Early life , Unaipon's birthplace|alt=Black and white photograph of a scattering of small white cottages|upright=1.5 David Unaipon was born on 28 September 1872 at the
Point McLeay Mission in
South Australia. He was a member of the
Ngarrindjeri people, an Aboriginal nation made up of eighteen tribes from the lower
Murray River region. By the time of his birth, the Ngarrindjeri population had been decimated by disease and many had been displaced from their land. Of the estimated 8000 Ngarrindjeri who had been living in South Australia in 1834, just 2000 remained in 1860. The Point McLeay Mission had been established in 1860 by the Aborigines' Friends Association (AFA), an interdenominational Christian missionary group, with the goal of converting the surviving Ngarrindjeri to Christianity and training them for domestic labour. Unaipon was the son of
James Ngunaitponi and his wife Nymbulda, the daughter of the senior man of the
Karatindjeri clan. James Ngunaitponi had arrived at the Point McLeay Mission in 1864 and was the first Aboriginal man at the mission to convert to Christianity. He became a
Congregational lay preacher and eventually worked with the mission's superintendent to produce books on the Ngarrindjeri's culture and language. David was the fourth of his parents' nine children. From a young age, David Unaipon was regarded as an intelligent child with strong academic potential, particularly due to his status as the son of the mission's first Aboriginal convert to Christianity. At the age of seven he began attending the mission school, and at thirteen he was sent to
Adelaide to work as a servant for the secretary of the AFA, the farmer and winemaker
Charles Burney Young. Young encouraged Unaipon's interest in music, science, and philosophy, while Young's wife taught him to play the piano. Unaipon returned to the mission in 1890, where he continued to read widely, learned Latin and Greek, and trained as a
bootmaker. He also pursued his interest in music and was eventually selected as the mission's
church organist. Unaipon began working for a bootmaker in Adelaide in the late 1890s, and then returned to the mission to begin working as a
bookkeeper at the mission store. He married Katherine Carter (), a
Tangani woman who was employed as a servant, on 4 January 1902; they had one son named Talmage de Witt. According to Unaipon's later writing, around this time he became restless at the lack of opportunities available to him on the mission and developed a fascination with
perpetual motion after hearing a lecture from a visiting scientist.
Career Unaipon began to work as an inventor, preacher, and public speaker. In 1909 he accompanied the mission's
Glee Club on a tour of Adelaide, where he spoke to audiences about Indigenous knowledge of astronomy and botany, as well as about his people's traditions and folklore. He also began to publicly predict scientific advances, leading him to be labelled in the press as "Australia's Leonardo" and a "black genius". In 1909, he registered a patent for a new
sheep shearing mechanism, and in 1914 he predicted that an aeroplane could be developed based on the same aerodynamic principles as a
boomerang. From 1913 Unaipon was employed by the AFA as a subscription collector, which allowed him to travel the country and develop connections with prominent settlers. The relationships that he developed with influential white Australians through the AFA allowed him to retain effective freedom of movement, which was uncommon for Aboriginal people at the time. He travelled across southern Australia throughout the 1920s to speak at churches and schools about Aboriginal traditions and about the conditions of his people. Unaipon published his first piece of writing in August 1924: an article in the
Daily Telegraph titled "Aboriginals: Their Traditions and Customs. Where did they come from?". That year he was the subject of a portrait by
Benjamin Edwin Minns, where he was described as a "Scientist Lecturer". He spent much of his time studying at the
South Australian Museum, where he read widely about anthropology, the
classics and the ancient world. The museum's committee approved a motion to hire him as an attendant in 1925, but funding was never secured and he was never appointed to the position. The following year, while earning his living as a freelance writer, he returned to the Point McLeay Mission to care for his mother. While he was there, he was arrested and fined £1 for
vagrancy after the superintendent determined that he was not making adequate efforts to seek employment. Unaipon continued to publish articles and poetry in newspapers and magazines over the following decades, many of which he drew from stories and legends that he had collected from Aboriginal people across Australia. In 1925 he sold 29 of his articles, which included both legends and essays on Aboriginal
ethnography, to
Angus and Robertson for £167 5s (). He also published booklets of Aboriginal folklore, including
Hungarrda in 1927 and
Kinie Ger—The Native Cat in 1928, with support from the AFA. He travelled across Australia to deliver sermons and lectures, funding his travels through the sale of these pamphlets of his writing. In 1929 he published
Native Legends, a 15-page booklet of Aboriginal stories. In 1938 it was reported that Unaipon had sold 20,000–25,000 copies of his pamphlets over the preceding five years. Unaipon was regarded as an Aboriginal spokesperson by settler authorities and was frequently invited to address government inquiries as the sole representative of the Aboriginal population. After a proposal for the establishment of a "Black State" in central and northern Australia was introduced to parliament in 1925, Unaipon became an advocate for the proposal and was discussed as its potential first president. In 1926 he addressed a
royal commission into the treatment of Aboriginal Australians, and in 1928 he assisted
John William Bleakley, the Queensland
Chief Protector of Aborigines, in conducting an inquiry into the treatment of Aboriginal people in the
Northern Territory. By the late 1920s, Unaipon was regarded as among the most prominent Aboriginal people in the country. He supported policies of
assimilation and urged the federal government to take on a more active role in Aboriginal affairs. Unaipon was often presented as an example of the success of assimilation policies, and himself said that his success demonstrated what Aboriginal people could achieve if they were raised in a Christian environment from a young age. Unaipon's influence declined in the 1930s amidst the emergence of a more progressive and reformist Aboriginal rights movement. The
Aborigines Progressive Association, founded by
William Ferguson and
Jack Patten in 1934, staged a protest in 1938 that they termed the "
Day of Mourning". Unaipon boycotted the event and was critical of their activism, writing in a letter released by the
Department of the Interior that he "[deplored] the emotional tone of the Day of Mourning as much as the political motives behind it". He later wrote that he saw no means for Aboriginal advancement apart from "co-operation between the white and black races". Unaipon was a strong advocate for missionary efforts; he wrote that the best hope for Aboriginal Australians laid in "properly-conducted missionary enterprise" that would "[give] them the inner power to reconstruct their lives which have become shattered by contact with white civilisation".
Later life and death Unaipon continued writing until 1959, publishing a short autobiographical pamphlet titled
My Life Story in 1951 and another titled
Leaves of Memory in 1953. He also wrote a number of poems during the 1950s. In 1953 Unaipon was awarded a
Coronation Medal. He continued working as a travelling preacher into his eighties, before retiring to
Point McLeay to continue his lifelong research into perpetual motion and to work on his inventions. He died at
Tailem Bend on 7 February 1967. ==Writing==