The Tintookies, from an Aboriginal word meaning 'little people who come from the sandhills', was an elaborate marionette musical first staged by creator Peter Scriven at the Elizabethan Theatre in Sydney in 1956.

The board was chaired by Sir Howard Beale, president of the Arts Council, and included Dr H.C. Coombs, Dorothy Helmrich and Scriven, who was also artistic director.

Apart from commissioning and presenting original Australian puppet works, the Marionette Theatre of Australia was to establish a training school, encourage the development of other groups, and import overseas companies.

[4] The Marionette Theatre of Australia produced innovative large-scale puppet shows with an overtly Australian content for children for more than 20 years, including the landmark productions Little Fella Bindi (1958) and Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (1960).

He commissioned local puppeteers to make the marionettes for The Tintookie Man, a small-scale show that he presented on an independent tour of Australian schools in 1976-7.

He was survived by many of his Tintookie marionettes, which now live in the archives of the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, and his brother, philosopher and polymath Michael Scriven.

Scriven's enthusiasm and expertise had legitimised Australian puppetry, transforming it from a children's party distraction into a major performing art form that attracted wide audiences and government funding.Funding for puppetry in Australia no longer attracts the level it once did from state and federal sources when Scriven headed the defunct Marionette Theatre of Australia.