John Liddle
I remember that time when he was working for DAA and he had this big Alsatian dog. He used to take it everywhere and he used to insist that it goes and sniffs women in the crutch. He would stand back and smile at people. Fucking bastard. Now anyone else would feel ashamed for doing that but not him, he just thought it was the right thing to do, not the wrong thing to do. And I have been with him everywhere and he did the same thing, no matter who it is, just walk straight in, as he had gate-crashed Congress staff meetings [where I was the director], and he had gone in and taken over the meeting. There might be a hundred people sitting there, and he would sort of slink in and all of a sudden he had [taken over the meeting], and people looked at him and would think, Who the fuck is this bloke? He is not one of us. Next minute he was up there talking and telling people to do this and do that. Then create all the confusion. And off he goes. And they all walk around saying, Who the hell was that? That bastard.
He continuously rang me up and I would ring him up, Oh! Well what about this, this scheme to get rich, this scheme to change the world. That bloody Centrefarm stuff [to develop horticulture on Aboriginal land in Central Australia], he and I were sort of talking about that for years, not that scheme specifically, but something broadly which I reckon he had sort of tweaked into what turned out as Centrefarm. We were talking about farms, and he was responsible for sending me to Israel for three and a half months back in the early 70s.
I did not even know where Israel was. I was straight from red sandhills out there [on Angas Downs] and he said, Do you want to go overseas? I said, Yeah! I do, where? He said, I don’t know. I said, I’m going. He said, Don’t worry, I’ll come with you. I said, That’s alright, be like a holiday. Holiday alright. And he did come with me, but he came about two months after I got there. He was only there for one week. So I was left over there for three and a half months. He said, I’ll get you a trip. And I said, No worries, I’ll go. Because I had thought, Oh! Alice Springs is not for me, it is too small. I want to learn things and see different things and go overseas. So, Bloody oath, I’ll go. He said do not worry about anything, money, people will look after you. Alright. We landed in Tel Aviv, me and Johnny Kelly. Me and him went. And Tracker came. He brought some blokes, about five or six of them came after us.
We landed at Tel Aviv airport, two blokes from the bush. The furthest we had been before was maybe to Adelaide or something like that. So that was a great adventure. We landed at Tel Aviv airport and soldiers come on to the plane to search you before you actually get off, with little machine guns. And here were these two blokes from the bush, shitting ourselves. We did not know what the hell was going to happen. Anyway we get off and we got sent to a rural college I suppose you might call it, and it had something to do with cooperatives and trade unionism because that was going to be the push for Aboriginal people, to establish cooperatives and learn how to work with one another, bulk buying and all this sort of stuff.
Then I suddenly woke up that he was not on the plane with us, and somehow or other, I worked out how to ring from there to Alice Springs and I rung up Charlie Perkins. He was sort of helping me. He was the one who got the fares for us, because we had free tickets from somewhere, although I do not know where. I said, Where’s this Bruce Tilmouth, is he coming over to thing? Charlie said, Oh! Yeah! Might be another month or so. I said, What! He told us he was going to be there, he was going to be here with us, and there would be three or four of us, not only two.
Anyway we had to go to daily classes and lectures and all this sort of stuff, so we are going every day, and sort of getting used to it. Could not get used to the food, and trying to learn the language. So after about a couple of months Tracker and these other mob started to turn up and said, We’re here, where are you? We said, We’re downstairs. Anyway we go downstairs to where we were living. I think it was three or four storeys like a big motel, and we went down there and he had got these blokes with him. Anyway they were not going to stay with us. They did a quick study tour, and we saw them for maybe two days for a couple of weeks, and then he said, Oh! We’re going back now bro.
I said, What!
We’re going back now.
I said, I thought you were going to stop here.
Nah, nah, I’ve got to go back.
So another couple of months later we were still there, but he had gone. He had gone home.
He had caught me out a lot of times that bastard, I tell you, with those schemes like that. He had some great ideas and he would look around for a sucker, Ah, Liddle there, I’ll get him to do it. So I fall for him all the time, I do not know why, I should have learnt the first twenty times. But he is responsible for me working at Congress I reckon, and working in Aboriginal health, so I have got to thank him for something I suppose, but he had hounded me ever since with all of those harebrained schemes, and I have had a few too that I had handed him over the years.
Vincent Forrester
I went in the army after working at Angas Downs, and when I came back, we had this bloke wandering around causing trouble, converting us into communists so they said, black power, and his name was Charlie Perkins. He come back to Alice [in the 1970s] and started off the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress medical service and Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid. We were workers, Tracker was at Congress, and then Neville Perkins and Janet Layton mob came.
This was the early days of the Aboriginal political movement with Charlie’s leadership in Central Australia. He could ring up Gough Whitlam and get a hundred thousand dollars of government money to buy the drunks’ farm with land previously owned by the Italians in Alice Springs. So Tracker and us, we worked together, and his first job was a bit like a welfare officer. In those days no one was on a pension, no child endowment, and no dole. Our job was to go out into the camps and take 44-gallon drums [of water] to the mob sitting down at the town camps, the old-timers’ camp, Little Sisters, over at Morris Soak, and those ironwood trees that would become Truckies Camp. But every time you took water the fucking dogs would be getting a drink of water instead of the people. And they were mangy, mangy dogs. So our job was to shoot the dogs and when people died take the body in a coffin back to their traditional country and bury them in their country. Everybody had their little areas of work to do.
An interesting thing was that we did a survey amongst ourselves, of who died young, who died old, and which communities they came from, and taking people back. There were some startling statistics, and we knew who died from grog abuse and all this type of thing. A lot of our peers at that time started dying from alcohol abuse – all the boys, and the most frequently visited place was the first alcohol-free zone of Hermannsburg. This was where we started carting all the bodies back to, because they all came out to Alice Springs and got on the piss. The eighty miles did not stop them. Santa Teresa was another place, but Hermannsburg was the worst.
This was the genocidal stuff of the early 70s that took place in relation to grog. It started kicking in actively about 1967 to 75, and was wiping out a whole bloody generation. When they got citizenship right, everybody got on the piss, flagon-sherry half gallon, that one there. You could get five bob for an unbroken flagon by taking it back to Underdowns [tavern]. Get five bob, a cab was a shilling and sixpence.
I think Tracks went to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs then and he went out with Gordon Williams at Docker River. He was at Docker River for quite a while. So he had his apprenticeship in the bush. Then he went to ADC, the Aboriginal Development Commission. He was setting up a Central Australian Aboriginal Cattlemen’s Association, and he worked with a bloke called Dr Stuey Phillpot who used to work at the Institute for Aboriginal Development, and Tracker considered himself a cattleman. When the eradication of brucellosis had wiped a lot of the cattle herd in the Northern Territory, Tracker and Stuey Phillpot were playing with a pet project at a place called Amata in South Australia. Those mission settlement whitefellas had bought up a good breed of cattle at Amata. There was a lot of natural water so the cattle got wild, but they were really, really well-bred cattle. Stuey Phillpot, Arthur Liddle, Tracker and old uncle Alec Kruger, and I think old Ray MacDonald was there too with old Minnie Stewart. They worked around this whole area of the cattle industry, trying to restructure the industry in Central Australia.
The only blackfellas that had land rights at the time were people on Schedule 1 lands.10 We knew what we were trying to get back eventually, and we tried to address that question by putting in strategies to buy back land for people living on stations because at that time, there was only a couple of stations [owned by Aboriginal people]. One had been bought by the then Aboriginal Land Fund Commission and that was Utopia, and also Willowra. A lot of these people, traditional landowners on the cattle stations, had nothing. So we put in a sound strategy with policies attached to it and outcomes. Land rights did not give us all the land, we had to buy some of it, including Muckaty where the government was going to build a nuclear waste dump. That was not given to us, that was bought by sound strategies, by creative accounting by the ABTA [Aboriginals Benefit Trust Account] with royalties from mining.
The ABTA did not do anything for about five years. They kept the money in the bank, and then they bought back all the stations that we managed to purchase because we saw on the horizon what was going to happen when they eradicated all the cattle because of brucellosis and tuberculosis. The pastoralists had to get rid of all the cattle on their properties and they had little compensation. But, they also had to put in good fencing, and if you had a fence you controlled the herd. We saw that, Hey! They’re not going to be able to have money. So that was a critical time to buy back that land, because the pastoralists were all going broke.
The Commonwealth Government was in favour of it, and so was Clive Holding mob [former Labor Minister for Aboriginal Affairs]. We had a good rapport with the Commonwealth Government, even though we did not agree with everything. At least that government gave us something with Clive, and he gave us freedom to purchase the stations as minister. That was a sound decision and well researched, and from there we looked at broader economic policies, with Tracker going to Roseworthy Agricultural College, Colesy going to Adelaide University, and Rossy going down to university too. Three blokes went down south to university so that they could manage some of the work that had been developed in Central Australia.
I remember trying to sell this idea of buying the stations with sound principles behind it, but we had to sell the idea to the Aboriginal Development Commission and so we went to Canberra. We wanted a deal, and we had backup from old Nugget Coombs, and the government was quite interested. Alice Springs was a pretty dynamic go-ahead place because we had gathered the intelligentsia of the movement. Alexis Wright, Marcia Langton, Pat Dodson – the movers and shakers of the movement at that time. We coordinated the Federation of Land Councils where there was a sharpening of the minds with the Peter Yus of the world involved, and we would get together and debate issues and strategies.
The strategies of buying the cattle stations in the Territory came out of the meeting of minds and discussion of landless people, the people who land rights forgot. They were the people living in the towns and on the cattle stations. We were successful. The government were encouraging it to a certain extent, and if we had kept on we would have bought up the whole Northern Territory, and they could not have that. So the government put a sunset clause in the Northern Territory Land Rights Act. We were too successful, and there was one little hole in that Land Rights Act that we went through, so they closed it off.
But it showed the importance of collective thought, and how this came through the Combined Aboriginal Organisations in Alice Springs, and the likes of the Federation of Land Councils. We commissioned an economic report on the Black dollar with economists Greg Crough, Bill Pritchard, and Richie Howitt.11 Rossy had come back after going to university, and Tracker came back and so did Owen Cole, and with all those old people like Wenten Rubuntja that were in the leadership roles at the land councils, it was an exciting time in the development of the movement, and of course Tracker was at the forefront of it.
Senior Aboriginal people gave us another education. That was my spiritual education, my spiritual nurturing. It comes from the elders, from each tribe, and being able to get to a forum like the Central Land Council because the first Land Council was made up of all these old men, corroboree men, ceremonial men. You had old Wenten, old Tyamiwa, old Nosepeg, old Johnny Lynch, old Trigger Derrick, Joseph Mantjakura, these were the ceremonial men.
The whitefella education is good to have, it is essential, but the guts of us, and I cannot stress the importance of this, is that we must always have our cultural practices at the forefront, of how we are going to protect our cultural legacy. Those are some of the biggest questions to ask in forums where we can make our own decisions. It is important that we get the younger ones to carry on, to educate them on what we have done, because I go along to the meetings of the Central Land Council and we are talking about the things we were talking about twenty-five bloody years ago. Those young people say, Oh! This is new to us. Hang on a minute, their fathers and grandfathers have already discussed these matters and put in place policies and strategies, and now that they have gone, we have to go and re-educate a whole new generation of decision-makers and policy implementers. This is something I am really concerned about.
Owen Cole
Tracker was great mates with my father, Willy Cole, and he would often visit and sit down with Dad. He often bribed Dad with fresh station meat to back his claim that he was a better footballer than me. Dad was easily bribed and usually agreed with Tracks.
It was our parents who used to mix with one another, and we would just run around and play together before he and his two brothers were taken to Croker Island. With those green eyes, you could not miss him. I am sure he would have been the same when he was a kid. His father, old Roy, had a similar type of personality, he was a real storyteller and a real jokester. I always say he got it from his father. He used to love doing exactly what Tracker did, where he went and visited people on a weekend, he would go and visit six people and sit down and have a cup of tea with them. That was exactly what his father was like.
Tracker was real close to my dad, and Dad was a good mate of his father. So Tracker would always make the journey down to Alice Springs and see my father who is eighty-six [in 2013]. We purchased all those pastoral properties and I never got one piece of meat from any of those properties. Tracker would be dropping sides of beef off to Dad, and I said to him, What about me? He said, Stuff you. I am looking after the old fellow.
He loved all the older blokes and I am a bit like that too. He loved the stories. Listening to the stories. I will spend hours with old people listening to the stories, and Tracker he loved doing that. It could be old Jack Cook up at Mistake Creek, and I remember sitting down there with him and Tracker was cross-examining him on his life, Where did you go, where did you go from there, and how did you come back to Mistake Creek? Tracker would get all these stories out, and of course he had a mind like a steel trap. He virtually had a photographic memory, where he could digest a piece of information and have it there forever, whereas I would probably retain fifty per cent of the story. He just got it.
When he was doing his degree down at Roseworthy, where most people would delete most of the stuff, he could throw it up at you word for word basically. The only thing he could not do was economics, and he would rock up to Adelaide University, where we used to go to the Aboriginal Task Force on a Thursday, and say, How are you going cuz? I would sit down with him and Dougie Turner. They were doing their first year and they rocked up there saying, Oh! Let’s go and have a beer. So we go down and have this beer, and he said, Anyway, we have to do this economics essay. I said, No worries, come around on the weekend. No, he says, It has got to be done now. We have to hand it in tomorrow morning. And then you had to sit down and help him do this economics degree.
He could organise all the people he had to, to get something done. That was the secret of Tracker. If he ever needed anything, he would just harness, or if he ever needed a bit of assistance, or he needed a few ideas, he knew where to get it.
He had contacts all over Australia who could be the Jewish, the Arabs, Lebanese, the Greeks up in Darwin if he had projects up there. He would go, Owen, I have got this idea. You mob own that property up in Darwin?
Yes, we do.
Then he said, Right next door is Danila Dilba [Aboriginal health service], and they need new headquarters. What would you say if you mob develop a new medical centre for them, completely state of the art, knock down the old building and…I said to him, We never thought of that possibility Tracker. Well that is a possibility. He said, Well! I have a mate there, a bloke called…you know, Costas or whatever it is. Nothing happened on that occasion, but he was far out. Who would have thought, Why don’t we build something like a mini hospital for Danila Dilba? He would.
Tracker Tilmouth
I remember when we set up Tangentyere Council in 1979, and I remember when we set up Congress, where I worked with Trevor Cutter who was the first doctor recruited by Congress in 1975. We established the first market garden down at Little Sisters which is a town camp in Alice Springs – a bit of fruit, vegetables, tomatoes and everything else. I used the Amoonguna tractor to use the plough, and everything it had, and I took it all down to the Little Sisters and started a market garden with all the drunks. All the vegetables grew well. We gave them to the town campers, and put up tents and shelters for them. We made sure they had firewood. And the Jim Downing Memorial Toilets: the Reverend Jim Downing from the Uniting Church was at IAD and they built the toilets down at the Little Sisters. We had all the drunks working on the vegie garden, and John Liddle and I went and got goats from Harts Range–Atitjere and brought them in and slaughtered them and gave them to the campers, and then we would keep a couple back and make stews for the drunks, or we used kangaroos and rabbits as well. Congress had that role in those days and we were kept busy, but they will not let you do it now.
I went out to Utopia with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the early days with Rod Horner and my job was to take over as project officer for Utopia, Ammaroo, Harts Range and those other eastern communities on pastoral leases. We were negotiating living areas, one square kilometre of land to put houses on pastoral leases. That was my first job out there. Talking to pastoralists and talking to communities about where they wanted to live and how much water they needed, houses and so forth, through the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. And at the same time establishing health and education services in the region under a bloke called Toly Sawenko. He was a schoolteacher who had just started at Utopia and had built a little shack on the side of the Sandover River [where he lived]. I camped there a few times over the years, and with Toby McLeay and all these other blokes who were health-service people, they all lived there, in and around that country at Three Bores. Three Bores is the main community centre where you have got your store, you have got your fuel, and you have got everything else.
We sat down with the government on a few occasions about how we provided health services, how we provided education services and so forth. We decided to follow their education model, where we had schoolteachers in each of the outstations, or teacher’s aides, on health services. So when you had a clinic at Utopia, it was not that big a clinic, and it had a lot of health workers who were located in remote communities or in remote outstations. Over time the health services were pretty good compared to Papunya and elsewhere. But it looks like these health statistics have now deteriorated because of lack of infrastructure, water, housing and so forth. So Utopia was a hard-learnt exercise for me because we had all sorts of programs to run. I negotiated the living area for Atitjere which is Harts Range and for Mount Swan, Number Five Bore, Alcoota, Woodgreen, MacDonald Downs – all in the eastern Alyawarre region of Central Australia. I did most of that work and I lived in the back neck of the woods there. Most of the Aboriginal people in the area were living at Mount Riddock, and then we moved across to Harts Range near the police station. There has never been a land claim. It was a special purpose lease, called a community living area. It is still a community living area. The only bit of Aboriginal land in the area is Utopia with Alcoota and Lake Drouin, and Atula. The rest are all pastoral leases with living areas.
The pastoralists were quite good because they all knew my grandfather, old Harry Tilmouth, an old whitefella. They also knew my father well, they knew who I was and I got on with them, especially with the Webbs at Mount Riddock and Huckitta. Those days were very good days because we were able to negotiate some good areas of land to live in, not big enough some of them, but we pushed the envelope when we could.
I did that for a couple of months or years or whatever it was, and lived at my own place of residence which was at Goofy Bore on Mount Skinner with old Katie Potter and Roy Potter. I used to work there but most of the time it was just bush work, driving around. I established a gemstone fossicking project out at Harts Range because of the amount of gemstones there. So the community was paying for its own vehicle, fuel and wages and selling gemstones to Hong Kong through Mr Cummings. The store, the service station and all that were established. Harts Range became a little bit of an economic activity on the Plenty Highway.
Utopia was pretty straightforward because it allowed me to interact with my mob, people I was actually related to by blood, with old Tony Petrick, old Paddy Webb, all those blokes now passed. They were extremely strong people. They introduced me when I used to come back into Alice, and they were all related to Wenten Rubuntja and were his mates. The Chief [Wenten Rubuntja] and me were very close because we had the same linkages.
That is it, I am your government. That is what he used to say.
So those early days were the formation of what I thought of as Aboriginal affairs, and you could do the Aboriginal affairs work if you wanted to and not bother with the next step, or you could think of how do we improve the situation? I always had this argument on how we improve the situation, to such an extent that when Bob Beadman was my boss we had a big argument on the highway about how things should happen, and that is why I pissed off to university. Bob wanted the Utopia health service to be like any other health service, with a centralised clinic and school. But people were not going to drive twenty kilometres a day to bring their kids to school. It was just not going to happen. We managed to keep him away from developing his normal operational model, which he conceded in the end did not work.
Working with Utopia, and with Papunya and Yuendumu with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, was pretty full-on. Anyhow I was able to connect with a lot of people out there. I was out at Haasts Bluff, and Papunya especially. Even now I go back there and I am welcome to go back any time.
Tracker Tilmouth
Old Rubuntja? When I went to Land Council, Chief was the chief. I knew Wenten because I was introduced to Wenten by my old man, and also I met through my old man Tony Petrick who was a senior traditional landowner from the Harts Range region in Central Australia, and former executive member of the Central Land Council. I also met Toby Paul and Mr Paddy Webb who were both Eastern Arrernte senior traditional landowners from the Alcoota–Huckitta–Harts Range region of Central Australia, and other people like that. They were my old man’s relations, and Wenten was close to my old man. So Chief, his idea of politics was different to the average person, and his ideas on methodologies and getting things done was different. He knew how to use the system, he taught me a lot about how to talk to the good boys and good girls, as he used to call Aboriginal people.
Old Chief, he had a different way of dealing with people. He was very good at putting people down in public through his little jokes and all that sort of stuff. In a public debate he would put people down by calling them good boys or good girls, and by saying: I’m your government, I’m your president.
We went through all of that with Wenten, arguments with him about how he dealt with people, even though he was not chairman all the time, and where he would declare the current chairman a gibbering idiot or nut in his own language. He did not know how to talk to white people and there would be comments like that coming from the floor in the big meetings. It was funny, it was absolutely funny, because the way he would say it everyone would laugh. And the chair, the only bloke that would be out there would be [Bruce] Breaden, and Breaden would be so embarrassed he did not know which way to look, or what to say, or whatever.
So anyway that was how it all went with the Chief. Tony Petrick was very good at the Land Council as well, as was Breaden. I grew up with Breaden so I knew him. He used to be at Tempe Downs and Angas Downs, and he is Bessie Liddle’s brother. So we knew Breaden. He used to call me a son, and that was all fairly easy for the Land Council in those days when I was the acting director, and then director, because you could do things. You had a very good executive with old blokes and old women that knew what had to be done, and knew they had to be strong to do it.
I do not know about the executive of the Central Land Council today. It is made up of younger people doing things. I suppose with the same agenda but it is a bit tougher now because you are more politically attuned to the wishes of the government of the day, whereas in those days we went on regardless of the position of the government. We were a bit more militant.
The old people on the executive in those earlier days were a lot stronger, like Mr Zimran from Kintore and elsewhere. There were blokes like that who could get up and tell them what they thought. Old Dick Leichleitner – old lightning [senior member of the Haasts Bluff Aboriginal Land Trust], Rexy Granites [senior Warlpiri traditional owner] to a certain extent, Harry Nelson [senior Warlpiri traditional owner], Mick Wagu [senior Luritja law man] and people like that who knew how to say things and when to say it. We do not get that anymore nowadays. I could not say some of the things that they would say, I couldn’t, it would be rude, especially Wenten’s commentary on the way back from a meeting, you would be absolutely red. The Chief always nailed it. It is a difficult one to go there [to talk about these times].
Mick Wagu was someone you learnt a lot from. Mick Wagu was a senior traditional Luritja law boss from Mbunghara near Papunya, but my real boss was a relation of my grandfather Mick Boolard from Alcoota, and this was Wenten Rubuntja, from your father’s father you would say.
The greatest philosopher and storyteller we ever had was Wenten Rubuntja. He could tell stories like you have never heard but it all had meanings if you listened to him. He would tell stories that would bring tears to your eyes. Him and old Breaden to a certain extent, but certainly nothing like Wenten though.
Wenten would get up and philosophise in three different Aboriginal languages, plus English for the uneducated. He used to say, I will talk in English for those people who aren’t educated. If you could not understand the language then you were not educated. So the Chief had it all. And he could sit there and he could just spell it out, step it out, and the stories to go with it. What are you talking about? This, this and this. It comes from traditional leaders, Aboriginal leaders, because nothing is written down. It is all based on tjuringa and Dreaming tracks, and everything else on the songlines.
This all came to the Central Land Council. Yes, very much so, and you were only as good as a director if your bloke at the head was philosophising, having strategies based on Aboriginal concepts. If he has no idea of Aboriginal concepts, just because you are black does not mean you are Aboriginal. Unfortunately, that is when the shit hits the fan, because by osmosis you are supposed to be able to move within the Aboriginal community, and if you have not bothered to learn who you are and what you are and so forth…it goes too hard on the argument about young blokes going out and being initiated and having no language skills. Unless you understand exactly what they are talking about and how they are talking about it in that framework and that concept, unless you have had that experience it is extremely difficult.
I was well looked after by Wenten and all my grannies and that [all the people who fall into the classificatory skin name of his grandparents’ generation], and also by my adopted grannies down at Docker River. They looked after me very well, and then down Amata, and down the Pit [Pitjantjatjara] Lands and I could travel within circles. You know I had Harry Tjutjuna, Leslie Muntantji, Windless, Harry Brumby, old Mick, Barney Donald who is Vincent’s grandfather, the whole lot.
Gordon Williams will tell you that they taught me. We spent a lot of time out bush with them and you learnt it all. When it all came to pass [while I was deputy director at the Central Land Council] we had arguments with people at Hermannsburg, and they turned up in the Alice Springs office of the Land Council and had brought all the business people with them who saw me sitting there, and the old men said, Hey, my grandson how are you? That was the end of the argument. No! We’ll stay with him. All those sorts of things were built on that framework and if you do not have that, it is very difficult even in the Top End. I can get around in the Top End because I have Ronald Lami Lami, Victor Cooper, Sammy Cooper, Henry and Andrew Yamirr and all these blokes I grew up with and went to school with on the mission. They see me in the Top End and they say straight away, Oh! He’s Minjilang [Croker Island] Or, Galiwin’ku [Elcho Island], or anywhere else for that matter.
When it came to finishing university and going to run the Land Council, I knew most of the people, I knew most of the bush mob. I had already been a community adviser out at Papunya, Docker River, Kintore before it became developed, all sorts of places, Yuendumu and so forth and so on. I was out at Utopia for a little bit. So Angas Downs allowed me to develop all those connections and a big part of knowing who I was, and Mr Breaden and those blokes made sure that everyone knew who I was. Breaden would make sure, call me Sonny Boy in front of everybody, just to say that is my son. Old Bess taught me a hell of a lot of responsibility and a hell of a lot of relationships in the bush. Today she is a very senior person, very senior person amongst the Aboriginal cultural scene, very senior. There are ceremonies that cannot go on without her, so she is way up there.
She knows the whole lot. Two woman’s story, the Devil Dreaming, chasing the Seven Sisters. She knows all those songs, as she is the main person. So for her to teach me stuff going along as a young fella was good. Then I had old Maxi Armstrong. I had Dave Longway. I had Esky Armstrong. I could talk language to them, I could mix with them. I was a bit more removed from being a station bloke, I was sort of in between the station blokes and the blacks if you like, to a certain extent. I could mix with them and I could talk language to them. So Docker River was easy. Warburton was easy for me. It was not hard. There were good blokes in the Department [of Aboriginal Affairs] who understood if they wanted to know something, ask the bloke on the ground. There were people like [Bob] Beadman and Neville Jones. They were all before their time. Jonesy had economic programs running that people would just weep if they ever thought of it now. The same with Beadman. They were progressives, and they knew all about Aboriginal self-sufficiency, self-determination, doing things for themselves. The trouble is that government policies never respected that and Beadman, being a bureaucrat, went on to do other things. You survive.
Bob Beadman
I went to Alice Springs as regional director of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the middle of 1980, and Tracker was already employed in the Department in a middle-ranking, field-officer type position. I think I knew him before that, but in that regional director role I came to work fairly close with him over the next four-odd years.
The way the office was structured, we had the region split into four area offices, and each area officer had some field office capacity. They were generally Aboriginal blokes that improved the go-between between remote communities and the non-Aboriginal people in the Department. Tracker was in that sort of capacity. He had an excellent range of contacts around the bush and was well known, good family connections, knew the lay of the land well, knew the bush well, and I consequently travelled fairly extensively with him, particularly in the north-east sector out of Alice Springs. I saw the way he operated on the ground as well as in the office and the way he interacted with people, his peers and the bush.
He had excellent relationships with people, but probably he was too involved. I thought that he had difficulty standing back and getting the broader perspective of what was going on. He had an amazing ability to grasp the complexity of issues but tended to undermine himself by frivolity, ridiculing issues to the point that it got to the most celebrated moment, of my once telling him under a mulga tree on Bushy Park Station, on returning from Utopia, that he was a pain in the bloody arse. I told him that one of these days he will feel passionate about an issue and desperate to be heard, and will find that the audience have already written him off as superficial and a joker.
He took great exception to that, and he was threatening to give me one in the mouth. I suggested he think carefully about whether he was good enough for the task. Old Milton Liddle was with us, we had taken him out there to do some interpreting. Milton was watching all this in horror, and Tracker’s response was to walk around kicking at sticks and kicking at the fire, and he cooled down a little bit. That issue blew over but ten years on probably, sitting in Canberra, I got a phone call one day. I picked the voice immediately, and he said, Do you know why I’m ringing you? I said, Obviously through past connections to say g’day. He said, No, no, why am I ringing you? After a while I said, You tell me. He said, I’m ringing you to thank you. You remember one day you abused me under a tree on Bushy Park Station? I said, Yes, very well. He said, You caused me to hold a mirror up to myself and make some decisions about what I was going to do in the future. Tracker’s recollection of it was that I had said to him, Why don’t you go and get a bloody education, and his response was, You pay. We had slightly different recollections of what happened under that tree on Bushy Park Station but whatever it was, it resulted in that phone call from him to me probably around 1991 or 1992, I forget the year. I’m ringing you to thank you. Tomorrow I graduate as a Bachelor of Agricultural Science and it’s a consequence of you forcing me to have a look at myself and do something about it. I think the clearer truth of it is that I was the motivator probably, the catalyst that caused all that to fall into place. I was absolutely chuffed by that phone call from him all of those years ago, acknowledging that I might have played a part in him turning his life around.
You had to pull them up occasionally, and remind them that they were professional public servants and that they had a profile to protect. The boys would play if you gave them enough rope, so sometimes you had to pull them up and say hang on a minute. But there were always issues there that produced the humour and kept people amused. One of the boys was an absolute shocker on motor vehicles for example, and at one stage of the game I said that he was not to be given the keys of any departmental vehicle ever again, and some wag in the office pulled up the old Commonwealth General Orders and found a provision there where you could pay somebody a bicycle allowance. So Tracker delighted in things like that. The bloke’s grounded, instead we’ll pay him a bicycle allowance.
But he was always one of the brighter blokes. He was operating at that field-officer level but he could always contextualise the issues better than most, complex issues too. He could see a way through, and see what the end objective was. I think that is lacking these days. People seem to process a piece of paper in their inner vacuum, and they do not contextualise what has gone before, or what the end effects are. They have lost the ability to analyse cause and effect. He could grasp exceptionally complex issues. I have listened to him out there on the verandah many times talking about carbon tax and how you might utilise the vast expanses of Arnhem Land as carbon entrapment schemes on a commercial basis. I cannot quite think through all that, and how it is going to work, because it is more money for nothing, and I think probably the greatest destroyer of remote communities is money for nothing. He had many balls in the air, and he managed to catch most of them before they hit the ground.
There was one other suggestion I made to Tracker early on and that was you have got to work with the government of the day, whoever is in office, irrespective of your political persuasions or theirs. You have got to put any partisan policy approach behind you and deal with the government of the day. It was something he did successfully.
10. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 provided for a number of areas of land that were formerly gazetted by government as Aboriginal reserves. These reserves became Schedule 1 lands attached to the Land Rights Act when the legislation came in to being, in effect directly handing these lands over to Aboriginal people with freehold title, not needing a land claim.
11. Greg Crough, Richie Howitt and Bill Pritchard, Aboriginal Economic Development in Central Australia: A Report for the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of Alice Springs, IAD, Alice Springs, 1989.