David Ross
In 1985 I decided that I needed some education, formal stuff, because I had been putting up with the likes of Paul Everingham [Northern Territory Chief Minister] and others saying, Oh! You blackfellas don’t know nothing. You rely on whites all the time to do everything in the organisations and always have to have these whitefellas do everything for you. I decided that I needed some more education and understanding of finance and things of that nature. CLC at that time was running its management based on Nugget Coombs who did a review back around 1982 or 1983, and he had come up with a model of participatory executive and members, and everything was based on a committee-type thing that ran the organisation. It just was not happening. We had a chair who was not really engaged in the organisation, who just went walkabout and was not really engaged in the organisation. I was secretary to the Council and found myself making decisions that had to be made. It was just the way it was.
So myself and Bruce Donald, who at the time was a lawyer with the CLC, went to Darwin and spoke to Jack Ah Kit. Jack at the time was director at the Northern Land Council and we figured out how managements worked. So I think it was around July or August 1985 we put to the Council at a meeting in Amoonguna that we needed to implement a new system of management and we needed to have a director and delegations. Bruce and I talked to the Council and the chair said, Well! If that’s the case I’m out of here. The Council said, Yeah! That’s pretty much what we’re going to agree to do. The Council had had enough of his running around, just not doing the job and taking huge pay and all the rest of it. So he walked out of the Council meeting that day and we implemented the position of director and, at the same time, I was also applying to go to university.
By the end of October–November, we advertised the job and Patrick Dodson was the successful applicant. I went off to university in Adelaide to do a business management course so that I could understand what I needed to know about money, and to have a better understanding of budgeting, and how to do all those sorts of things. I did not know that I would get down there and Colesy was at Adelaide Uni next door, and I ran into him. Jesus! He was doing a degree in accounting and he said, Tracker is out at Roseworthy Agricultural College. I said, Bloody hell. I did not know these blokes were there. As time goes on we were sitting one day having a yarn and I said to Tracker, So you’re going to uni, what are you doing? He said, I’m doing a science degree. I said, What’s it about? He said, It’s all about land management and this and that. I said, Hmm, okay. I said, The Land Council would be interested in what you are doing, what are you going to do with it? He said, I don’t know but I’ll go …I said, The Land Council is going to need people like you with these sorts of skills, so you need to think about what the Land Council is doing. He said, Oh! Yeah, alright. That was sort of the discussion that we had, and it went on from there.
Anyway, I was not doing a degree, I was only doing an associate diploma course which was for two years of my time from 1986 and 1987. I came back to work and they anointed me and gave me a job as assistant director I think at the time, that was the terminology that was used. It was in early 1988, and then Patrick Dodson decided in 1989 that he was packing up and going back to Broome and the job would be advertised. I said to Tracker, You should put in for this job. He applied for the director’s job, but the trouble was he was not ready and was not keen to take on the job. He was not finished school and the Council executive at the time said to me, You’re going to have to step up to the plate. I said, I’d prefer not to. I prefer to do what I’m doing. Basically their response was, We sent you to school for two years, you either take on the job or go find another job. That is what happened. And Tracker can have the other job when he is finished. I had to be the bearer of the bad news to Tracker and he was happy with that and so that is how it all came about. I am not sure exactly when, but I think he finished in 1989 and started work in 1990 at CLC in early January.
It was very funny because Tracker turned up very well dressed, good pants, and – oh! flash shoes. I said to him, Where are you going? He said, I’m coming to work. I am sure Kathy [Tracker’s wife] must have said to him, You get dressed properly. Anyway he comes in and we are all walking around in jeans and working boots, as you do at the CLC. Anyway, it took him all of a few days and he was back to normal like the rest of us. I don’t think I had ever seen Tracker that well dressed again. That was pretty much where it all started and I suppose we have done a lot of things since then.
I remember these different things at different times, of trying to acquire land, and scheming in different ways, and bringing people in who had different skills to help. I think the acquisitions of pastoral land was the first job I gave to Tracker. There was money in ABA [Aboriginals Benefit Account] and we had minister’s approval to buy some land, and so Mistake Creek was up for grabs, and Loves Creek. I think they were [both for sale] at that time. I gave him the job to put it all together and we dragged Colesy in at one stage to help us with Mistake Creek. They both had a few trips up there and all sorts of stories came out of that. I heard from old Jacko Cook, who was one of the main TOs [traditional landowners] from up there that at one stage there was a gun involved. They loved to argue and fight, them two.
At the end of the day the properties were acquired and we purchased Mistake Creek from Gary Dann who was known as one of the best wheelers and dealers in the cattle business. A man who started life as a butcher and ended up owning quite a number of properties, and not only had his own butchery but had his own abattoirs and all the rest of it. Tracker was open to beating these people at their own game, and I think we ended up with possibly a thousand or fifteen hundred head or more cattle than what we actually paid for. You don’t do those sort of things without having a bit of smarts about you. I think Gary offered to help us acquire Loves Creek from the owner at the time who just refused point blank to sell to blackfellas. We had to use two or three other people in a roundabout way to actually make the acquisitions.
We got what we wanted, and I think Gary pointed out to the owner at the time: Well! These blokes will end up with it one way or another, so if you deal with them up-front then you will pay less in commissions. The bloke did not want to and he ended up paying a lot out in commissions. Well! That is the way it works. That is life, that is the way it goes. Tracks had a lot to do with those acquisitions, and I think James Nugent [CLC lawyer] and Colesy all played their parts. The overall strategies, in terms of making sure the stock was there and all the rest of it, that was all down to Tracker and his ways of doing things.
The next acquisitions came when Bobby Tickner [Robert Tickner, former Minister for Aboriginal Affairs] offered me a job as a part-time ATSIC commissioner. I said, Yes, no worries. It was a way of getting in the door and we were able to acquire some money through there and buy some more property. Alcoota was up for grabs and that was a whole different ball game. When it was first raised that old Tom Webb [then owner of the Alcoota pastoral property] wanted to talk to us, he dared not come anywhere near the CLC office because of the rednecks. He was so afraid of the rednecks and being seen to be talking to the Land Council. So we met with Tom in the car park down the back of the creek behind the old Woolworths in Alice Springs. Oh! Yes, it is a true story. This is true. When Woolies used to be in the Mall in Todd Street and we ended up down the back, in the car park near the creek. That would seem to me to be a much more public place, but that was where Tom felt a bit more comfortable about talking to me and Tracker about acquiring the property. Charles Perkins had raised the issue with him, about if he wanted to sell then Aboriginal people should get a chance. So that was why he was talking to us. And that is where we started that process. Tracker took pretty much control of that process.
My job was always to go and get the money. That was always my job, to get the money. Tracker’s job was to make it all work and then drag whoever he needed into that process. It got very personal with Tracker and one Mr Turner, at that time.12 Tracker was abused inside out when it then became public that we were going to buy this property for the traditional owners. Mr Turner, who was living there, was not necessarily a traditional owner, but part of the relationships, and family, and married in and whatnot.
So there was a lot of personal stuff there, but we got through it. There was a time when Tracker and David Avery [principal lawyer at the Central Land Council] actually came in the office and said to me one day, Let’s use the money to buy something else. I remember saying to them, Get out of this door and you go and make this thing work. It’s not about us. It’s not about how hard it is. It’s about acquiring this land for the people. I probably did not say it so nicely to him, but things happened. We led people to believe that that was what we were going to do and that was what we did. But it was one of the most difficult acquisitions we ever did. Mr Turner really personalised it with Tracker, he really personalised it.
This all began in 1993 or 1994, while dealing with native title and trying to put the act together, all at the same time. I cannot remember who the chief minister of the Northern Territory was at the time, I mean they have had so many chief ministers. It could have been Marshall Perron. Turner had a very close relationship with this CLP government, and they were on the phone to him every other day. He was a favourite son, running their line while all this was taking place. There were all sorts of other things going on at the time within the CLC, which was just its normal business. This was just acquiring land. This was six million dollars we are talking about, and it was a lot of money. It was a great property, really good cattle, good infrastructure. So paying good money for a good return. There was a lot of personal stuff involved and Tracker pretty much wore a lot of that. He is listed as a traditional owner in the claim, with his brothers. So he was heavily involved in the whole thing. Life is life and it is pretty rough. It took a long time and we got through it all. I think Tracks is very proud of what finally happened but it was a long-winded process. A lot of problems come with it.
Tracker Tilmouth
At the end of the day you can say, Righto! We just paid five million dollars for a cattle station that my family owned for forty thousand years. We had to pay five million to get it back. We did not get it back because the government still owns it, still runs it, and if it comes across [as land returned to the traditional landowners] it would be run by the Land Council anyway, which is the government. I do not want to enter into a false pretence of land ownership. So do not invite me. I said the insult to injury is the five million dollars that we had to pay because someone stole it off us in the first place. We have land rights today from Gough Whitlam, and we paid millions of dollars for land that we already owned.
All the court cases! All those poor people out there who had to go and bare their souls in front of judges who knew nothing about them. And today, still know nothing about them. So I declined the offer [to go to the official handback of Alcoota to the traditional owners]. I was glad they missed me out. They actually missed out inviting me. The Central Land Council forgot to put me on the list and I bought the property as director. Rossy and Avery left me off the list.
I thought it would be good to get an invite at least. They gave Willie an invite. He went. He does not share my understanding of the process. Never got an invite and I bought the place. Rossy mob went. They only got put down because Willie put their name down [on the claimants list] for old Don Ross. Nothing against that. Ask Nugent. Ask Rossy. Did Tracker ever get an invite to go to Alcoota? It is run by the government. The Indigenous Land Corporation runs it. The traditional landowners are on the board. There is one white bloke on the board from Ti Tree. I did not want to run cattle.
I know all the stories. Got it all. Mount Bleechmore and all that country, New Well, Rabbits Rock, I named all the sacred sites. Drove all over that country with Petrick Mob and the Tilmouth mob, old Kenny, Walter Dixon, all them blokes, old Dave Ross. I know it all backwards. That is it. Right down to the border and Loves Creek because I knew all about it.
William Tilmouth
Tracker was really good in a scrap as a driver. I remember one time when we went out to the land claim, this was the Alcoota land claim and that is our traditional country, our father’s country. And there was a move to put Alcoota under the Anmatjere Council which was run by another family member, and that family member was listening to the Country Liberal Party who were totally against Aboriginal land claims and Tracker and I went out there.13 Tracker was the director of the Central Land Council and really he should not have gone out, it was a direct conflict of interest.
But we went out there and to this meeting, and the meeting started turning violent because this guy who is family of ours, started getting aggressive because people were listening to Tracker, and people were listening to me. They could see the sense of what we were saying. We were saying that we are not Anmatyerre, we are Eastern Arrernte and that is a fact, that is the truth, we are not Anmatyerre and so why should we be under Anmatjere Council, we are Eastern Arrernte mob. And our Alcoota is right on the boundary of three different groups, Alyawarre, Anmatyerre and Eastern Arrernte – but it is on the Eastern Arrernte side.
So that debate was going on and this guy wanted to [fight], he had boomerangs and everything, and he was jumping around. It was a rainy day, so I said, Come on Tracker, we’ll go down to the station, so we jumped into the Toyota and we drove off. The car, the Toyota was just spinning and sliding in the mud, and that bloke had a Toyota too and he followed us. And I said, Here, pull over Tracker, we’ve got to deal with this. So we pulled up and I jumped out, and Tracker jumped out his side and we started to walk over to his Toyota and the guy jumped back in and drove back to the community. So we followed him back. And there he was jumping around with boomerangs and everything for Tracker. And Tracker was wild but he had to contain himself. He was fuming. He was really angry and you could see it. He really wanted to do something about it right or wrong.
This was twenty-five years ago when the land claim was first being negotiated. Tom Webb [then owner of Alcoota Pastoral Lease] said to the traditional owners, You might want this, if you want it say yes and I will get ATSIC to buy it for you, and they said yes. So all of a sudden Alcoota was coming under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. Tom Webb could not see the value of that, but Tom Webb got paid out handsomely in the end. He has passed away now, but he was very familiar with the people, he knew the people, he could even speak the language, so Tom was not alien to the people, but the Country Cattlemen’s Association did not like him for it. He said stuff them, if these old people want it, they can have it, they need to have it back and I am going to give them first option.
Anyway we left the meeting and you could see Tracker was fuming and it was very quiet driving back. The roads were all wet and on some of those outback roads they put gypsum on and when the gypsum gets wet it is like soap. Tracker was starting to fly along, then all of a sudden a big corner came and we lost it and – Ah! Straight through the scrub at full speed, he did not slow down. Ah! Go on. Give it to em bruz. Give it to them. I had nothing else to say. I knew he was going to tear his way out of it and I tell you what, he controlled that vehicle at full speed and missed a few trees. Just full speed, he was just full concentration and that Toyota was going sideways and everything, and we come back onto the road and he just held it and kept going, but by Jesus, I turned white.
You could see that driving skill come out of him. All of a sudden he had to be serious and when he got serious, by Jesus, we were lucky to be alive, but it was his skill that got us out. Because as we came off the side of the road, it was all wet, it was really soaked and boggy and he did not slow down one iota, just whacked it back.
David Ross
One of the other really personalised attacks that he had is probably not on public record but I am going to tell you this. I think it was when I was a part-time ATSIC commissioner and also the full time CLC director and we tried to acquire Angas Downs from the Liddle family, and they had a lot of debt. ATSIC had approved the purchase, the figure I cannot remember but within ATSIC and government authorities, they always give you ten per cent up or down the market price.
Tracker had been talking with the family and doing the deals, and Lorraine Liddle [a lawyer, and daughter of Arthur and Bess Liddle] had somehow been acting as a legal person for the family, and we were having a Land Council meeting up at Mistake Creek and I got a phone call, Lorraine wanted to talk to the chairman, Mr Breaden, who was her uncle, a brother to her mother. Tracker had grown up with them at Angas Downs after he had come back from Darwin.
So he was very much part of the family. It really took a toll on Tracker at that time, quite a heavy toll. It was very much personalised, and it was like he was outcast from the family. It was not nice to see all this. That was one of the sad parts about people not understanding the business that they are dealing with. And when you have got someone from the other end who has very good knowledge of these things, very good knowledge of cattle, negotiating these sorts of things, it was a terrible thing to see. We see all the other sides of Tracker, but I have seen this side that a lot of people do not know about.
It was because people do not understand, we could not pay any more money. The price was set, it was market value, you have valuations done and ATSIC will go ten per cent higher or lower, that was it. And as I say, we had to hold up the Land Council meeting for a number of hours because she insisted that the chairman ring her directly. So the old bloke, old Breaden, drives all the way up there to Mistake Creek homestead to ring her up. This was days before we had satellite phones and all this, you had to go and use the landline. So he went there to talk to her. It was not going to make any difference, but we held up the Council meeting for three or four hours while all this took place. And it was all personalised and pointed back to Tracker, because he had grown up with that family and was very much a part of that family structure. It knocked him around. He would not admit to it, but I know it knocked the shit out of him for a long time.
They would not sell us the property. They ended up selling it to the Imanpa community somehow, who got some money, and as far as I know they still have control of that property. We were still in the time limit to run a land claim on it, and it could have been Aboriginal freehold. That is the sorry part about the whole thing. The money was there and the moment we could have purchased it, the old people would have had some money in the bank. But the longer it went, the higher their debt, and they ended up with very little in the bank. That is life. That is the way it goes. We did everything we possibly could to give those old people as much as we could in terms of the valuation.
These are some of the downsides as I say, that a lot of people do not know and have never seen and probably never heard of.
Steve Ellis and Lawrie Liddle
Steve: I did not really meet Tracker until I came to work with the Central Land Council. I knew who he was when he was playing football and I can remember a few things about him and his old Land Rover. He would pull up and start talking about Angas Downs, remembering his training there for five years. But I did not really get to meet Tracker until I worked for the Land Council. He was assistant director then.
The biggest thing that I reckon started with Tracker and me was the purchase of Mistake Creek. Colesy and Tracker were going up there to talk to the owner, then all of a sudden they said, Why don’t you come with us too. We flew up there and had a look around the place and I did not even know what was going on. And then all of a sudden, yes, they were negotiating with Gary Dann to buy the place. So that was my first big thing. There have been other pastoral properties later on, but that was my first big thing. And of course Tracker and I had to go back the following year once they had worked out the deal and did the bangtail muster.
One thing I will give Tracker, you could not take away his knowledge of the cattle game. He knew the ins and outs of the cattle game, not only the ground stuff, I am talking all the stuff that goes with it. People could find it surprising because coming from the Land Council, what would he know? But he was across the board with the whole lot. The whole cattle industry, everything. And that was part of the reason why Mistake Creek is running so successfully. Because of the way he and Colesy set it up to start with, it was just set up right – no problems, so it would not fall down, even though the Land Council do not have much to do with it now.
Lawrie: Yes, this came from working at Angas Downs with my father, he also went across to Mount Ebenezer, and in those days they used to have a motel as well so you did motel work and you did pastoral work.
You got to know how business works through dealing with tourism and government operators every day, and road workers. It was a fairly varied cross-section of the way the world works.
He was sort of like the green-eyed boy with my parents. I do not know why, but it was his personality and he was pretty easy to like.
Not long after, I came to the Land Council, when the regionalisation plan was being put into place to have regional offices of the CLC in the scrub. Tracker put a lot of work into making sure that plan worked. The other thing was what to do with the start-up of the CLC pastoral unit, which was dealing with pastoral concerns in the bush with the traditional owners. Tracker put a lot of time and effort into that.
Steve: I do not know if I should say this but maybe it is time that he heard it. Tracker said to me once the Land Rights Act is coming to an end, we have got all this land, now we have got to go and do something with the land. Not so much to try and get more, we have got to do stuff with the land that we have now. And then he turned around and left. I can understand why he left but as soon as he left I think it went backwards.
I was a little bit pissed off but when I think about it I can understand he wanted to get things done for himself. In a lot of ways I was sort of pissed off and thinking, He has got this up to this stage and now, as far as I could see it, he is letting it all down . You could see after he left that he had been the driving force behind it, and it was going to go down, and in my opinion it has. Whether that is right or wrong I do not know. I know he really tried to get things going on the Aboriginal-owned pastoral leases because Mistake Creek and Alcoota were a success. He wanted them to feed off those other two places, and to build themselves up from there.
Lawrie: When they started off CAAPA, Central Australian Aboriginal Pastoralist Association, apart from one person all of the directors were people from these newly acquired properties, namely Mistake Creek, Alcoota, Loves Creek, Ti Tree, and Mount Allan, Mount Wedge and all of those places, and Tracker actually started a meatworks processing plant at Amoonguna. Vertical integration is what he wanted.
Steve: Tracker had a lot of good ideas but it was not easy for him. I think if he had a little bit more support a lot of these things would be working right now. They would be a lot better than what they are right now.
One of Tracker’s strategies that I remember was when we were both in the regional office out at Atula at a Council meeting, and the Native Title Act was just coming in, and he was trying to explain what was happening to the Council. You have to draw pictures which is the easiest way to get information across, so he just drew a line and said this [side of the fence] is the white people and mining companies, and [on the other side of the line is] the Aboriginal Land Rights Act and Aboriginal land. At the moment under the Land Rights Act, he said, there is one gate in that fence, and it is a big fence with one gate so everybody has got to come down [to the gate] and the CLC sits there like a big cheeky dog. Then he explained that under the new Native Title Act there are gates everywhere in the fence where they have busted holes, so they can come in anywhere and the law itself is like a spider, it has got all these legs and the government pulls a leg off, and pulls another leg off, and in the end you have got this spider with no legs so he cannot do anything.
You could see these people, the delegates [from remote areas all over Central Australia] actually pick up on what he was saying. It was not just saying, Under the Native Title Act this is what will happen and under the Land Rights Act this is what happens. It just goes over their heads. By doing things like that, they could understand. I asked him how he thought at a meeting. He said, I just look at the people and I think how they are dressed, if they have got hats on, if they have got jeans, so I try and use something that they will relate to when I am trying to explain something to them. I said to him that was really smart, because I had heard a lot of lawyers and people talking at these meetings and they have not got a clue how to talk to those people. Lawrie and I were just sitting down and giggling to ourselves about this spider with the legs going off in every direction. He communicated by telling a story that could get them to understand what he was trying to say.
Lawrie: I suppose this way of communicating by telling a story goes back before modern technology had come up into that part of the country such as TV, commercial radio, and all the other stuff that goes along with it. You were lucky if there was one telephone in the street. So you had to be pretty good at yarn-spinning, otherwise life would be pretty boring, so you have always got your own little collection of yarns you like to tell. In the bush, the mail delivery was, if you were lucky, once every two weeks by air. We barely had any radio reception, no commercial radio, nothing, I think that did not come until the 1970s. The reception did not last for long, it was only a couple of hours and after that just static. So you had to be able to tell a yarn or lie pretty well. During the workday you would always find something amusing that you could build on later at night to make it worse, or make it better.
Steve: I think Tracker was trying to make all these places work, so the traditional owners could make a little bit of money off them and live on the land and do what they really wanted to do. Ninety per cent of them were people that came from the pastoral industry, so they could have employment and do their own thing. You are not going to be the next Kidman or anything like that, but just have enough and, if they had small killer herds, they could sell them to the abattoir if it had gone ahead. And for a fair price. And then you were not shipping, because you were only selling a small number, and there would be no freight costs of shipping into town. It would have taken different steps, and when the cattle were sold it would generate the money to be able to pay back people to buy the cattle the following year. And also to help them breed their herd and get up to scratch like other pastoral properties, having good bulls and things like that. I think that was Tracker’s long-range plan, from hearing him talk about different things at different times. But the problem was, he just did not have enough support. Not so much with us, we were going to support him, but higher-ups and from government.
Lawrie: Even with the meatworks at Amoonguna there were all sorts of barriers, with the Department of Health and quarantine, and cleanliness and hygiene. It just got harder, and harder, and harder, so in the finish they said leave it .
Steve: Later on he was going to try and set up an abattoir in a central place where you would get the contracts from the stores. You would kill the animals there and farm them out to all the community stores. The trouble with meat, a lot of the meat is rubbish. I think he had thought about all this earlier on, but it was a long-range plan.
After I went over to Calton Hills I had only been back a couple of months [in Alice Springs], and at the old greenhouse [Land Council office] down there at Hartley Street, he said to me, Oh! You’ve got to catch a plane tomorrow, you’re going to Mount Isa . I just said, Yeah. There was nothing planned or anything, but he said, You’ve got to be there tomorrow, by the weekend. So what do you do, you go. But it was good, and I made a mate of that old [Kalkadoon traditional landowner] bloke there, and he turned out to be a good friend of mine, and the Dunns [former owners], they were good people. But if it was not for Tracker I would not have got to meet them.
Lawrie: Even at times when we went over to the Gulf of Carpentaria for that mining meeting, that was spur of the moment. He said, We’re leaving tomorrow. He said, Make sure you’ve got enough clothes to last two or three days because I’m not sure when we’ll be back. So five or six of us jump on this charter and went to Lawn Hills, and there was a major mining meeting with the mob that wanted to mine the land. We spent a couple of days there arguing, and wheeling and dealing with the mining companies and the traditional owners. And from there we come back to Alice Springs. He said, Go home and have a shower because you’re going to Canberra. Same day.
When we went down to Canberra, Tracker said to this young fella, Hey! I need you to take my staff up through the building, Parliament House, take them for a tour. This young fella said, I don’t work for this Tracker. He thinks he’s my boss. And out of that little trip you’ve got Laurie Brereton and Nick Bolkus, and we took them through the Tanami, and up through Darwin to Mistake Creek. He had been on them for a long time to come up and have a look. That was all part of another scheme that Laurie told me about. Tracker wanted me to come and do this for a long time. It was all about pastoralism on Aboriginal land.
It was about business with Tracker. In another time, in another place, he probably would have been a top businessman, because once people got past, That’s Tracker!, and actually listened to what he had to say, you forgot about his joking. He carried on but after a while it clicked that this bloke is terribly, terribly smart. You actually listened to what he had to say.
Steve: One funny story that I can remember which happened only a couple of years ago at a Central Land Council meeting at Tennant [Creek], and Tracker rang me from down at the BP service station there, so I went down and picked him up and when we came back out of the council meeting, it was lunch time. And you know Ned Hargraves [Warlpiri traditional landowner from Yuendumu], how he has got a limp? So Tracker walks up to get a feed and Ned looks back and did not recognise him. He walks up there and being Tracker, he called out, Ned Hargraves, I’ll fight you any time you like. Old Ned took a step back. I am sure that gammy leg straightened up and then he looked around and said, Tracker you, you mongrel. All he had heard was his name and fight you anytime you like, and it sort of shocked him.
He livened people up. Well! Him and old Max Stuart were a good combination during the Land Council meetings when things were starting to get slow, and old Max would get up and he was chairman, and he would say to Tracker, Oh! Son, we’re going to go and look for a new mummy for you tonight. And just when things were getting slow them two would start and wake people up, they were good.
Lawrie: I remember the story about Tracker saying he had a letter from NASA asking Land Council delegates to volunteer to be sent into orbit. He said, You know what, I will just show you how much attention these people pay to me at these meetings. So Tracker is talking and he says, We have a new program coming up and I want some volunteers, who wants to go into orbit? One old bloke puts his hand up and he says, I want to go into orbit. I’ll go. Tracker says, See what I mean. Lovely old bloke too. Yeah! Into orbit. He asked, You’re going to turn into a spaceman?
Tracker Tilmouth
With Loves Creek it was pretty straightforward. We [the Central Land Council] had offered to buy Loves Creek and every time we went in there to make a price, the price kept going up. Loves Creek was a good place to get some of the Santa Teresa people back onto their country, like the Ryder families and the Bloomfields, and what we did was to end up with a bidding process. One was Danny Schwartz out of Melbourne, and Ross Ainsworth out of Darwin, with both bidding against each other, and they took the price higher than expected and the property agent said, We’re getting prices from one bloke in Darwin who wants to buy it, and another bloke in Melbourne who wants to buy it. And I said, Oh! Yeah…And so they priced it higher and outbid the Central Land Council. They said, We are going to go with one of these blokes out of Melbourne or Darwin, this is the bid. I said, Oh! We can’t match that. And then there was a hiccup in the pastoral industry, on live export or something like that, and so Ainsworth dropped his price, and Danny Schwartz dropped his price, and they kept dropping their prices until it was below the Central Land Council price. So we went in there and bought it. We organised it that way. We got Loves Creek for a good figure, because we knew the minute we put our hand up that the price would go through the roof, so we organised that through the Aboriginals Benefit Account and the Central Land Council. There were no other deals done like that that I know of. Mistake Creek was straightforward. They were in financial trouble.
Owen Cole
One of the biggest arguments I had with Tracker was at Atula Station. We had purchased that pastoral lease and then it was a question of what happened to it before the sunset clause in the Land Rights Act prevented it being put through the land claim process. And Tracker mob from the Land Council rocked up at a meeting and Sandy Taylor, an Aboriginal lady, had got there beforehand and the meeting had started at nine o’clock. He had rocked up at about ten o’clock, as they were camped further away or something, and she had convinced the mob there to put the station under Northern Territory legislation. So I said, Tracker you can’t blame her, she’s only doing her job, and if you people had got up early like you should have and got there at the right time…You can just imagine he wanted to kill me, so we are sitting down at Mistake Creek at old Jack Cook’s place actually, and Tracker was abusing me, You are nothing but a blah blah blah. I said, Look you got done over by a female, an Aboriginal one at that. She beat all your lawyers. I was really shit-stirring. Next minute he jumped up and he said, I’m gonna shoot you, you bastard. So he grabbed a gun – he had his stock inspector’s licence and he comes out with a gun. So I said, Go on, fire away. Go right ahead, do your damage. He smiles, puts the gun down and says, You’re nothing but a big-lipped bastard.
So him and I used to have a fight and the next time was in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and we were up there talking about training and employment and enterprise development. We are in the back of the car and we were arguing and of course all these Carpentarian mob had never expected something like this. We were supposed to be working together and there was this big bloody argument. Next minute, Go on! You are throwing punches. They were saying, You mob are bloody mad. I said, This is par for the course. This is the sort of relationship we have. Go on hook me, I will hook you. So. Okay, good. We had a lot of arguments.
I remember when we purchased Mistake Creek and you had to be careful with the bangtail muster with the cattle. This was one of the times when we could not get the legal section to quickly draw up the agreement to organise the muster. So I drew up the agreement and tossed it to them and they fixed it up quickly. I said to Tracker, You’ve got to sign these papers every day, do the count, ear tags, the whole works and you’ve got to put it on this form and get both parties to sign it. So, Yeah no worries, that’s good bro.
So I shooed off, and I was only up there for a couple of days and he was doing the muster which went about five or six weeks or something, and anyhow, I come back and I said, Where are those tally sheets, and he said, I’ve got it here. And he opens up his diary and he has it all written in pencil, see. I said, That’s not worth the paper you use to wipe your arse with. I mean if we got into a legal battle or a legal fight what were we going to do, show your handwritten notes. So him and I were shaping up to one another. I spent all that time organising this thing, making sure it was legally watertight and you go and do that. He went, Oh! Yeah, dickhead, you wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know one end of the bullock from the other. Which is true. But anyhow, I remember that.
We were supposed to have so many cattle, say there were fifteen thousand, and we done the bangtail muster, and from one paddock alone there was a photo that Tracker had where the cattle were strung out from next to the road to beyond the horizon. They got something like fifteen thousand from one paddock. No one had ever mustered it before. So that was the only time when Aboriginal people actually ended up with a hell of a lot more cattle than what we actually purchased.
That was one of Tracker’s little triumphs upon acquiring the property with fifteen thousand cattle that no one had ever mustered before. Before that I can remember he said, We’ve got to get down to that country, to the southern country. I said, Okay. So we hopped into the Toyota and were driving along next to the place up there – Kununurra – and when it rains it pours. There were all these little gullies, ten metres wide by ten metres deep, and Tracker goes, We’ve got to get across it. I said, I’m not driving.
He said, Well! You walk and I’ll do it. Tracker was mad enough, and he goes down and he comes up while I was running, and he would go to the next one and he would go down it again. No wonder they never mustered it properly because it was almost impossible to muster. I basically ran the whole southern boundary with Tracker driving, and every now and then you would get two hundred metres and jump in the car and go to the next one. That was the type of bloke he was. No one else would have driven the Toyota down those gullies. That was the paddock where he picked up all those cattle. Anyone would have said, Nah! Let’s use a helicopter or fly over it, but not Tracker.
He drove the whole boundary, and saw how many cattle were still in the gullies that had not been branded and so forth, and he said, When we purchase this property, first thing I’m going to do is go out there and do a thorough muster of that paddock.
I can remember driving along the road there and the next minute I saw this helicopter come up beside me. There was the pilot with his hands up, and there was Tracker controlling the helicopter. He was flying this friggin’ helicopter. Of course he did not know how to, but he had seen the pilot and said anyone can do this.
James Nugent
I had some interesting experiences flying around the country and Tracker used to enjoy that. I remember going to a meeting in Burketown and coming away with Tracker in the right seat, and a very large fish strapped into the back seat. A big fish, it completely occupied a seat in the back of the plane. I think he must have got it from Mornington Island.
I remember coming back once, again it might have been in a little twin, and of course Tracker was saying, Tell everybody I can fly Nuge, and that was always good fun. We were coming back across the Tanami and I had decided that I would use the fuel in the tip tanks until they were almost exhausted before changing to the main fuel tanks, and of course Tracker and I got talking and at some point one of the engines started surging and then cut out, and Tracker went from calm and just chatting about things to, Jesus Christ Nugent what are we going to do?
It’s alright, hang on. I changed fuel tanks and got the engine going again. Tracker was quiet for about the next twenty minutes which I don’t think I have ever heard in my life. I was guilty, but I had a slight grin on my face. Then we got back on the ground and he proceeded to tell everyone how I had nearly killed him in the plane.
One time he wanted to land the plane, but as soon as Owen had said, Righto! Tracker that’s enough, now just hand it back, Tracker of course would not let it go. He was sort of looking over his shoulder going, Look! Look Colesy! I’m going to land the plane, here I go. He got reasonably far along the way and Colesy said, Nugent! You just take it over. But Tracker would not let go. He just had to keep ribbing Colesy about it, it was too good a joke for Tracker.
Owen Cole
Another time we went out to Ikuntji where there was a smart-arse community advisor, and Tracker and I were there to meet with the Council. We were standing up there waiting for about thirty minutes and we said, Have you spoken to the chairperson, we need to talk to him and some of the Council members, and he turned around and said something along the lines, Why don’t you shiny-arses get back to Alice Springs and do something productive, or something like this. Anyhow, I said, What did you just say? He repeated what he had just said, so I jumped the counter and I grabbed his hair, and I said, You ever say that again I am going to shove your head up your bum and knock your front teeth out. Tracker was standing there and we go outside, and he said, Totally unprofessional, Owen. I said, I felt like thumping the bloke talking to us like that. Tracker said, You don’t go and do that type of thing.
Anyhow about a month later we were there again with Neil Bell, who was the parliamentarian for MacDonnell Ranges region, and Tracker was having this discussion with the same bloke and he was being sarcastic and rude to Tracker. So next minute, I saw Tracker drop his left shoulder and whack, and he knocked this bloke. And Neil Bell, he was trying to be the perfect gentleman and he tried to stop Tracker by saying, Come on, come on, and I said to him, Tracker, I thought you said this was totally unprofessional behaviour, and he said, Shut your mouth or I will give you one. Different circumstances, same action. Whack.
You know we used to be a pretty volatile sort of bunch and we wore our hearts on our sleeve, and sometimes, we did not put up with fools that well, and there were a lot of fools out there on those communities. Some funny stories I tell you.
12. After eleven years of dispute, the Northern Territory Court of Appeal on 26 August 2003 dismissed a claim made by the Alcoota Aboriginal Corporation – which was made up of Arthur Turner, the station proprietor, and a traditional owner – that the purchase of the station by the Central Land Council on behalf of the traditional owners was illegal. Mr Turner declared that consent had not been sought, and challenged the acquisition in court with financial backing of the former CLP government. The court’s decision finally freed up the official land claim process to return this land to Aboriginal title under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. The process was finalised with the handing back of title to the Alyawarre and the Anmatyerre peoples as the traditional owners of the land under the Alcoota land claim No. 146, in July 2012.
13. Anmatjere is another way of spelling Anmatyerre.