His principal aim was to gather entomological specimens for the South Australian Museum, the ethnographic aspect being almost an accidental sideline that developed, as his curiosity was stimulated, into close observation of the indigenous people he encountered from the Cobourg Peninsula to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

[11] Tindale's vast collection, held at the South Australian Museum,[12] is made up of genealogical information about Aboriginal communities throughout Australia, journals, papers, sound and film recordings, drawings, maps, photographs, vocabularies and personal correspondence.

When Japan precipitated war with the United States however, Tindale's knowledge of Japanese, rare in Australia at the time, made him an asset for military intelligence.

Jones states that Tindale's unit's meticulous analysis of the metallurgical debris and serial numbers enabled them to arrive at the companies responsible for producing the components, deduce production figures and infer what crucial alloys the Japan military was beginning to suffer shortfalls in.

[1] Tindale also played a major intelligence role in putting a halt to Japan's balloon bombing assault[a] on the western coast of the United States.

[1]On retirement after 49 years service with the South Australian Museum, Tindale took up a teaching position at the University of Colorado and remained in the United States until his death, aged 93, in Palo Alto, California on 19 November 1993.

[20] This interest began with a research trip to Groote Eylandt where Tindale's helper and interpreter, a Ngandi man, impressed him with the importance of knowing with precision tribal boundaries.

Philip Jones writes: one of Tindale's key tasks was to record the names and sociological details of each of the Aboriginal people participating in the fortnight-long intensive survey.

Over an 11-year period they produced over 10 hours of footage concerning many aspects of Aboriginal life, from material culture to hunting and gathering practices, cooking, love-making, and even ceremonies of circumcision observed during their field expeditions.

[1] A point of departure was a meticulous analysis of the male genitalia of each species, as a guide to more precise classification, and, starting in 1932, over three decades he wrote several papers reordering the Australian ghost moths.

[1] The editor of Tindale's paper on Groote Eylandt in 1925, Edgar Waite,[1] changed his drawn boundaries as dotted lines, obtrusively insisting that Aboriginal people were nomadic, and not place-bound.

When Tindale finally managed to print, unaltered, his own map, he represented the Aboriginal peoples as filling every nook and cranny of what became colonial Australia, avowing their former presence, much to the unease of many cartographers, everywhere.

In doing so he placed a disappearing people back "on the map", much to the later discontent of mining corporations, which fund research that would revise Tindale's approach and restrict Aboriginal territoriality.

[38][39] The prevailing criticism of Tindale's influential overview of Australian tribes stresses the dangers in his guiding premise that there is an overlap between the language spoken by a group, and its tribal domains.

Japanese is written syllabically reflecting its phonetic consonant+vowel structure, and in writing down words like tloperi (ibis), throkeri (seagull) and pargi (wallaby) he perceived and transcribed them as toloperi, torokeri and paragi respectively.

[40] Aboriginal Legal Aid lawyer and land council lawyer Paul Burke, first in his book Law's Anthropology,[41] and in a later essay,[42] argues that Tindale's map of Australian territories had not only achieved "iconic status",[43] but had begun to exercise a deleterious impact on native title judgements made in suits that have been brought to court by Indigenous peoples following the landmark Mabo decision of 1992, and negatively affect their rights to land tenure in a number of cases.

Ray Wood argues that Tindale's mapping of Cape York Peninsula tribes is suspect, since there is evidence he disregarded the in situ observations of reliable earlier ethnographers in favour of material he later gathered from informants among the remnants in places like Palm Island.