Tommy Windich ( – ) was an Indigenous Australian member of a number of exploring expeditions in Western Australia in the 1860s and 1870s. Tommy Windich (or Windiitj) was born around 1840 near Mount Stirling in Western Australia. Little is known of his youth, but his skills in tracking and knowledge of a number of Aboriginal languages suggest a traditional upbringing, whereas his skills in horseriding and marksmanship indicate extensive contact with colonial culture. By the early 1860s, Windich was working as a "native assistant" in the police force at York, where his main tasks were to assist in the tracking of escaped convicts, Aborigines who were wanted by the authorities, and escaped horses. In 1863, he joined the first aboriginal assistant policeman Cowits to accompany Henry Maxwell Lefroy on his expedition east of York to the interior. In 1865 he tracked and helped to recapture a prison escapee named Joseph Johns, who would later become the notorious bushranger Moondyne Joe. Early in 1866 he helped to capture three Aborigines who had murdered a pastoralist, one of whom fought against his arrest, spearing Windich in the arm. This expedition appears to have made Windich's name as a superb tracker and a reliable and useful member of any travelling party, for he was afterwards in constant demand. Windich and Cowits joined Constable Edwards in the police expedition east in May 1866 which discovered petroleum. Sometime in 1866 Windich was stationed to Beverley, where he continued his usual work as a native assistant, but was also sent on a number of exploring expeditions. Windich's next exploratory expedition (also with Cowits) was the third expedition of the explorer Charles Hunt. The objective was to explore the area east of the Hampton Plains but an unseasonal drought caused a great shortage of water and feed for the horses, and they were forced to abandon their plans and return to York. In 1869, Windich was a member of John Forrest's first expedition, which searched without success for clues to the fate of the long-lost explorer Ludwig Leichhardt in the desert west of the site of the present-day town of Leonora. The following year, he was a member of Forrest's second expedition, which surveyed Edward John Eyre's route between the colonies of Western Australia and South Australia along the coast of the Great Australian Bight. In 1871, Windich was part of another attempt to explore the