Tracker Tilmouth
Do not sweat the small stuff, and do not chop wood for practice. On Croker, all the punishment we had was to go and chop wood, wood that was already chopped.
I was put in Essington House, a home for boys at Myilly Point in Darwin so I could go to high school, and because the mission had no other place to put me. I was there for about two years and then I went to Carpentaria College in Darwin for about a year and a half. After that I worked around, and I was in and out of what they called foster homes.
I was famous for being taken to school in Darwin in a paddy wagon and all this other stuff. The reason I was a mongrel was I was way out in front of everybody. We pushed the police van with the policeman in it. We could have walked away and left him, he was too fat to run. We were silly pushing a police van to start it. Anyway, that is another story for another time.
I kept going to all the different foster homes and different homes and that, and then Geraldine and Alfie Liddle decided to look after me, and I went down to Central Australia. I was in a bit of trouble, just misbehaving more than anything else. Just breaking and entering, kid stuff. Nothing spectacular. Alfie decided to take me on a trip to Angas Downs. I was living with him in a foster home. Alfie ran a foster home, him and Geraldine Liddle. So they took me down to Angas Downs and I met old Arthur and everybody else. Everyone was happy that I was out there, including the judge and everybody else. So I stayed out there. He got permission for me to stay at Angas Downs to work but I was not allowed in the township because I was in some trouble in those days. I went to Angas Downs for about four or five years, whatever it was, and I was not allowed into town. Three years I stayed out bush. I did not go into town, not even for Christmas.
The relationship originally with Johnny and Vincent and everybody else was pretty hairy for me because I was a stranger. They knew each other well and except for Timmy, they took a lot of pleasure in Vincent giving me a touch up every now and then, in the yards, or kicking me, or whatever.6 He was just like any other young bloke out of Alice Springs. He did not know which way he was going, and he was finding himself like everybody else was I suppose. Nothing spectacular or anything else. And that was alright, you grow up tough, big deal. So I had a fairly hectic first couple of years there. To escape that, Bess used to take me out hunting with her. I was Bess’ driver and I’d go hunting and we would dig witchettys and goannas and everything else and talk language.
I was about seventeen. I nearly tried to commit suicide, I was that messed up because I did not know whether I was accepted in with the Liddles, or what I was doing there. I had spent all my life in Arnhem Land. The first couple of years were fairly full-on for me, and Bess allowed me to escape. Bess was, I think, concerned about how messed up I was as a kid. I was totally messed up. So, for a bit of entertainment they [the other boys] used to have Vinnie go the knuckle on me every now and then. He was one year older than me and bigger, stronger. I do not know what it was, I did not think I was a threat to anyone, but anyway. I could do things good because I always learnt off Snowy Lander, as Snowy Lander’s offsider. I did everything Snowy did, and Snowy was very good at what he did. So it was a hectic first couple of years. And you can do that, you can grow up anywhere. You have got to fight your way through, and you have got to be accepted for who you are. I think I did that quite well because I could ride a horse, I could do just as good as anybody else in anything. Snowy Lander made sure I learnt all that.
Snowy Lander at the end of the day ended up looking after me more than anybody else. And so I treat him as a big brother. When I got into trouble, old Bess would take me away and we would go getting mingkulpa or pituri [bush tobacco] up in Kings Canyon and up at Wallace Rockhole. There was no one out there, there were no roads, no anything and me and old Bess and old Maggie Armstrong, we used to drive around in this poxy old Land Rover doing all this sort of stuff. I was picking pituri, I knew how to mix pituri, around all the boxwood swamps to get the bark, how to cook the bark to mix with the pituri, because you had to have certain bark otherwise the pituri is poisonous to you, and you had to do it properly.
The old girl made sure you did it properly because she did not want to kill her mob. So we did all that and old Bess taught me language. We were not allowed to talk English. She taught Timmy Lander language as well. So we ended up like that, doing that part of Angas Downs.
Tracker Tilmouth
Yes, Lois spoiled me, and Arthur Liddle and Bess spoiled me, [and their son] Johnny Liddle was very upset. You see, old Arthur and my old man grew up together in the Bungalow [government institution for Aboriginal children removed from their parents]. He was in the Bungalow with my old man, and when they were twelve old Harry Tilmouth [Tracker’s grandfather] took them out and employed them at Alcoota and Mount Riddock.
There is a post at New Bore in the old stockyard there, I think it is burnt now, but Tommy Webb showed me when I was at Utopia and my old man’s and Arthur Liddle’s initials are carved in the post. They did it when they were twelve and thirteen years old. So when old Arthur Liddle saw me he was really overcome because my old man was a good mate of his. He treated me better than he treated his sons. Old Bess absolutely loved me. I would not have to work. All I had to do was drive around the countryside digging tjala [honey ant] and picking pituri.
A hard life making damper and scones. Cups of tea. They would be all out working and I would be sitting under the tree eating scones. So you have got this picture of scones all through my life. Old Bess, they treated me really well. He was a good sounding board, old Arthur. You could talk to him and he and I would go for drives. I would do all the bore runs with him as his offsider, go around and check all the bores.
I camped by myself normally. I was outside. Me and Snowy would pull our beds out in the moonlight at night-time. I kept to myself to a certain extent. I got to be really good mates with Johnny Liddle. He was a good bloke Johnny. But, the rest, I sort of kept closer to Snowy Lander more than anybody else.
Anyway, Old Arthur was a good bloke, he meant well. A thorough gentleman, he was a thorough gentleman to everybody. That was the reason he got done over, he was just too nice a bloke. I think he favoured his older son Lawrie more than he favoured Johnny. Firstborn and all that I suppose. Johnny was a bit of a ratbag. Johnny was the third child but he suffered the second-child syndrome. Complete mongrel Johnny Liddle, complete mongrel. He would do anything for you, Liddle would do anything for you but madness goes with it.
John Liddle
Uncle Alf was the one that brought him down from Darwin, Uncle Alf Liddle. He was doing the same sort of thing up in Darwin where he was looking after kids because he got sent to, I forget which island it was, Croker Island or one of those. He was one of the original people that got sent from Alice Springs. And he never came back to Alice Springs to live, he stayed in Darwin. So somehow or other, I do not know how, Uncle Alf got to know Tracker and he was living with him. Uncle Alf and his family used to come down every Christmas for holidays so we were sort of expecting them: it was Christmas soon; all the Darwin mob will be down soon and we can mix with our cousins and all that.
They brought this bloody cheeky, skinny little mongrel of a kid and it was Tracker. I think we all wanted to kill him straight away. We were out mustering and I think my dad said to his brother Alf, What are you going to do with this young bloke? and Alf said, Well! I might leave him here and you mob can have him. My old man said, Oh! If he wants to stay he can stay. So he went and asked him and Tracker said, Yeah! I’ll stay. He just sort of fitted in with us.
I think he enjoyed it and he was the centre of attention and that sort of stuff, so he just stayed with us for years. We could not get rid of the bastard. I think my mum and dad actually treated him more like their family than any of their own family to tell you the truth, because he was such a skinny little bugger, and I think they felt like he could not find out who his family was. He was a little bastard of a kid. One of those kids that annoyed everyone and got in everyone’s way.
Everyone wanted to kill him, but he was like Dennis the Menace. He was a kid who was always in your face, doing this and doing that, asking questions, that sort of stuff. My dad had a weird sense of humour too so they got on really well. My mum used to mother him more than anyone else, so he got special treatment, even though he says that she would tap him on the shoulder with a stick and say, You behave yourself. Which she used to do, but he got away with everything so he was pretty spoilt by my mum.
He worked the crowd, you know. So he knew how, he knew that from that age, and I reckon even when he was twelve or thirteen or something like that. Skinny little bugger. Then he just stayed with us and he blended in with everyone and pretty soon he was king of the world sort of thing.
Lawrie Liddle
Well! It goes back to our fathers actually, who were both a part of the Bungalow and taken away from their parents. Tracker’s Dad and my Dad [Arthur Liddle] were at the Bungalow at the same time. And of course from the Bungalow they went to Jay Creek up until their school days finished, and both of them were put back into the workforce, which was the requirement in those days, where you had to be employed, sort of like an apprenticeship.
I think Tracker’s father went back to Alcoota and my dad went out to Undoolya. So the two fathers knew one another well and later on when I was a little kid, they lived in The Gap [on the south side of Alice Springs] and we did too, and we knew one another from a long way back. Tracker was a long way younger than I am but I knew him as a kid, and then he was taken away as part of the Stolen Generation, and Tracker and his two brothers were sent up north to one of the islands, Croker Island.
He was away until he was a young teenager, probably twelve or thirteen, and in those days we were living and working on a property called Angas Downs. So Tracker was brought to us by a welfare officer to try and find him a job to be away from town because Tracker being what he was, there was less temptation in the scrub to be naughty.
Naughty! Gosh. He was sort of like another kind. When he turned up he would have been about twelve or thirteen or a bit older, with a welfare officer who asked my old man whether there would be a possie [position] out there for him. Tracker gets out of this old Land Rover and he would have weighed about six stone, no hair, pair of baggy shorts, no shoes, no hat and a runny nose. Took one look at him, and you know you were meant to be fairly fit to work on a station, and we said we did not think he can do the job. So the welfare officer took him down to Curtin Springs which was next door about thirty-five to forty mile away.
There was no possie there for him either, so the welfare officer took him over to Tempe Downs which was another neighbouring place to us, and there was no work, there was nothing there. The welfare officer took him around a bit to Mount Ebenezer and still nothing. So the very next day the welfare officer turns up again with Tracker, We can’t find a place. Anyway, my mum [Bessie Liddle] was not too far away listening to the conversation and it was all, I don’t know, you might have to try us again next year. Mum piped up and says, Stop here, and so that was how he got to be with us.
Tim (Snowy) Lander
Back in the 60s and 70s of course life was a lot simpler than it is now and the Liddles were just good family people, just had family values. Money was not everything. I mean they lived on Angas Downs all their lives and just scratched a living out of the drought, and the good times, and the bad times. They sort of had no value of money, but just the value of family I think. With Old Arthur, us boys could never do any wrong. If we went into town and got into trouble he would stick up for us like he was our father. It was pretty innocent in them days. We did not really get in trouble, we just did what normal boys do, go drinking and stuff like that when we was kids, but we never did it in front of him I can tell you.
He would not approve and we respected him. Lawrie would not even smoke cigarettes until he was twenty-five in front of his father, and we all smoked cigarettes when we were fourteen or fifteen. He was just a really respectful old gentleman, old Arthur, and he never lost his temper with us kids or anything. He taught us the values of being a family. And also at that time at Angas Downs, there were probably about fifty or sixty Aboriginal people camped there just in humpies and that, before the community started up, and that was part of Angas Downs life too then.
We were fencing and yard-building, and the stock work was all horse in those days. We used to break in our own horses, the brumbies, I suppose they called them brumbies, but they were just horses that had gone wild on the place. We all had our own horses that we broke in ourselves. Sometimes we went and caught them. We used to wheel them in with an old Land Rover if we could not catch them. But it was all good fun. A few tourists used to come through and we would intermingle with them sometimes. We had a little bit of a shop at Angas Downs, plus Aboriginal people were just getting into that art situation then, and people used to come in looking to buy carvings, not so much paintings but mainly the carvings in those days, with the burn marks on them, clap-sticks, lizards and stuff like that. We met a few people from other parts of the country and even other parts of the world, and Bruce just seemed to get on with everyone. He was one of the characters at Angas Downs and he always had a smile on his face. Sometimes you could not shut him up. We used to grab him by the left ear and twist it like a volume knob on the radio and go, Click, there Bruce, stop talking.
He used to take it all in his stride though. It would not shut him up for long. On top of that, even though he left school when he was pretty young he was a really smart bloke, no doubt about that. He was a really intelligent kid. The things that we had been doing for a few years he would pick it up in no time. Also, getting on with people – and that too, because he did not have that shyness about him like a lot of kids.
We all grew up together as brothers. We used to have our little tiffs and that but nothing serious. We used to tell him to shut up when he talked too much and all that. He had come straight off Croker Island and talked about bloody mud crabs and fishing boats and stuff when he came there. He did not take long to learn our ways. But he fitted in no worries.
We used to doll ourselves up to the nines in clothes. That was one of our things. Spend all our money on clothes so we could go to the late night at the Stewart Arms or somewhere in Alice Springs. That was the local disco in those days, the only one, and that was where all the girls used to congregate. I don’t think it was only Bruce, but I know he used to fall in love every time he’d go to town with a different girl, before he grew up of course, when we were all teenagers.
He bought a car. I do not know how he got that. He bought a car, a Valiant ute and it was a good car, better than any of the cars we ever had, and he lent it to his brother one night, that was Patrick, and I think he run into a tree or something. That sort of put the mockers on it for Bruce. He was really down in the dumps about it, so he didn’t worry about driving that car again. A couple of months after that we said, What are you doing with the car, Bruce? He just gave it to me and Lawrie to use. We fixed it up, we put a mudguard and bonnet on it, we did it ourselves and brought it out to Angas Downs. He never ever asked for it back or anything.
He used to be a bit frightened at night. I think he was there on his own once because in the old days we had lots, not lots of guns, but we had a shotgun and a few other guns at the station which you normally have for snakes and that. So he went to bed this night with a shot-gun next to him. We had a few scrawny old chooks at the time and the dingoes must have been bad, and when the dingoes were bad the chooks used to come inside the house in a panic. And he woke up in the middle of the night and this chook was sitting on the end of his bed. It was one of them old beds with the end on it, and the chook was sitting about a metre up above his foot on the end of the bed. He just reached down and got the shotgun and shot it. He thought it was someone standing there. Lucky it was not someone standing there.
When I was at Angas Downs, I also had an uncle there called Johnny Stewart, who was absolutely, totally mad. Anyway, we were building the stockyards at Wallara, fixing them up and putting in the loading ramp and everything else, and across the road was the Wallara pub. Snowy Lander who was also at Angas Downs got on with the waitresses, so we went over there for a couple of beers one night and he stayed and got drunk and came back horrors. We were all laying back in our swags and Snowy comes along and goes in the tucker wagon and pulls out the toilet paper and torch. He struggles out there into the witchetty bushes. You could see him, he did not go too far. He started to choke a brownie. So Johnny Stewart grabbed a long handled shovel, crept up and pinched his shit. Have you ever seen a drunk looking for his turd, while wiping his arse? You shine down to see that you do not step in it and there is nothing there. He looked under his boots. He was looking in his trousers, looking around the bush, shining up in the trees and for days he was absolutely fucked, he could not work out where his turd was. Every time we saw him we just cried. You wonder why I am mad.
John Liddle
I agree that some of his cheekiness came from Croker Island, because the first time I saw him I wanted to punch him in the head, and I think we wanted to punch each other in the head for years afterwards. He was a cheeky little bastard. Well! He always was though. I would not say that Willie or Patrick or even old Roy his father were not built like that, but Tracker had that habit of annoying people. And you wanted to punch him in the head sometimes. What used to give me the shits with him was that he would say something stupid and if I was there he would say, Isn’t that right Liddle? Include me for his sort of backup. I would not know whether to say yes or no because either way, I am in the shit. I’ve got John Liddle here. Oh fuck, do not do that for God’s sake. A bastard, there was no doubt about it.
We did a lot of silly things, him and I. It is a wonder we never got killed, especially in cars. He had this thing, I don’t know what the cause of it was, but he used to sleepwalk. At Angas Downs we put up a big building with a roof right over the top but hardly any walls, then my old man brought out a truckload of bricks, and put all the bricks up, to close in the outside verandahs, all the boys used to be on one side, and everyone else used to camp on the other side. In the middle was the dining room, kitchen and that sort of stuff. The living area I suppose. So Tracker got into this state where he jumped up and wanted to punch things in his sleep. The walls had just been put up so everyone said let’s get behind the walls, new windows and that sort of stuff, but he got up and punched the new line of bricks. Knocked a bit of it down.
I do not know where this came from but it might have been something from his childhood. He never talked about that. But another time when we were out doing this fencing job in Angas Downs all the young blokes, about five or six of us, went out in this truck. It got late in the afternoon and we had our swags, so we said we will just camp on the back of the truck, the big long tray of the truck, the five or six of us. I think he was second from the end of the truck. I was sort of over here, at the front of the truck. I reckoned it would have been about two or three o’clock in the morning and something made me wake up. I looked and I saw Tracker get up and he just looked around like that, then he walked along the edge of the tray of the truck, which is only about that wide. Walked right along the edge and got to the corner, round like that, round like that, right around. I woke one of the other blokes, might have been Vincent, Lawrie, or Tim, I woke them up and said look at this. He just walked right around us like that, right around the edge like a tightrope walker and he got back to his swag, got back in it and started snoring. And the next morning we told him but he did not believe it. We all saw it. The truck was that high off the ground and the part that he walked on would be just that wide on the side of the truck.
It would be hard enough to do that in the daytime, when you are awake. But he just walked right to the corner like that, and just went swoosh, then got back into his swag, and started snoring. Amazing. So that really pointed out to me that he was mad and I have told everyone since. But apart from that when we used to live in Mum’s house around the corner, he smashed windows in his sleep, and punched into us and all this sort of stuff. Because the boy’s room is about half the size of this, and one bed here, and one bed there sort of thing. He would wake up and start punching into you in your sleep. He did not know he was doing it. Or punched the wall. I do not know how Kathy [Tracker’s wife] got on, poor bugger. She would have got a few punches in the head in her sleep.
Tracker Tilmouth
I wanted to hang myself in the engine shed. I was there by myself. I was three months by myself, living by myself. Well! It rained and the place was full of grass and water and everyone went into town and left me there. They just left me there. I looked after the place for three months by myself. I do not know why they had left me – Vinnie [Vincent Forrester] had left and gone into the army but this was before.
I went mad. Then I got a religious experience. Well! I was going to kill myself and I thought, put the rope around my neck. I thought the rope would break. It was only a blue-grey old thing and I would have done myself more damage and probably died a slow and miserable death. And so I got off that, I could not even hang myself. So I sat down and I thought about it all and I did not know where to go. I picked up Psalm 23 in the Bible, because the old preacher Pastor Kaleski [from Areyonga] left a Bible. We never read it, never said anything about it. So, opened it up. It said, I will lay a table for you in the face of your enemies.
I thought, Fuck, that is a pretty heavy saying that is. What do you mean you will lay a table for me in the face of my enemies? Do you want to know how many enemies I have? You do not know where I am going. You do not know who I am. How are you going to lay a table for me?
Then I got a feeling and I just said, It is going to be up. You are going to be different. You are different to a certain extent. And I kept that thought with me all of my life. So when I have problems now I just say, You have done more than lay a table, you have laid a feast for me. I have had the best go at anything ever, and I have had the smoothest run than most people ever, than anyone else I can remember. I have done things that people only dream of doing. It all started when I wanted to commit suicide at Angas Downs.
Yes, I have always got this feeling at the back that I have got someone watching me. Even with the current problems I get, so what? Big deal. Move on. That’s it. This is the way I go out and do things. Shouldn’t you be in bed or shouldn’t you be doing this? No, I am doing that. Are you? Oh! Right. That was the saying in the Psalm that hooked me. There is a similar saying in the Koran. There is a similar saying in the Koran to Psalm 23. The Koran mirrors the Bible. I talked to the imam in Alice Springs. He told me it is the same because I went to Israel and I was confused about what I saw in Israel, the patriarchs. You had Abraham, and you had Sarah, and you had the Christians, and you had the Jews, and you had Islam, all from the same bloke Abraham. You know the people of the book, I saw all that and you try and get the answer.
Getting back to that day when I wanted to hang myself, I then walked down to Three Mile Dam with a .22 rifle and shot two rabbits for my supper. Everything was right. I came back and did not light the generator even though it was wintertime and cold. I did not need lights, so I made a fire outside and cooked them over the fire bucket, made a rabbit stew. A young fella. Sat there all night, looking at the stars, laying back in the swag by myself. Did that for about three months, two months, or whatever it was.
I had a radio. Listened to the Rolling Stones on the record player which ran on batteries. You put the batteries in the oven to heat up to make sure they were charged, and put them in the record player. Heat will charge batteries. I was very good. I never tried to commit suicide again. It was not worth it, but so what? I was not lonely.
Yes, so that was Angas Downs. Happy place for some, lovely place for others. Everyone wants to go back there. I would not mind going back there. But it is not my country. I am the Stolen Generation, I have got no country.
John Liddle
When Tracker first came back here [Alice Springs] none of his Tilmouth family knew who he was, although they knew he existed because he was living with us [at Angas Downs]. Mum and Dad used to look after heaps of kids, like wards of the state and all that sort of stuff, it became sort of fashionable. I do not think they got paid to do it, they just wanted to give the kids a home.
In exchange for a home they had to do work like the rest of us kids. No one had any money to talk about so we just lived the same, shared sheets, bed, clothes and all that sort of stuff. But when Tracker came back to Central Australia it took a while for him. I think the older generation knew who his family was, but he was feeling a bit nervous about going around to see them. I think I actually took him around to meet his father.
I will never forget this, and other people might dispute it, but I remember taking him around there. His old father he used to call him. He gave him this nickname Strawberry for some reason. He was a big old bloke, bit like Tracker’s shape. I will never forget him standing at the stove cooking some meat, like most of them old blokes they like to have a drink and he was standing up, around at Tippy Miller’s mother and father’s place cooking this steak, and I knocked on the door and they said, Come in. I said, We are looking for old Roy Tilmouth. I did not know him properly, but I knew who he was. And I have got this bloke here. Someone said, Who? I think Tippy and those other mob were there and Marilyn and her sister, about five or six people were in the house and they said, Who are you? I said, I’ve got this bloke here, I think he is Roy’s son. Ah! Yeah! Well! He wanted to come around and meet you mob. And the old bloke was standing up there cooking at the stove. He said, Yeah! I think you’re one of mine.
No! No sentimentality, but you know that was how people were brought up, and it was normal behaviour. Now you would look and think, oh shit it was tough. What I always told Tracker was that he was mad, but I tell it to his face. I put that down to where he got his madness from, to that sort of disruption in his life. He got taken away from his family. He did not know who his family were. He knew, but he could have walked past them in the street, and I think at that stage some of his family did not want to know him. I do not know why. I reckon they would dispute that now because they all loved him like the rest of us, but that was the way it was.
I was quite surprised really that a relationship developed between Tracker and his dad. Like I said, we shared everything, cars and clothes and money and all this sort of stuff. We never had much, but he used to always go around and see him and give him a few dollars and have a laugh. He got to know those Tippy Miller mob and they sort of accepted him after a while. They introduced him to this or that one. It just went down the line and they finally worked out where he was in the family. We were driving cars so we would have been sixteen or seventeen. He was a skinny little bastard and I think he was only thirteen, fourteen or fifteen when he came out to Angas Downs.
Tracker Tilmouth
The old man [Roy Tilmouth] was a joker. A big bastard but he was a joker. He could not stop, you could never get a straight answer, he was always laughing and joking. He was a little bit like David Ross’s dad. They grew up in the same time and knew each other well. A lot of men of that generation were like that and had a tough life, really tough, and they were tough men.
My old man was famous for when Nugget Morton and him ran through the big trenches and Nugget Morton always wanted to beat my old man in a footrace, and the old man tripped and fell. Morton beat him to the shovel, only one shovel left and said, Oh! I won, and the old sergeant said, You sure did. He knew what old Roy was about. Roy fell over so he would not have to do any work. And Morton had to pick up the shovel. His famous one is about a pub in Adelaide River during the bombing of Darwin. He was in the bar there and a little short-arsed white bloke was getting smart and said to the old man, Hey! Tally, how about you pick a few of the stars – you know, in the night sky – pick a few stars and bring them down a bit. The old man punched him in the head and said, How about you pick a few of them out of that. Boff! I do not have any other stories about him but old Arthur Liddle had a few stories about him in the old days.
Patrick and William Tilmouth
William: He had the same approach and the same humour as Dad. Dad had that. When I first met Dad, he said, Oh come around here, we were going to play cards, and he had the same tone of voice and all, as Tracker. Tracker had the same tone of voice as him. And I am sitting behind him and he was playing cards and he said, What are you doing boy? I said, What do you mean? He said, What are you doing watching me play cards for? There’s a lot of young fillies out there, he reckoned. And all the girls were in the kitchen cooking for all the card players, and here I was sitting behind Dad watching him play cards. He thought I would be best suited to be out there introducing myself to all the young fillies. He had the same sort of bite in his humour. And they looked alike. Some of the same characteristics that the old man had, Tracker had. We all have them in a way.
We came back [to Alice Springs after leaving Croker Island] in the middle of winter and I had Darwin attire, T-shirt and a pair of jeans and thongs and you do not walk around Alice Springs in the middle of winter with that sort of garb on. But anyway we got there, it was six or seven o’clock at night and we got down the Mall and Richard Day was one of the guys I hitchhiked with and he said, Hey, that’s Terry Tilmouth over there. And sure enough there was Mirrors, we called him Mirrors. He looked in a mirror whenever he could. And so they sung out to him and Terry came over and Richard said, This is Willie, and introduced me to him and I said, Where’s Tracker? He said he was in the Stuart Arms [Hotel], so Terry went and got him. Tracker came out and says, Oh! How ya going bro? So all this, and he was surrounded by girls. He had the blonde hair. Green eyes, bow legs. Flares.
He had just come in from the bush [Angas Downs] you know. So he took me up home to see the old man and as we walked in I stopped and stayed in the old laundry part. The laundry was nothing but just an old laundry wash type. But I could see through the louvres the old man sitting down, him and Aunty Tilly, and the old man had his packet of Country Life and his bottle of Southwark and they were playing patience. And Tracker walked in, Guess who’s here, guess who’s here? And you could see the old man spin around, Who, who, Tracker, who? And Tracker said: Oh! The prodigal son has returned, and the old man says, Who’s that? Young Bill, Willie’s out here. Dad said, Bring him in. Bring him in. I thought, Tracker, you have to fucking say that.
My reputation preceded me because of him too, you know. I was getting into trouble, but I was getting into trouble because I mean, any kid that had gone through the life that we had would be angry too. Any kid. I did commit crimes, but my crimes were so pathetic and trivial, and were more crimes of poverty than anything because you know, you had to eat and you walked past restaurants where all these whitefellas sat down to huge steaks and dined out and you could smell the food cooking, and there was no way in the world you could get in there. So you started working out ways and means of accumulating some sort of wealth in order to get a feed. And whether it was by hook or by crook you took your chances. No one gave us a home when we left the mission. No one said this is your home, come home.
There was no homecoming when we came back [to Alice Springs] either. Tracker probably had the best introduction into the family than we had because he was boisterous, he moved his way in with people. He was new. Patrick and I were coming behind and really nobody took any notice of us. So we were not welcomed wholeheartedly. The prison system was prepared to take me so that was the only accommodation I had. And it served its purpose because I did have a place to go to, I did have a place where I could afford three meals a day and that sort of shit. At the end it was not ideal but I was already caught up in the prison system. The judges threw the book at me, that was all.
Patrick: I came back to Alice Springs looking for my brothers. I went to Darwin and then I came back. And by that time Willie had been locked up and Tracker was at the station [Angas Downs]. The difference between Willie and Tracker was they used to fight. Tracker was not a nice fella when he was a young fella, he was a cheeky bastard.
William: We were too close. From Croker even since we were little kids you would try and follow Tracker, and he was a hard act to follow. Sometimes you were the brunt of his jokes. Tracker reckoned that I was the fat kid who got to the cookie jar. I thought I would come back [to Alice Springs] and play football and I thought, because I had played a few games with Adelaide Nungas in Adelaide, I would have a game just to keep fit. So I went over to play B Grade and Tracker was the coach.
I was training away and come Saturday we all went out on the oval and I had the Pioneer guernsey on because the old man was a Pioneer bloke. Tracker was a Pioneer bloke, and this bloke [Patrick] was always South. I wanted to honour the old man a bit so I put on the guernsey. At quarter time, I had been running my guts out, it was a hot day and at quarter time we had come off and we were all sitting around having refreshments, and Tracker reckons, You. I looked at him and said, What? He said, Can you stop fucking running like a gorilla. I was that deflated I never put on a Pioneer guernsey again. I mean what more can you say?
Patrick: No, we would have a good laugh when we are together, us three. We all teased.
William: We talked shit didn’t we?
Patrick: We would go and visit Lesley John [Nayda] at the old timers’ centre and it was just one big laugh.
William: Yes, but poor Lesley John.
Patrick: Yes, but we were laughing in our own laugh, it had nothing to do with them.
William: This is one side that is sad. Les never ever really came back and when he did come back he was too sick to do anything. I mean his identity and how to deal with it and all that, there is a vacuum in his life now. You cannot fill it no more, because we do not really know where we come from, apart from the Tilmouth family. We could claim by Warlpiri, we could claim by Anmatyerre, everyone claims you.
Patrick: People just look at you and even though they do not know what your name is in the Tanami, they just claim you, and they say: Where is that Tracker?
William: Yes they all want to claim you. They all knew Tracker, and this was half of it. You cannot hide. You cannot hide. Yes, they all loved him. I know he was going through hard times but he was a fighter, always been a fighter.
Patrick: He was positive. He broke your heart but he was very positive. He would come here and get you all fired up, and you get all bouncy and bubbly again, and then he would fuck off. He just left you all confused. Ah! Tracker! What was this? Most of the time, he calls me Bones, although I am not bones anymore.
William: And you did not realise until afterwards that he was taking the fucking mickey out of you. He had no right doing that. But that was how he was. It was a defence mechanism for him too. He would get you first before you even thought of getting him. And as I say, he lived outside of himself, he had a very personal side that he kept to himself, and it was his sanctuary. I tell you what, you had to get through this whole charade of jokes, humour, and he could see you coming a mile off. Come in spinner, and he had you. Whereas, I am more reserved, I live inside of myself, I mean this place [William’s home] is a padded cell. You give me this and I will never leave, I will never abscond. So it is the way it was.
Patrick: There is going to be no cell extraction here.
William: So this is it. The whole problem with assimilation is there is no smooth path back home and you end up asking, Who am I, who the fuck am I? Where do I fit in this world? Who am I? Where do I belong? These questions are continuously [being asked], and even to this day we feel we do not belong.
Tracker Tilmouth
Getting back to Alice and getting back to Central Australia, it was extremely difficult finding out where you belonged. It was difficult because you did not know where you came from. Simple as that. People look at me and say, Righto, he can speak the language, he has been able to do this, he knows this and knows that, but that has been a long, long journey. And that journey, like every other journey, never starts off on the right foot.
It is hard getting back to where you fit in the scheme of things as well as acceptance. Alice Springs was a wild place to say the least, it still is. The conflict between urban and non-urban, bush, whitefellas, blackfellas, is extremely fraught.
Croker was paradise in comparison. Getting back to Alice was very difficult but getting accepted in Alice was even more difficult because you had certain elders who [needed to accept you], and you sort of floated between living down The Gap, being part of the Gappies and playing footy, all that sort of stuff but very difficult to work out who you were and what you were, and a lot of people I befriended had not been able to recognise their own grandfathers or grandparents, or even their relatives who were probably in the creek looking at them.
There was a stigma attached, which was the softer version of Darwin – I am a blackfella but not that black. So you had this situation where you kept running into this area of acknowledgement, you had to acknowledge who your family was, but you did not mix with your family so to speak, and that became a lot clearer when I joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs with Gordon Williams and people like that, because all of a sudden you were part of the process and meeting Gordon and blokes, who really assisted you in being accepted as an Aboriginal person within Central Australia, by Aboriginals, not by whitefellas, but by Aboriginal people, saying that was somebody, he belongs to that mob and so forth and so on. That took a long time, it took a very long time. I was assisted in that by Milton Liddle, Roy Dubois, Tony Petrick, and some of these other people, but it was a very long journey. A lot of people do not make it. Brothers of mine still do not make it, like Les and Harry, my sister and so forth and so on.
The arguments for Aboriginal recognition by Aboriginal people is that when you leave a place and come back to that place and say, Righto, my mob is this or my mob is that, or I have been told this, this is what I know or understand, then you always have the scrutiny of somebody else saying, Well! Hang on a minute, this is that, that is this, and it all came to this with land claims and the Land Council.
You had this argument of ownership and misunderstanding of ownership by Aboriginal people who were not culturally au fait with where they stood, and you had this argument time and time again, of people saying, I am a traditional landowner, what are my rights? This happened with all the land claims that I have been involved with. I think there has been great difficulty in understanding, a lot of angst and emotion and so forth with the land claims. Their journey was similar to my journey, finding out how you were taken away, whether you were moved to Alice Springs, or to the Bungalow, or whether you were moved to Darwin or Minjilang [Croker Island] or wherever, it did not matter where, the journey was the same of coming back, and a lot of people do not come back. They would rather forget.
The people in the southern states that I know of decided that it was just too hard, they would rather be who they are and stay where they are. They would be Aboriginal people in name only rather than culture, and we are getting this difficulty to a certain extent, about what are we saying is Aboriginal, what are we identifying as? Each argument for each person is a different one, about how much do you grasp the idea of Aboriginality? How much do you live within a society that is willing to recognise that bit of Aboriginality?
In Alice Springs there is a concentration of that issue. Yes, we are all Aboriginal. Yes, we understand that, but are we more Aboriginal than that Aboriginal – and on and on it goes. So you have this argument time and time again with what being Aboriginal means, going out to bush camps and so forth, saying you want to understand your country and finding it difficult because language and cultural norms are not there. So Aboriginal society itself, it is not a different society, it is a vast society of transition if you like, from traditional Aboriginal life to the urban Aboriginal life.
I have seen it time and time again in New South Wales and everywhere else, where they were forced into transition, Aboriginal society along the river banks, to camping areas, to communities, to being concentrated and losing country because of that, and it is no different to American Indians or any other indigenous groups. The journey as a young bloke that I inadvertently went on was really about who you are. You cannot be anybody else. There was no other road for you. Your fate was already mapped. There is no that door opens and that door closes. Yes, you can make detours and do all sorts of things, but at the end of the day the main thing is, Righto! Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I? Do I take the trappings of a middle class, non-Indigenous person? How do I marry that within my mind with where I came from? That argument sits on my mind on a daily basis. You have got that, and that is just me. Imagine the turmoil of other people and what is going through their minds at the same time.
Who is Aboriginal? Can a real Aboriginal stand up? This is Tony Abbott’s mantra. This is why he wants to go to Gove all the time, where they are really Aboriginals out there. And the Aboriginals standing around the fringe camps may not be real Aboriginals. In fact he is creating a story about who is an Aboriginal. He is doing it on purpose, and it is good luck by default that Michael Long and these other blokes are saying, Hang on a minute, it is all of us. Longie is still saying it is all of us, and he is using recognition [the movement for constitutional recognition], and to a certain extent it is a vehicle for saying it is all of us whether it is the best thing on offer, or just what happens to come along at the time. He is a pretty smart thinker old Longie, and he has got this argument that recognition is the vehicle that brings everyone together.
We have not got anything straight. We have been trying to get our story straight.
Tracker Tilmouth
When I was out there at Angas Downs, Arthur Liddle had a calming effect on me because he explained things in great detail about what he thought were the issues of the day, and a bit of politics, but mostly about yourself, where you came from. He knew my old man, knew my family backwards. He talked about my old man, and talked about working and everything else, and gave great guidance on how you should behave and what is the norm and everything else. This was also backed up by his wife, old Bess.
Bess took me out hunting and gathering. I knew how to dig honey ants. I knew how to dig witchetty grubs. I knew how to get lizards and we went out to Tempe Downs, and I knew how to pick bush raisins – kampurarpa, which is berries. I knew all of the language. I knew how to pick pituri, which is wild bush tobacco. I used to come back with the Land Rover chock-a-block with it. It looked like a hay bale of it.
And then later we would go and get all the bark from the boxwood tree, coolibah tree in the swamp, and they would use that to mix with the ashes. There was Bess and old Maggie Armstrong and all the old people.
There were other blokes, but I think Arthur Liddle could see they were not interested in learning about culture and language. If you had most of the Angas Downs blokes lined up and we spoke Luritja, me and Johnny Liddle would leave them for dead, because we used to talk Luritja absolutely fluently. My best mates talked Luritja, and Lawrie Liddle too, but more so me and Johnny and Timmy Lander. We learnt Pitjantjatjara as well because the old blokes [senior law men] came through.
Bess wanted to make sure that I understood culture and country, and talked the language, and understood where I stood within any Aboriginal society. I went off to work at Ayers Rock where I did garage work, fixing up vehicles, and then I ended up as an outstation community advisor for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs at Docker River.
They could see I knew language and I knew culturally the right place to be and where, and what for. I have still got that. So I got taught a lot about my Aboriginality by Bess and Arthur. Arthur taught me how to speak a little bit of Arrernte. Bess made sure I could talk fluent Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, and Luritja. My job when I ended up at Docker River was working for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs with Gordon Williams, who was my boss.
One of my jobs was to actually drive the [Western Desert Aboriginal law] businessmen around the countryside. We called them tjilkata. They were the red ochre blokes and I drove them from Docker River to Areyonga, and from Areyonga to Papunya, with a government Bedford truck, four-wheel drive truck. Carting all the old people like Lesley, Harry Brumby, Tjutjuna, Windlass, the whole lot.
They all saw me, including Andy Kenyon and other staff of the Central Land Council, as part of those old important law men, and it came very clear at one incident at the Central Land Council when some of these old men demanded money off the traditional landowners for Mereenie Gas, and Mr Breaden [former chairman of the CLC], and Ben Clyne and those blokes were there. Mr Ross came over all flustered and said, I’ve got a group of red ochre men in the conference room. They were trying to get some money out of Breaden and Ben. Do you know Pitjantjatjara? I said, Yeah. So I walked in there and these old men say, Our grandson, how are you? Where have you been? We haven’t seen you for a long time. Big hugs all around from these extremely fierce-looking bosses of the business. I explained to them that there was no money but they eventually had their way. Ben and Bruce gave them some money for food and tucker, and fuel. There were no royalties to be had. Mr Ross will tell you how these blokes from the bush, when they first saw me, they could not believe it: Our son where have you been, our grandson.
They remembered that I took them around in Docker River when I was community advisor in the 1970s, before Mount Liebig was established, and before Kintore was established. My job at Docker River was to actually run rations near Well 13 on the Canning Stock Route. They were bush Aborigines. They used to walk around, and they would say, We will light a spinifex fire, and you can follow us by this fire. They would say, You look for the fire, we’ll be lighting it, and we’ll tell you where we are.
We would drop them off and they would walk around the bush up there. In a fortnight’s time we would go back and look for them and they would light a fire the day we were supposed to be coming there, and you would see the fire, and you would just drive across the country with an old Holden ute – a government ute, full of rations, and drop it off for them, flour, sugar, tea, bully beef, everything like that.
We followed the tracks back. It was me and Gordon Williams, and we did not need a four-wheel drive. We did it without a four-wheel drive most of the time, in the old Holden ute. So at Docker River, I was outstation community advisor with Gordon Williams, and then I went back into Alice and I was working around Congress [health service] and Aboriginal Legal Aid. I worked for Congress, then I worked for Legal Aid, and then I went back to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. I worked for them for years, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, and I ended up community advisor at Mimili at one stage, Ernabella, and Amata, so I could talk Pitjantjatjara.
There was Gordon Williams, Dougie Turner, and Andrew Wilson working for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Bob Beadman was my boss, and I also worked with Neville Jones, Richard Priest and all of those people [senior government bureaucrats]. I went from Congress first when I come into Alice because I did not want to stay out at Docker River, so I came into Congress and worked on the drunks pick-up bus. Then I joined the Department again, and I did Mimili and those places, and afterwards, I was sent as community advisor to Utopia, the traditional home of the Alyawarre and Anmatyerre people two hundred and fifty kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, and that was how I met a bloke called Toly Sawenko in my early days.
When I went to Utopia in that eastern country, my mentor for that area was Milton Liddle, because I came from that country but I could not speak Anmatyerre and Alyawarre or anything like that. So he was my mentor and interpreter, on more than one occasion, and he would come with me. Me and him drove around, and he told me about my old man, he told me about the country, and who were my relations at Utopia. And we camped at Goofy Bore on Mount Skinner Station more than one occasion, and out at Three Bores at Utopia, and at Ampilatwatye, Ammaroo, right around Lake Nash, Harts Range, Mount Swan, Number Five Bore, all those places. Milton Liddle took a lot of time teaching me who I was and I liked Liddle because he was a very smart man. He was Arthur Liddle’s younger brother and he just passed on knowledge. He must have thought I wanted to learn. Well! I wanted to learn. I was hungry for knowledge.
I stayed with old Katie and Roy Potter. Katie Potter was my old man’s aunty, and it was just a tin shed they lived in at Goofy Bore. So instead of camping in the community we used to camp there and she would cook for us. We would bring out a bit of meat and bread and some rations and we left it with them. That was Goofy Bore, which is on the edge of Utopia near the Sandover River, beautiful country. There is nothing there now. The old tin shed has gone. Old Tom Williams used to be there. It was just desert mulga, big gum trees, beautiful big red ironwoods and bloodwoods, big, big trees like that and good water.
One of the best things about Goofy Bore is that I would go out there with Milton Liddle and Roy Dubois – people would turn up, and old Milton could handle any political debate you wanted. I learnt just by listening to old Milt, how he talked, him and Roy Potter, where they would be exchanging stories. Milt Liddle and Roy Dubois would hold forth with old Katie and Roy Potter, with a young bloke like me just sitting there listening. I was only a young fella. Old Milt had so many stories that I could not stop laughing at some of them, but he had a very serious side to him, old Milt. He was pretty strong on Aboriginal rights, very strong. He talked about it, who did what and how and why, and he knew the country backwards.
He was really a forward thinker, because he helped set up Congress, he helped set up Aboriginal Legal Aid, all of these organisations. He was always in the background, and you could have a discussion with Milton. He would work you hard, nothing wrong with that. Many a day when I was working for the government, I would be out cutting wood for him up at Bond Springs. He was famous for his kangaroo pasties. He used to make these pasties out of kangaroo meat which were beautiful. We used to have that for lunch up at Bond Springs, chopping wood.
My mob showed me where my country was, right through to Aileron and Ti Tree, Adelaide Bore and Alcoota, Wake River and Bushy Park, and then Harts Range mob who are my cousins. We used to go gem fossicking at Harts Range, where we had a project to sell gems to Hong Kong, which paid for our Toyota and the wages and everything. I set that up with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. We bought our own Toyota, bought our own metal detectors and our own gem-making machine, everything – the cutting machines, and we cut gems from Harts Range. We did all that.
What sort of man was Milton Liddle? He was a hard man with his own family. He was a strict disciplinarian, but if you could sit down and talk to him, he had all the jokes – up at the woodheap, up where the Pine Hills Football Club shed is located in Alice Springs. He was supplying wood to all the houses in Alice Springs, and on weekends I would go and help him cut wood. Myself and little Nicky Liddle helped him cut wood. He would sit down and tell you jokes and tell you all sorts of things, but when you got him out bush you could not beat him. He knew the bush. He knew everything about the bush, especially that eastern side, around Utopia, up Ampilatwatye, and elsewhere. He had been around, and it was the same with Roy Dubois. We always went with Roy Dubois, so I had these two old blokes driving around with me in a government Land Rover. We would go everywhere and meet this person, meet that person, do that, do this, camp here, camp there. They would tell stories at night. You could not beat it. So Milton Liddle has played a huge role in the way I thought – he and Arthur. They used to call me Roy, never Tracker or Bruce, they called me Roy after my old man, Hey Roy.
My father was related to them. He was a good bloke, just different. We did not keep in touch that often. I was doing my own thing. I was out bush a lot because I never had many town jobs, and when I did come in to play football I worked for Terry Lee. Terry Lee came into Alice and lived down The Gap with us, and he was a mate of my old man and my uncles. I could always get a job with Terry Lee in the butcher shop, or in the abattoir, the Alice Springs abattoir. I could use a butcher knife pretty well. Me and George Somers always got a job. George Somers was related to my mother’s mob, or his wife was, through the Wades and those families. So I always had a job with those people. But Milton and Arthur were the main educators. Arthur had more politics than Milton, because Arthur was a lot straighter than Milton. Milton would laugh and joke whereas the old bloke wouldn’t. When Arthur talked to you there was no joking, it was straight up and down. You took it on. What to do about everything – the politics of the day, and all sorts of discussions. He and I would drive out from Angas Downs and do the bore run, just me and him, and he would be talking all the way, about this and about that.
It wasn’t really straight-out politics but what he thought of the day, about Indigenous and non-Indigenous issues. How it should be thought of and so forth. So with my grounding in Aboriginal affairs, I was very lucky. I had some good teachers.
When it came to running the Central Land Council, well first of all I went to university, and when I came back I was three feet in front of everybody because I had experience as the only director of the Central Land Council to actually have lived on an Aboriginal community and run it as a community advisor, and not just one, but three or four communities, and my experience in Aboriginal affairs, from west, east and south, down at Docker, down in the Pitjantjatjara Lands, but also up around Papunya, Yuendumu, and Lajamanu. So I had very good exposure to how communities worked, and who made the decisions and how they were made, and how you went about getting a decision made by the Council. You had to do your own lobbying, your own work in the system. Yuendumu was a classic. Papunya was the same. I had a lot of uncles at Papunya. And that was what old Arthur would say to me. He would say, You’re in Alice and people, old people, are sitting on the side of the footpath and you always got to say hello to them, because nine times out of ten they will be related to you – they will be looking at you. You’ve always got to be respectful.
Bess would tell you off if you did not say hello to somebody. She would say: Hey boy, come here, and she would say, This is your aunty, or who this is, This is your uncle. Call you boy, she would say, Hey boy.
I came from a wild background and the old bloke Arthur Liddle, he tamed me down. He made me think. Don’t be such an idiot. He made me dangerous, in how to use the brain.
John Liddle
He got to know all the big men. There used to be a lot of Aboriginal people coming through Angas Downs, proper people from the bush. They were just settling in places like Docker River and Papunya and places like that as new settlements. So Tracker went from Angas Downs to Docker River to work with his mate, Dave Simpson. He is a white bloke who took him from Angas Downs, first to Ayers Rock when it was known as Ayers Rock, then from there to Docker River, because it was Dave Simpson who actually helped set up Docker River as a settlement. Tracker got to know all those old blokes because they were sort of like our family anyway. He knew all those old elders you know like old Nosepeg [Tjupurrula] and old people like that, those famous old blokes. They used to come to us with their broken-down old cars, or on a camel, or something like that. We actually saw people, the last of the walkabout mob. They were walking, not driving in cars. He got to know all those mob. He learnt some of the language and they sort of claimed him also. He would be teasing them and they would be teasing him. All those heavies, the big ceremonial blokes, he used to drive them around.
So Tracker worked with all those old fellows and the old women. He knew all those mob. Knew their family and who is this one, and where they fit in, I cannot remember them, but he knew which one is which and who is their family. And those old blokes sort of adopted him. And he was one of the Liddles, that is our family, he is our family. So he had seen a lot of things other people would not have because of that.
He learnt a lot from Dad and that helped to shape the person he became and like I said, my dad had a dry sense of humour, but a mad sense of humour and he used to tease, like all those old Liddles, Uncle Milton, Uncle Harold, they all had this funny sense of humour. They would be teasing young blokes all the time to make them shape up. You cannot do that sort of thing any more, but back in those times that was how you got young blokes to learn how to work and pay attention.
When long hair first came in, Tracker always wanted to be better than everyone else. He would have the first set of flares that came in. And he wanted to get the prettiest girls. So the old uncles, my dad and his brother Milton, I think they were very proud of what all these young blokes were doing, getting up to mischief and those sorts of things but they had to tell us, You guys ought to behave yourself, you’ve got family responsibilities. We have to live in this town. The town is small and all this sort of stuff. So we would get all these lectures, come home early, and do this and do that, you have got to work. One of the things that these old blokes taught us was the work ethic. You have got to get up early, wash your face, get the gravy out of your eyes, so that you get out there and you are ready for work.
And that was what they taught him. It was normal behaviour, there were not any easy times, it was all work. We used to have lots of fun, muck around and tease each other with work place rivalry sort of thing. Try and outdo each other. You had to make your own fun then. It was good clean fun but you had to do your work at the same time. You might come to town every now and again and get on the grog and fall in love, but while you were out on the job you worked, and back in those times if you went on the dole it was like a shame job. So no one went on the dole. You had to go and find a job and there were not many jobs, it was all hard jobs that blokes could do, unskilled jobs. Well! They were skilled back in those days but nowadays you might call them unskilled. So you had to do the best you could with whatever you had.
Like I said, we had to share everything, clothes, sleep in the same bed. You tell people that now and they cannot believe that sort of concept, sleeping head to toe. Someone pissed the bed or they have smelly feet then you had to put up with it. And not many blankets in wintertime while sleeping on those old cyclone bunks, old ex-army bunks that were just made out of a bit of wire and some pipe. But you just had to do it, there was not anything else.
Whenever you talked to Tracker, you had to have an argument with him, or he had an argument with you. He told you his view on the world and then he would tell you a silly story. And what he always did with me was he would tell these stories where he was the main character, but he would put me in there instead of him. That was Liddle, he would say. Isn’t that right Liddle? Oh! Yes. He told such a convincing story it was not worth me saying no it wasn’t me, everyone believed what he told them, No that wasn’t me, that was Liddle, doing all these silly things, but it was him. He continued to do this all the time.
All the stupid things, and they were stupid things that we were doing, bloody misbehaving, but it was never him that instigated it, or was the main actor in it, it was always me. I was a little bit back to front but not as much as he made out. But whenever we went somewhere he would still tell those stories, and he always put me up the front in the story. I used to try and argue against it but I knew I could not compete against his story, so I just let it go.
That was Liddle, that was Liddle. And they would all look at me and think you stupid bastard, why did you do all that sort of stuff. No it was Liddle, and pointing at me. So I decided to give up in the end because you were up against a much larger force trying to compete with him. You could not beat him, you just had to agree with him and let him go.
Like I said, my mother had sort of sheltered him a bit from the real world. He was her pet, so he got away with a lot of things. She stuck up for him and gave him the easy jobs, so he did alright. He knew how to milk that sort of reaction from people. He used to put his hand up but in a subtle way, and she would say, Oh! Yeah! You can come and drive us. They used to go hunting for pituri. They would go for days and come back with a car load. And some of the leaves were about that big, like normal tobacco, domesticated tobacco. They would take big chaff bags. And because he was young and silly the old girl would send him up the hills where it used to grow in caves. He would be the main carrier of all that sort of stuff. He got to know a lot of those senior women like that. They knew who he was and they would boss him around, but I think he enjoyed that. He would be the driver and all of those old girls would jump on the back. So he would be there fetching the water and lighting the fire, and climbing the hills and that sort of stuff.
They would be away for days and would have gone one hundred and fifty miles sometimes from Angas Downs up to near Kings Canyon there, where you would go in the middle of nowhere, and up all those winding valleys and climb up on top of the hills. Some of the stalks of tobacco would be as thick as that – you would have to chop it, and it has got big leaves, like palm leaves they were that big. So they would bring back ten or twenty bags, big chaff bags full. Might be more. Then you have to dry it, take the stalks off. But the smell is enough to make you go bonkers. That nicotine, it is a tobacco smell. Oh! God! It was terrible, but those old girls could not live without it. He used to say he fell for that job, but I think he volunteered in a sneaky whisper, I’ll go with you. When you’re going let me know, I’ll go. Getting away from the real work.
And he used to tease all the old girls, have them giggling and then they would be teasing him. It was how he was, you know, he knew how to work the room. He knew how to get people to lean his way. A very convincing sort of bloke, and he was always an ideas man. He had all these schemes about everything. I don’t know the story but I know there was a dog that died. He would have thought, Geez! How am I going to get out of this, because he was always trying to get out of things. He most likely killed it. Starved it or something. Too busy to feed it. Because he would drift off a lot you know. You could be talking to him and he would go somewhere, I do not know where. And you say, click click [clicking fingers] – bloody silly bugger. That would be him. He was always passing the blame onto other people.
William Tilmouth
I remember old Sandra Armstrong telling me the story about when Arthur Liddle came into town and left Tracker out there [on Angas Downs] and the old dog, Arthur’s old favourite dog passed away. Somehow it died and I do not know whether it died from a snake bite or just a natural death, but when it passed away, Tracker did not know what to do.
He thought he was going to be in a lot of trouble so he decided not to bury the dog and put the dog in the freezer. And old Sandra Armstrong, an old Aboriginal woman from the Imanpa community, went to get some meat and there was this fucking dog, on the floor, in amongst the meat. And that was because he was worried that he would get scolded for allowing the dog to die suddenly, and he was not going to bury it because the evidence would be buried then. He put it in the freezer.
6. Johnny Liddle, Vincent Forrester and Tim (Snowy) Lander all worked with Tracker on Angas Downs, and were about the same age as he was.