John Tunney was one of the most important early collectors for the Western Australian Museum. After working as a messenger for his local Kojonup Post Office, and on a construction gang erecting the overland telegraph between Albany and Eucla, he joined surveying parties in the south-west of Western Australia (for an English land company) and in the Coolgardie, Norseman and Ravensthorpe districts (for a mining company). At the invitation of the Director of the Museum, Bernard Woodward, Tunney began collecting in 1895 and continued for at least ten years. The Museum's taxidermist, Otto Lipfert, taught Tunney how to preserve specimens. Tunney's collecting ranged from southern Western Australia to the Kimberley district in the northwest, and as far as Arnhem Land, visiting placed determined by Woodward. In the early 1900s Tunney collected moths, butterflies and fleas for members of the Rothschild family at the Tring Museum in the United Kingdom. Many of Tunney's specimens were of species new to science. A number of these were named after him, particularly birds named by Gregory Mathews. Although having no appropriate training, Tunney also collected cultural material which formed the basis of the Museum's anthropological collections. In his later years he was a farmer in Kojonup.
Tunney's date of birth is stated as 11 October 1870 on his birth certificate: a number of publications, including newspaper obituaries, put the date as 1871.