Tracker Tilmouth
I always was the chief. I thought of everything and told people what to do. And that was the way I grew up in the mission, of understanding non-Indigenous people, and trying to work out what they were thinking long before they said it. I had the ability at school to do that. I could finish my schoolwork as the teachers were writing it up on the board. I knew exactly what they were going to say next for some unknown reason. I learnt to read very young because books interested me, and books still interest me, I read a lot. I watch the news on television, I read everything, even my kids reckon, Oh! Boring! but it is not, it loads your mind, and especially with the discipline of university, where you get the discipline with homework and study, and then you come back with the ideas. Too often Aboriginal people have gone to universities and they have got tickets for turning up rather than doing the work.
The Troika: Rossy, Colesy and I decided we were going to the real universities, and we were going to stay there and get a proper ticket, but the other thing we said was that we would return to the community. We would not work for the government. And that is what we did. That is why Alice Springs, in terms of intelligence and ability and boost, got its economic platform. The Aboriginal community had David Ross, Owen Cole and me and that is what we quietly call each other, the Troika, because even today, there is nothing that Rossy does without me knowing about it, or Colesy knowing about it, and commenting. And that has always been the way that we have held things together. You cannot split the three no matter how much lobbying you do because the other two will definitely talk to the third and vice versa, and that has been a very good team for many years. I learnt this ability to try and work out what they were saying early in the piece.
He once said to me, Colesy, I can be anything you want me to be – an Arab one day, a Jew the next. I am the chameleon. What he was saying in his usual cryptic manner was, to really understand and appreciate people from all walks of life you must be able to walk in their shoes and see things from their eyes – and you must work with them in finding a solution.
When we were talking about this book Tracker said to me, Make sure you tell the truth. I said, How can I tell the truth when I am talking about you Tracker? I knew him all my life – which is sixty years, as we were both about the same age. I have known his family more so than Tracker, and Tracker when he was young would have known me through my family and our extended family. His father used to come and sit down at our place [in Alice Springs] and the kids were there when they were really young, and of course Tracker was taken away and sent to Croker Island, and then we lost track of one another for quite a few years.
I knew some of the family and his extended family, his aunty Tilly, and we just knew one another from the fact that we all mixed whenever the occasion arose. I had known him pretty well all his life. They moved to the east side of Alice Springs, whereas we were living down at The Gap but that was where they came from originally, and I like to think we all claim the same sort of connections.
When he came back to Central Australia, I remember going to the football in Alice Springs after I had come back from Adelaide where I was studying. I was about thirty I suppose, and I had not played football for five years and they said, Have a game.
So I went there and there was this loud-mouthed footballer there telling me I ran like I had a crankshaft up my arse. Why don’t you run properly, Colesy? I had to turn around and say, Who’s that big-lipped bloke? That cheeky fella? And they said, That’s Tracker. I had not seen him for years but he was just as abusive as always. So we were just like long-lost friends and it was as though we had never parted.
And then I went and worked with the Aboriginal Development Commission and Tracker was working with the DAA right next door. Then we worked together when they abolished or closed DAA. Tracker came across to ADC and we worked out in the western communities in Central Australia. We were going out to Aboriginal communities and delivering housing programs, and also some economic development programs, and that was always Tracker’s special interest to try and get economic development happening on Aboriginal land.
Later on he went and worked with the Central Land Council, but even when we were working with the ADC and I ended up as regional manager we started pushing to acquire Aboriginal land, and we identified the groups, Eastern Arrernte people and the Luritja people.8
They had missed out on land rights, because most of their traditional land could not be claimed under the Land Rights Act.
I tried to purchase pastoral property, so we were doing this with the ADC and Tracker was equally interested in the pastoral side of things because he worked out at Angas Downs with the Liddles and those types of people. He had that background with Vincent Forrester [then the Northern Territory chairman of the National Aboriginal Conference, the peak Aboriginal political organisation in the 1980s]. So he pushed it, which was a little bit different because when he was working for the DAA, the Department did not recognise the need for economic projects and Tracker was saying, Well! You need to get people involved, and he always pushed it from day one.
He never changed his tack really. He was the one who said it was all well and good looking at the traditional law and custom side of things, but you needed to get people thinking about being able to use their land, the same way that other non-Aboriginal people can use it for economic development and generate wealth, which in turn could be used to build up and support traditional law and custom. He believed this came hand in glove. I remember when he was working at the Central Land Council and the native title legislation was being negotiated, Tracker called me in and said we have got to tell these people [Aboriginal leaders, academics, lawyers and politicians], that it is equally an economic development argument as well. It is not just legal rights because Mabo was quite restricted with the rights the High Court found in the Mabo case.
Basically Tracker was saying, Look! We should see the right for Aboriginal people to access the land, and to use it for economic development to generate wealth, and to be quite honest we got thrown out of the meetings because it was all about: This is what the Mabo decision was and we will work within those parameters. Tracker was saying, Stuff the parameters, this is a political argument, let’s really push, we want to access the land and develop it and use it to create wealth. That was not favourably looked upon at that time, which is quite surprising because it has become a bit more fashionable now. But Tracker was pushing that argument from before the legislation was enacted.
His argument was about the population of those Aboriginal communities coming into towns like Alice Springs and the problems that brings. Tracker’s argument was that we needed to get these people actively involved, particularly in the pastoral industry because they had a long history of doing that. So let’s set up these pastoral properties and run them properly so these people can continue to work there, and give them a reason and means to stay on the land. Build up the infrastructure, and give people the means to sustain themselves out there on their traditional lands. That was not the fashionable view then. It was all about the welfare-oriented perspective and Tracker always challenged that. As it proved, he was absolutely right. We have seen a lot of those communities which were not given the opportunity to develop wealth and employment opportunities depopulated and they are living in Alice Springs, a large number of them. I just look back and say, Tracker was absolutely right.
David Ross
That was a political act. It took all these acts of politics to get that taught, something along those lines Tracker would say. Going to the toilet is a political act. That was one of his favourites. He used that for years.
I had known Tracker since we were teenagers. I first met Tracker here in Alice, and saw him in Darwin a couple of times but most of the time, he was elsewhere as a teenager and he ended up at Angas Downs. So then he used to come in to Alice Springs from Angas Downs. He was part of the workforce and he was tear-arsing around. He was living at Ayers Rock at one stage and it must have been around 1974 or 1975 that we were working over in Van Senden Avenue in Alice Springs, around that area, where it was all new housing west and south from the old cemetery on Memorial Drive, and all through that area with the building of new houses. I was laying bricks and he was working for Terry Smith and his father putting on roofs. He and Lawrie Liddle were roofies, putting the roofs on all the new houses.
That was a real hoot as you would have these bastards singing out and yelling out, cracking jokes. Tracker always did that, always up for a giggle and a laugh. That was probably our later teenage years as young blokes, but he was a few years older than me. I am probably about the same age as his brother Patrick. Patrick and I went to school together at Nightcliff High School in 1970.
Welfare decided back in them days, when Tracker and them were taken away as young’uns. My mum died in 1964, and it was left to our grandmother and older brothers and sisters [to look after me]. As I got older Welfare threw me into St Phillips, in 1968 and 1969. Then once you got to a certain age they wanted to send you away. That was their policy. I had a bit of a history of going walkabout, going home and seeing the family when it suited me rather than when it suited them. Anyway, they decided that they were going to send me off to Adelaide or Melbourne or somewhere, because that is what they did. And I said, Well! You can send me wherever you like but I won’t be staying. I’ll be coming home.
An older brother was living in Darwin, so they talked to him about me going up there, and that was why I ended up in Darwin. To cut a long story short, that was where it all happened, and that was how I knew Patrick. I never met Willie until much, much later. I met Tracker first, and then met Patrick, and then got to know Tracker over the years through work and what not, bit by bit. I laid bricks for ten years or more after I left school and then I came to work at the Central Land Council, and around about that time Tracker was working for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, in the late 70s. He was at DAA and he went on to the Aboriginal Development Commission. He and Colesy were there and I forget the exact year, but it was down at Ayers Rock where they had the big Central Australian Aboriginal Pastoralists meeting.
We had the big thing down there, it was a big meeting with lots of people and the meeting finished late on the Friday and we were going back Saturday morning. We never took much notice and the second tank on the Toyota did not have a fuel gauge on it. It was a new car and it did not have a fuel gauge. We were just outside Orange Creek and realised we had run out of diesel. We switched over to the reserve tank and some bastard had milked it on us down at Ayers Rock the night before, because we had filled up both tanks. I know, I had filled them up. We could not make it home. So the memory of the meeting down there around these other issues sort of sticks in my head. We ran out of diesel and we were stuck on the road. You remember these things because all you want to do is get home on a Saturday night, after a week of meetings. That was a big impact on CAAPU [Central Australia Aboriginal Pastoral Unit], and Aboriginal people throughout Central Australia, and we got some support and some funding.
Owen Cole
We were involved in setting up a Central Australian Aboriginal Cattlemen’s Association in the 1980s. I remember the ground-breaking conference at Mutitjulu, where they actually said, We need to get together and form this Cattlemen’s Association, and let’s harness our collective strengths and make sure we are represented in the industry. So we worked on that and once again, Tracker was a pioneer, and a lot of people just sort of looked at him and said, Whoop! Whoop! What are you doing? Meaning to say, Hang on. This is the equivalent of the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association, they are our enemies, why are we trying to emulate our detractors? But Tracker was a visionary, and that is the only way I would look at him. He was way out there and a lot of people did not really appreciate it, including Aboriginal people, did not appreciate what he was trying to do.
I have often thought about what had nurtured the way he looked at the world. He was a visionary. He had seen the vision splendid. Whereas us people tend to look from a very narrow perspective, Tracker had seen endless opportunities. And he would just build on them and I do not know how he did this. I have thought about it, and I have had these discussions with David Ross, and some of his ideas were too far out there and were probably not going to work, but you need those type of people who could tease out all these opportunities, and Tracker was one of those blokes. I think this was probably a result of his background where he was taken away from his family and he had to come back, and to develop the wherewithal to survive and to grow, and so forth. He lost connection to a great degree, and the rest of his family as well, and he had to come back. He became very independent. He knew that he had to survive and to survive, he needed to be creative and strong and be out there. That was him all over. And then he would come up with gems. He would just toss them, these endless ideas about something, and all of a sudden there would be an absolute gem and everyone would say, Let’s grab it and run with it. But none of us would have thought of it.
He would tire you sometimes. I mean he was a real intellect but not in a sort of academic sense. It was his creativity of looking at things differently. It was just the way he thought. He was out there and he looked at things, looked at a particular subject, and he saw it differently. He always had the entrepreneurial flair, and that gets back to the fact that you’ve got to survive, and you’ve got to survive in any shape or form. He was able to mix with anyone, the paupers, the queens and kings, the politicians. He just had that personality. He had no shame whatsoever, whereas most Aboriginal people would be a little bit circumspect I suppose. He would walk up to anyone and talk to them, engage in conversation, and throw ideas around. Walk into any meeting and take it over.
His philosophy was identify what the issue is, work out the solution and if there were any barriers, either knock them, or work out a way to undermine them so that they fell over. So that was his technique, and he did it. For example, when he was working as the director of the Central Land Council when David Ross went and studied in Adelaide, there were still a lot of Aboriginal groups that did not have land, and David Ross had started a land acquisition program. Tracker had just came back from Roseworthy College where he had completed his applied science degree or whatever it was, and he said, We’ve got to get this land back and what we need to do is put in a system. We’ve got to do it better than anyone else. There was a lot of money there, but a lot of the Aboriginal groups did not know how to access that money. So Tracker said, Let’s set up a system, an acquisition system and property development system.9 So he could do that, and my job was to come in and just pull together the application and it was a formula type of thing, where if you needed to get anthropological things, where do you get it from and so forth, and Tracker would set up the framework, the computer framework. He just got the system working, and he and I worked together, and I think in one year we ended up purchasing about six pastoral properties, which was unheard of in those days, and it was like a production line really. We said, Right! This is the property, bang. But he ran into a lot of resistance.
A lot of people did not want to sell to Aboriginal people, so Tracker said, We’ll just set up a system where we get these smart lawyers to set up companies and we will buy it later on. The company will purchase the pastoral property, and we will purchase the company and they will not know that it is an Aboriginal purchaser. So that was one thing. But he also ran into a lot of problems in the Land Council. Some of the lawyers did not agree with that philosophy of pushing the economic development side of things, so Tracker and I just ran straight over the top of them if they did not want to do the agreements.
I would sit down with Tracker and we would draft the agreements and say, Here it is. You people have got until tomorrow to approve this and it needs to come from you, so of course they would be hastily running around trying to make it more legally binding and correct. So he forced that change, the ideology of some of the people who worked there who thought we should be concentrating on the cultural side of things, and Tracker said once again, Let’s get access to land, let’s try to get enterprise development there. And we needed to have those things going simultaneously. So he just pushed it through and eventually they had to kowtow, had to comply with what the director wanted to know and they got involved, but they were hesitant. If the need was there, Tracker would run over the top of people.
A lot of the land we were purchasing really was unsuitable as pastoral properties, so we tried to pick the ones that would be sustainable and to make sure we accessed funds to develop those properties the way they should be developed. Properly! And my background was working in a government department at one time, where I learnt how to play the games as good as anyone else, and I knew the economic side of things, of pulling the figures together and what they needed, which we could serve up collectively. Tracker was the agricultural genius or so he thought, and he actually set up a system with Barney Foran from the CSIRO. It was pretty complicated and I did not know one end of a cow from the other to be quite honest, which Tracker kept on reminding me was the case, but once the model was there, I could input the data and get any sort of information out of it.
The ILC [Indigenous Land Corporation] had never come across anything as sophisticated. They tried to attack it, and of course they couldn’t, because they were used to using simple spreadsheets and this was really complex with climatic conditions and fertility rates et cetera, which Tracker and the CSIRO people had developed. So we had to educate half the bureaucracy on how to interpret the stuff.
Anyway we just kicked down [the barriers]. We knew how to play the politics, and Tracker was excellent at playing the politics. I knew how to do the economic stuff because that is my background, and we both knew the community side of things, how to get out there and talk to the right people, and we had worked at doing this for a long time by then, having been involved for ten or fifteen years out in those communities. And it was always an eventful experience working with Tracker because you never knew what was going to turn up. And it was good fun working with him.
Then you had Rossy [David Ross] who was the director of the Central Land Council and Tracker was his deputy prior to Rossy going and after Rossy came back, and they just complemented one another. You know Rossy was a straightlaced director, and Tracker was the far-out one, and Rossy would bring him in, and collectively they would mesh their ideas and they worked well together. But you needed people like Tracker, otherwise you were just going to settle for the status quo.
He was never about settling for less or the status quo somehow. So we worked on the Central Land Council, we worked on the Cattlemen’s Association, we worked on pastoral properties, all the acquisitions, and we worked on the purchase of Mistake Creek which is one of the best pastoral properties and Aboriginal-owned pastoral properties in Australia I would suggest, and it is still going strong after all these years.
What else did we do? Oh! Look we worked on setting up new stores [on communities] and that sort of thing. We knew how government policies worked, and we knew how to use those policies and programs to get things done. And we introduced flexibility that was not intended within those program guidelines to get things done. I think it was because of that sort of attitude, that we have ended up with things like the Yeperenye Shopping Centre in Alice Springs, as well as Imparja Television, because if you tried to set those up today with the bureaucracy that is supposed to be setting up economic development nowadays, you would not get any of that. Aboriginal people would just run into barriers.
And of course Tracker had this amazing relationship with Kumantjayi [Charlie] Perkins. He was sort of Kumantjayi Perkins’ protégé I suppose in a lot of respects, and he would use Tracker for all the cultural side of things when he came into Alice Springs. Tracker would make sure that he would talk to the right people and Tracker learnt a lot from him as well. So those two had a lifelong relationship, sometimes a little hostile but full of respect, and we all had that sort of relationship I suppose. We loved one another, but we also hated one another at various times.
His favourite term that he coined for me was big-lip Luritja. He said that every time I had a few beers my lips used to drop, and so with my Luritja backround, he called me that if he wanted to be insulting. I regarded it as a term of endearment more than an insult, and whenever he was feeling down I would ring him up and say, Ring me up and have an argument with the big-lipped Luritja. That helped. So he was great. I mean he could be frustrating at times but when you take everything into consideration, he was just a champion in my opinion.
Doug Turner
Tracker came back to Central Australia from Croker Island [Mission], and he was part of the Stolen Generation. He always said that he learnt how to sail with a bark canoe, but I do not know how true that is because he was always making up stories.
What was he like? He was mad. But I think that was the best way to be because even in your madness you can achieve a lot of stuff. It breaks down barriers and opens up doors. He had a big heart, and he gave his time and energy to a lot of people and his expertise which was short on the ground I suppose, but he always says that he knew everything and did everything. That was how mad he was.
He would get up and go. He had a lot of people that he knew, and friends, and he was willing to have a go about what was right for the community, for the Aboriginal community in the local Alice area basically. He knew people out bush. He could speak the language, especially Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, and maybe a little bit of Luritja, but I am not a hundred per cent sure on that. He had that sort of understanding about people and because of his madness in that era where there was a lot of racism still around, you had to brace yourself for that racism and get over it so that you could get on with life and achieve things. He got on well with different people, whitefellas and blackfellas and stuff like that, Aboriginal fellas when I say blackfellas – this is how we spoke, we spoke like this within the Alice Springs Aboriginal community.
I think if you were a local Aboriginal person in Alice Springs during that time you sort of grew up with the mainstream community, the white community, and people were aware of your background and you fitted in basically. But coming from the outside, people would look at Alice in a different light and say there was racism in the town because of the experience of half-caste Aboriginal people and full-blood Aboriginal people, there was that social difference, between traditional lifestyle coming from the bush, and the other which was sort of semi-traditional – and between European and Aboriginal society, they conducted themselves in a different way so to speak.
I would not say because they were more civilised or anything like that, that is probably what a lot of white people saw basically, but because there was a lot of social issues with pastoralists and that stuff in Alice Springs, and I think to some degree that still exists today. The Aboriginal community in Alice is very outspoken and wanted to see change and a better community with better infrastructure and all those sorts of things, and that is what the local Aboriginal community put in place. We had to break down a lot of barriers and stand up for our community. When I say our community, the Aboriginal community in the Territory. Because the Territory was a territory, it was not a state, it came under the jurisdiction of Canberra, and a lot of funds came out of Canberra to go into Alice Springs to develop different programs, town camps and all that sort of stuff. So we put a lot of time and energy while working with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, as members of the local Aboriginal community, into trying to improve the lifestyle for Aboriginal people in Central Australia.
There were a lot of town camps around Alice, and I am going back now twenty-five years, because we were involved in going out bush and working with Aboriginal communities on grants and aids. We set up programs in a lot of remote communities, but some of the programs around Alice were to help clean up the town camps, because the level of rubbish and the dogs were an issue.
If you could not get a grant program to help do this sort of stuff you had go out of your way and do these things out of your pocket, and you would go and talk to the camp communities around town, where you provided a service, and help clean up. We got involved in actually cleaning up a lot of rubbish around some of these camps and all that support came through ourselves, outside the services of government, even though we were working within government, because the government was very slow to get things done.
So we provided services to communities, and around the town camps out of our pocket and out of our spare time, to help move things along and get things done. We would beg and borrow machinery to go help clean up yards. That was a big thing that Tracker got involved with in those early years. This was before Tangentyere Council got off the ground, and I think that was probably one of the reasons why Tangentyere actually started, to provide this community service into the town camp areas around Alice.
He was not only a good communicator, but he would put the time and energy into different business companies in Alice, white business companies, and he built up a reputation with the people and it was my understanding that he put a lot of energy into these businesses for nothing. He grew up with white families who owned businesses in Alice, so they saw a local Aboriginal person trying to do things for the community, out of the goodness of his heart on a voluntary basis, so some of them got behind him and helped him.
Not only that, he was part of a stronger network of Aboriginal people, get-up-and-go Aboriginal people, who were needed to try and bring about a change of attitude within Alice, the mainstream business community of Alice where they were members of the Chamber of Commerce. Those were the sort of games I saw that Tracker was playing, with other strong Aboriginal members in the community to bring about a positive change for Aboriginal people in Alice Springs, for Aboriginal artists, the businesses, the abattoir, to get mainstream local business support.
Dave Murray
I lived in Alice Springs at the time and I had a mobile abattoir which I was operating at a place called Amoonguna, an Aboriginal community about twelve kilometres out of Alice Springs. And at that time Tracker was a liaison officer with ADC and he came to see me about whether we were able to join forces to supply meat to the Aboriginal communities and instigate a vertical integrated program to utilise the finances that were coming into the communities, to utilise them rather than just having them going back into white organisations I guess. And that is where our relationship started.
We met several times with an accountant who worked for Howarth and Howarth, and we did have several discussions to see whether it was appropriate and how it could evolve. It did evolve and we were working together for the next three or four years at least. During this time he formed the Aboriginal Cattlemen’s Association. The ADC funded a big meeting down at Ayers Rock which Tracker coordinated, where each community that had land was invited to participate. And out of that meeting came the formulation of the Central Aboriginal Cattlemen’s Association.
I guess in setting up any organisation there are problems to sort through and sort out, but Tracker was the main instigator in sorting through those things, bringing people together and making sure everybody understood their roles, and that they had adequate input into what they wanted to see come out of it. The main thing that came out of it was the fact that each week the main commodity through the stores seemed to be meat, the main sales seemed to be meat. A lot of Aboriginal communities were breeding and raising cattle, but these cattle were being sourced off through the local whitefella markets. It seemed feasible that if the markets could be established, if you could capitalise on these markets and the cattle that they were breeding could be turned around and be resourced back through the communities, there would be a bigger piece of the pie. And I believe that was instigated by Tracker and he was the one who pushed the boundaries for that. It was a great idea actually and very feasible and very workable.
He was unique in that he was very well read, and he had a photographic memory. I proved this time and time again, when he would call me up and say, I have got a meeting going on, blah, blah, blah, Murray, and I might need you over here at such and such. I will pick you up at such and such time, he might say, 2.30 sort of thing, and we might drive for fifteen or twenty minutes to get to the meeting. During that period of time he would ask a series of questions and he would really have a discussion with me, driving from point A to point B, and I would think that he was not really taking much notice of what I was saying, but having been a party to listening in at the meeting, I know he would almost quote you verbatim what you had just discussed. After a while it was evident that he had this photographic memory with his ability to retain information and bring it out at the appropriate times. It is quite a unique ability to have. Then afterwards, he would not only remember what was being said, but he would have deciphered the lot. He had an uncanny ability to do that. The biggest attribute of the guy was his absolute honesty. This was why people could not pin him down, because of his ability to absorb information, and because he was absolutely sure and honest with his dealings.
Basically what happened to his idea of an Aboriginal Cattlemen’s Association in Central Australia was too many people with too many hands in the pie. I believe that there was a certain amount of funding through the Aboriginal Development Corporation to get this up, but their requirement to release funds was that they needed a feasibility study. Most of the finances that were made available were eaten up with feasibility studies unfortunately, and then when the time came to instigate the programs and put them into actual being, it was the lawyers, accountants and people doing the feasibility studies who were the ones that got funded first and foremost, and the project itself just sort of fell by the wayside. Very disappointing. Tracker worked very hard with myself to liaison through the abattoirs, and we believed that we could still get it up and running provided that we had the support of the local Aboriginal community stores. If we could get the stores on side then it was still feasible. And so we went down that track for a couple of years funding it through the operation of a butcher shop, and with the instigation of a training program for Aboriginal slaughtermen. A very hard slog, when you did not actually have the support of some of the organisations that should have been backing it.
I believe Tracker actually was a competent slaughterman, so he did understand the cuts of meat. He did understand the facts of finance, and could see the amount of finance that was actually going into the stores on a weekly basis. He could see the correlation between these things, and he had invited me a couple of times to do some musters on Aboriginal communities with him to see what stock was available on their land. As he sussed that sort of thing out he could see that sometimes the cattle that were provided, or the finance that was provided to put cattle on some of the properties, ended up on adjoining whitefella stations, and there was a trade-off that happened sometimes with the whitefellas. They would do a muster and they would take cattle in lieu of their input to the muster, but unfortunately, lots of times the cattle that they actually took far exceeded the amount that those cattle should have bought even in a normal sale situation. Tracker was very much aware of that, and he brought it to the forefront, which put him out on a limb. He was out on a limb as far as the whitefellas were concerned, and the whitefellas Cattlemen’s Association, and then he was at loggerheads with some of the members of the Aboriginal Cattlemen’s Association because there was this double standard play going on.
Because sometimes you have got a handout, and you can see the handout, and that handout is tangible, so you will take the handout. You do not see the long term or bigger picture. And basically, if you have a dozen people, a dozen different groups if you like, and say the benefit would benefit eight of them, what are the other four going to get? They see a piece of the pie does not turn up on time, then you have this dissension happening. So he had a very hard row to hoe, but the idea and concepts were very much on track and inline and very feasible.
The Aboriginal Cattlemen’s Association was absolutely part of a broader picture and vision that Tracker had because of his knowledge of the land. Because of his Aboriginality. Because of his background in having been a slaughterman and having worked on communities. And understanding the store situation and the finances going into them. He had a very strategic role to play. He was a qualified stock inspector, and I believe probably one of the few Aboriginal stock inspectors of his time. With his knowledge of the finances and what was going on in stores, he was very strategically placed.
Even today, his ideas would still be workable. See, he developed what we called a vertical integrated program, where the same dollar value stayed within the marginal groups. They would have gotten to the point where they would not have been relying on government handouts, or bureaucrats playing politics.
That was the way it was. He did have an understanding of the land and breaking in horses and stuff like that. In that whole sector, he had let’s say a handle on what was really going on, but unfortunately, he could not get the powerbrokers to follow through. It happened time and time again.
Patrick: Tracker was at the head of everything. They talk about Tangentyere [Council] and all this shit, but I cleaned Freddy Fry’s block up when it was a dump at Little Sisters [town camp], when there was nothing there. I had got away from painting and Tracker said, Come on you’re gonna drive this tractor. So I went to Geoffrey Liddle to get a tractor, and Geoffrey Liddle gave us a backhoe and we cleared that block. I cleared it, not Tracker, he was gone. I was operating that tractor.
William: I think he was the first community development officer with Congress when Neville Perkins was the first director. I remember when Tracker got me to paint the clinic.
Patrick: Yes I had to do the floor, tile the floor and I knew nothing about tiling. He had me doing the floors and everything like I knew how to do it. He just said, Oh! Bones will do that. For nothing mind you, I never got paid for it. I did a lot of work for him just for nothing.
William: Johnny [Liddle] was one of their first bus drivers.
Patrick: Tracker got him the job, didn’t he?
William: Tracker was a bus driver for Congress. The bloke was a visionary, no doubt about that. He is an ideas man.
Patrick: He had more vision than anyone I have seen. Thought outside the square all the time. We used to say that he was twenty years ahead but it is true. A lot of people gave him a hard time for thinking outside the square too: that he was not the full quid. But when it all comes to fruition sooner or later, everyone else takes the credit for it. I used to think, Tracker, that was your idea. I remember, I was there. But this person and that person…
William: I have a thing about people who just out of their own ego claimed to have started this and started that.
Patrick: Like CAAMA. That was Johnny Macumba. I do not care what anyone else says.
William: Yes, but it all came from the need of the most disadvantaged, poor people who had a need and, like Congress, it was not started by anybody, it was started by the people who needed a health clinic. The need was there, Legal Aid, the need was there. Even with Tangentyere Council, the need for housing was there, the need for land was there, and it all came from those people who had nothing. And for those poor people in those days in Alice Springs, it was a real rough and tough town. It was crazy town. People lived anywhere, any old how. Old Freddy Fry and that block he had down there it came from nothing, it was just a little humpy. So Tracker was a forerunner in a lot of things. He definitely was.
Patrick: And he was always thinking of ideas, I want to do this and I want to do that. We would say, Tracker pull up now. Grab Kathy and just go around the country. You have been around the world that many times. He had been everywhere. He knew everything.
Gordon Williams
I knew Tracker’s brother Willie back in 1975, and then in 1977 I actually started mucking around with Tracker. In 1978, Tracker got a job at the DAA [Department of Aboriginal Affairs] and he was my project officer. At that time we travelled extensively throughout Central Australia, Alice Springs, Areyonga, Mutitjulu, Docker River. We spent a lot of time in the field and our main area of work was contacting communities and outstations to check requirements regarding housing, water, et cetera.
Later, in 1979, I was sent out to Docker River, and Tracker came out to stay with me for a month to gain some more experience in the bush, working with traditional people, although he had already worked with a lot of traditional Aborigines, but out there it was completely different because you were in one spot. We spent a lot of time in the field again because Tracker always had ideas of enterprise. We drove around the country, up to a place called Tjukurla checking on camel numbers, checking the sites for an outstation, and we were using a Holden ute and Tracker just could not get over how a Holden ute could travel that back country in those days. He did most of the driving, I was just the passenger and he did most of the talking.
When Tracker was out there with me he learnt about administration and how to look after a community the way the government required. He always had ideas, even back then which surprised me. He talked about camels and harvesting camels and all this stuff. After about a month, he was sent back to town as a project officer and I was still out there.
In 1981, I was staying at this Aboriginal hostel in Alice Springs at 7 Lindsay Avenue with a few other males. Tracker had no place to stay so I said to him, Okay, mate, look there’s a room at the hostel but you’ll have to share one side of the room and I’ll have the other. So Tracker moved in and I said if you bring a woman home, we will make a partition. I will even camp in the lounge. So after a couple of months Tracker brought his future wife there. So from then on I virtually camped in the lounge. Every weekend a few others and myself, we would go out hunting and we would bring back a kangaroo which is very unsightly, and leave it in the kitchen. Kathy would get up and cook breakfast for all of us, and she was appalled at the idea of a kangaroo sitting up there, so she would ask Tracker to put it somewhere, out of sight. We actually stayed there for quite a long time.
Then I was transferred away and Tracker still worked out of town until 1980, and we were both seconded to the Aboriginal Development Commission, and during that time Tracker was the project officer. He got involved with an abattoir at Amoonguna. Dave Murray actually ran it, and again Tracker wanted to do this and do that, expand it, and then we travelled extensively again with the Aboriginal Development Commission throughout the southern area of the Northern Territory. Tracker loved hunting, he would let others do the shooting, but he always knew what to do, everything like that.
One thing with Tracker, he was always into enterprises. Let’s do this, let’s do that, and at ADC and DAA it was the same thing, he was always looking at doing something and it was always to do with the land, cattle, horses, abattoir, pet meat, anything like that he was interested in. He got support, and the ADC met every six weeks to look at projects, and some projects got up. A lot did not, because it was up to the whim of the commissioners which projects they supported. This frustrated Tracker a bit. Later on Tracker kept saying, You know, I need to learn how to write properly. I can speak. I said, Boy can you ever. He reckoned, My writing’s not too good. So Owen Cole and Jerry Tilmouth said, Why don’t you go back to school. No, he said, That’s easy for you guys to talk. They said, No, you should. So between him and Douglas Turner, they decided to go to the Rural [Roseworthy] College in Adelaide.
So off they went and I never seen Tracker for about three or four years, and then when I did he reckons, Well! Bro, I’ve got letters behind my name. That was the first thing he said. I said, Well! Good on you. I reckoned, I’ve got letters too. It is Williams and it is hyperactive. So he started showing me how to type and he did not get far, but still. He started blaming the typewriter. Anyway, he was still the same Tracker. One thing I must say for Tracker was that he never ever forgot his friends, because when he was down living in his car it was his friends that pulled him into gear and actually looked after him. When I say friends, I mean people like myself, the Liddles, Willy Bray, Owen Cole, Jerry Tilmouth, a lot of us, we all supported him.
We liked him a lot and he had a lot of character. He always had some scheme in his head. After those years I lost track of him, he caught up with me in Katherine. He was the director of the Central Land Council and so he said, Hey, come on, do you want a job there? I said, Yeah! I’ll think about it. I was on holidays at the time. So he offered me the job, and I took the job, and he was the same Tracker. He always would say to myself and a few of the other mates, Lawrie Liddle, Stevie Ellis and that, he would just say, Okay, come here, and he would start talking again about enterprises, all this stuff, about his prawn farm that he was going to establish. He was still heavily involved in the rural side, even as a director of the Land Council. He would be up and down to Mistake Creek, and looked at all the cattle stations around Alice. At meetings he would always use terminology of, Well! This fence, that fence, and all of his analogies would be rural virtually. He would always say – this land – put the cattle in here, and then you do this and do that but everything he spoke about revolved around cattle, horses. He would always have some idea of how you could make money out of cattle and stuff like that.
Dave Murray
One of the things I remember very clearly was that we actually funded a Japanese delegation. We were in the process of wanting to get meat into Japan through the abattoir situation, and we were working with a broker from Sydney and he brought up four or five Japanese people with an interpreter and a business manager, an export broker. So we had this delegation, and they came out to the meatworks and wanted to see some cattle slaughtered. The next day they came to see the meat getting boned out, and wanted to know how we would do it in an appropriate way.
They wanted some photographs and this Japanese guy in his enthusiasm handed this camera to Tracker. He extended his hand with this thing saying you take picture, you take picture or something or other, and Tracker put his hand out initially but pulled it back and he said, You take your own fucking pictures. He said, You fellas invented it, it’s not our invention. You fellas invented it, you take your own fucking pictures. The broker from Sydney’s looked, and was like, What in the heck is going on? It was a fairly delicate situation if you like. We were trying to sell thousands of dollars worth of product through these fellas, and everyone was tiptoeing around them like you would not believe and Tracker turns around and says, You invented the fucking thing, you take your own fucking pictures. That was just the way he was. He was just so down to earth. And you could not take offence at it because it was always true.
8. Eastern and Central Arrernte includes Harts Range (Atitjere), Bonya (Uthipe Atherre), Santa Teresa (Ltyentye Apurte), Amoonguna (Imengkwerne) and Alice Springs (Mparntwe). Luritja is spoken east of the Pitjantjatjara lands from Oodnadatta in SA through to Finke (Aputula).
9. The Land Council wanted to acquire land for land claims for Aboriginal groups that would miss out on land rights after the ‘sunset clause’ came into effect on 5 June 1997. The sunset clause was an amendment to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 that prevented any further land claims being made under the act, especially over pastoral land that had been purchased and claimed by Aboriginal people under the act.