Person

Aiston, George (Poddy) (1879 - 1943)

Born: 11 October 1879
Burnside, South Australia, Australia
Died: 25 September 1943
Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation: Ethnographer and Policeman

Summary

George 'Poddy' Aiston worked as a policeman in South Australia between 1901 and 1923. Through his work he made contact with Aboriginal locals and developed a keen interest in their culture. From 1912-1923 he was based at Birdsville Track and studied the customs, beliefs and technology of surrounding peoples, becoming an authority on the Wangkangurru of eastern Lake Eyre especially.

Published resources

Book Sections

Jones, Philip, 'Aiston, George (1879-1943), policeman and ethnographer' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 13: 1940 - 1980 A-De, John Ritchie, ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), p. 18. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/aiston-george-poddy-9320. Details

Resources

Wikidata, http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q15130753. Details
'Aiston, George (18791011-19430925)', Trove, National Library of Australia, 2009, https://nla.gov.au/nla.party-1009040. Details

Rebecca Rigby

Created: 25 October 2011, Last modified: 11 April 2016

EOAS ID: biogs/P004900b.htm

This Edition: 2026 February - 1926 Centenaries
Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - Late summer: late January to late March - season of eels
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-kooyang-season-of-eels

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P004900b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260