David Unaipon

David Unaipon was a Ngarrindjeri man of South Australia — inventor, writer, preacher, and scholar — born in 1872 at the Point McLeay mission on the lower Murray. He became one of the most remarkable Aboriginal Australians of his age, and is honored today on his nation’s fifty-dollar note.

A tireless inventor, he registered some ten patents between 1909 and 1944, among them an improved shearing handpiece that turned rotary motion into a straight stroke; he sketched, decades early, ideas toward flight. Few of his designs were ever built, and the patents lapsed for want of means.

He was the first Aboriginal author to be published, gathering the legends of his and other peoples into books such as Native Legends — though a white anthropologist first printed much of his work under his own name, and Unaipon’s authorship was only fully restored long after his death.

He preached and lectured across Australia and argued for the rights of his people until his death in 1967. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.