems among the Aboriginal Australian peoples on Mornington Island.
[3] Despite his clear-eyed and frank insights into the abuses that were rife in many Indigenous Australian communities from alcohol and other causes, local respect for him was such that Lardil elders asked him to teach Damin to their children.
[2] Long interested in Italy, he settled in Rome on his retirement, and, on the dissolution of his first marriage to Meg Phillips, by whom he had six children, he later married Alessandra Solivetti.