Tracker Tilmouth
Of all the Aboriginal academics and leaders the one who I found was way out ahead of everybody was Mick Dodson. Compared with other lawyers, Mansell and Mick are the two outstanding ones, because the law as far as they were concerned, and as far as I understood, the law is a way of measuring white blokes’ intentions.
There is a whole degree of other social agendas that need to be linked in to the legal argument of the day, and Dodson was an absolutely compassionate man. In fact every time you saw him, you could see the burden of the responsibility sitting on him and it did not sit well. But there was no doubting his commitment or his compassion towards Aboriginal people, and the rights of Aboriginal people. There was absolutely no doubt and he would vigorously defend that, even though a lot of people misunderstood what his agenda was towards the Aboriginal people. But if you knew Mick Dodson like I knew him, he was one of the foremost leaders that I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
Even now I might criticise him a bit but that was all for the game as far as Mick was concerned. He did not mind you having a go at him as long as you understood that his integrity and compassion and his ability to defend Aboriginal rights was not impeded. And he fought vigorously to maintain that position. As fighters for Aboriginal rights, you always had Charlie Perkins with his political agendas, you had Michael Mansell with legal agendas, and then you had Mick Dodson with both, political and legal. Dodson lived and breathed this every day of the week and he did so since I first ran into him. As far as I was concerned he was an absolutely brilliant bloke.
I met him years ago before he ran the Northern Land Council. I knew him in Katherine when he lived in Katherine. I knew who he was. You did not really get to know Mick until you worked with him and I worked with him in the UN. I worked with him at Geneva and elsewhere.
We are extremely good friends and he has always been someone that I could count on at any time to give good advice, and he was always brilliant with his advice. Mansell as far as I am concerned is one of the foremost lawyers in Aboriginal society today. He has always had the ability to talk to the common person. Mansell never has airs and graces and yet he is absolutely brilliant on his legal opinion. He does not murder the English language or play to a non-Indigenous audience like some Aboriginal people whose speech is to the white people who think they are absolutely brilliant. They are not worried about what they are saying, they are worried about how they are saying it, and they judge them accordingly. They like that, because they are up there – and can use bigger words than the white blokes can. Whereas Mansell, if he wanted to say something, Mansell would say something in very plain English and straightforward, and it is meant for the Aboriginal community – this is what I am talking about.
And so when you compare Aboriginal leadership – I am biased because I am a Centralian Aboriginal, and the leadership in the north, in the Northern Land Council and in the north in general, has never had the leaders as we have had. And you have got everyone from Wenten Rubuntja, Charlie Perkins, Bruce Breaden, and Rexy Granites and Harry [Jakamarra] Nelson from Yuendumu, both highly educated, prominent Warlpiri activists and traditional landowners, and former executive members of the Central Land Council. Mr Nelson was also a chairman of the Combined Aboriginal Nations of Central Australia. Also, Kumantjayi Zimran from Kintore.25 Mr Gunner from Utopia. Those sort of blokes. You never get those sort of people in Darwin, or in the North.
The Top End leaders did not have this ability to incorporate young people into the debate so there is no Breaden, Wenten, or Smithy, or any of those old senior men. They would make sure that you understood your role, and they would say: This is our message, and you take the message. Right! They would say: We don’t need to debate it, we don’t need you to tell us what you’re thinking, we will give you instructions on how you deliver the message and what points you make. They were able to do that quite easily in the Centre. So Rossy and I were only two young blokes and we had our own political agendas, but at the end of the day, the people who called the shots were the senior men in the Central Land Council. That still remains today. In the north though, I cannot for the love of me see any relationship between the senior level of the Land Council, their workers, and the communities they are supposed to be servicing. There is no connection, in fact there is a disconnect.
This is historical because the Northern Land Council was the bureau of the Northern Land Council, where you had an administrative arm that was separate from the Council when it was first formed. Whereas, in the Central Land Council, the Council had direct links to the administration. So they have had that historical process to deal with.
The non-Indigenous community, especially in the north, had this perceived idea: that when we are talking to Aboriginals, we are talking to the full blacks, and mission blacks. We weren’t talking to the urbans, or Stolen Generation, or anyone else for that matter. They were the half-castes and the coloureds. In fact, a lot of Aboriginal people in Darwin classified themselves as Sri Lankan to get passed. I remember a number of people that I went to school with who turned out to be Larrakia in later life, who were actually classified as Sri Lankans or Malaysians at school and classified themselves as such, and they kept away from Aboriginal communities at school. They were not recognised and did not want to be recognised by the Aboriginal community.
This was the problem with the Larrakia native title claim in my opinion, where there was a duplicity in identification of native title holders, where a lot of the people who did front as native title holders were not, and never did classify themselves as Aboriginal in my day. I remember who they were and they know I remember who they were because I was there. So you had this situation in the Top End that was perpetrated by community advisors and everybody else – that the urban blacks and the coloureds were not real blacks, they were imitation white people. I managed to escape that process because when I came in from Croker Island and went to high school we were classed as mission blacks. I was a blackfella from Croker Island – Minjilang. We had a different classification, and a lot of the urban blacks as far as we were concerned, we were not part of their clique. They had this distinct thing that flowed on from the Retta Dixon days, to the Kahlin Compound, and everything else. So you had the continuation of ‘coloured’ and urban blacks being discriminated against by non-Indigenous community advisers, white people, government services, government agents, and also being discriminated against by full-blood Aboriginals.
They were in no man’s land. Then along comes the land councils, the Northern Land Council for example, where there was the [historical] disconnect inside the Aboriginal world of urban blacks versus bush blacks or community blacks, and that was reflected by the chairpersons of the Northern Land Council. There has never been a half-caste, or a coloured person, or a woman of any stature within the Northern Land Council. All the chairpersons of the Northern Land Council came from East Arnhem, or Arnhem Land itself, except for Gerry Blitner who came from Ngukurr, but very few others ever got up to be chairperson.
Arnhem Land is a world of its own. East Arnhem is a fiefdom of its own. West Arnhem to a certain extent, and then you have got the middle, Central Arnhem which is Maningrida, and they have their own processes as well. If there was a breakaway land council in any upcoming debate with the Northern Territory Government and the [Abbott] federal government – the Liberal government – it would not be hard to draw the boundary of the breakaway Land Council. All you have to do is anything south of Pine Creek – Pine Creek south, and Elliott north, and west and east.
This would be the new land council very easily because the political debate in that area would suggest that there is no connection at all with services from the Northern Land Council, or if there are services, it is very limited. There is no real debate and this has been the problem all along. And now we have the situation evolving where the Northern Land Council has to work out how to keep itself together without being split up. Unfortunately, the Northern Territory Land Rights Act is a single act and there is no difference between how it operates in the CLC area or the NLC area. So the CLC by default will also get split up. And it will be all because of the NLC’s inability to service its clientele and its constituents. This is the dilemma that Rossy and people like that will face in the future when it comes to the debate in relation to what do we do with the Land Rights Act.
You have got to remember again, and it is going back to the original position [of property rights], the Land Rights Act is a political process, a political act, and has nothing to do with law. The Aboriginal people do not own the land, it is owned by the Commonwealth, and all the titles to the land are held in Canberra, and you cannot rent or lease or do anything with the land without permission of the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, or the person responsible, which is the Commonwealth. So you hold Aboriginal land freehold in brackets, in trust, and then you have the Commonwealth statutory bodies which are the Central and Northern Land Councils, Anindilyakawa Land Council [covering Groote Eylandt], and the Tiwi Land Council, holding that land in trust for the Aboriginal traditional landowners that administer their land on behalf of the Commonwealth. Their funding comes from consolidated revenue through the Aboriginals Benefit Account to fund their services, so as a Commonwealth statutory body, they have no responsibility as an Aboriginal organisation. Their role and responsibilities are pretty well defined and many a time the management of the Central Land Council tried, and I tried on more than one occasion, to morph it into an Aboriginal organisation. It was very difficult, and I fell foul of some of the lawyers within the Central Land Council by trying to achieve that. This all started with the debate about Aboriginal sovereignty, CANCA, Aboriginal government and everything else, including the Kalkaringi Statement, to try and say that we are not a Commonwealth statutory body, we are there to support Aboriginal self-determination. And that went sideways at a hundred miles an hour because it was too difficult for some of those senior bureaucrats within government, but also, some of the senior bureaucrats within the Central Land Council itself.
They said, Well! Your role and responsibility is determined by the Land Rights Act, paragraph this, clause whatever. But! I said, Yeah that’s wonderful, but there’s no debate, and there’s no discussion about the enjoyment of land rights in the Land Rights Act. If you take out Part IV which is the mining provisions, there is nothing worth reading in the Land Rights Act. And so the debate went on and on within the Central Land Council and wore me down, it wore me down, and in the end I thought, Well! Reap what you sow.
And this is the process that also happened within the Northern Land Council. The senior bureaucrats of the Northern Land Council decided that they would stick with the rules and the most compliant political process was the appointment every year and every election, of the chairman coming from East Arnhem. Now there is no political militancy or agenda coming out of East Arnhem and there never will be while I am alive, because now they are royalty receivers and they should do very well out of it, but the social indicators suggest that they do not do socially well out of it. And so you have this situation that is going to come to pass in relation to the closure of the Gove aluminium smelter and the source of the royalties. What happens then? Where are the economic programs after thirty years of three million dollars a year? There is nothing to show for it. Nothing to show for it, absolutely zero.
You have these situations evolving – whereas early in the Central Land Council area we said, Righto! If you get royalties, royalties are a provision for social programs within the community, and we dissuaded the use of royalties for payment to individuals. We managed to invest on behalf of the Aboriginal community most of their money, that is why Centrecorp was set up, that is why the royalty associations were set up, and this was how Centrefarm got set up.
Let’s go back past the royalties for mining and look at the enjoyment of land rights in its purest form. How do you enjoy being out there? What do you do when you are out there? What natural resources have you got to allow you to stay out there? These are the questions that the Central Land Council is dealing with through its community development section, but it may be too little too late, because the Intervention has come and gone, and they [the federal government] are looking for the next victim. The next victim is going to be [from the government asking]: Well! Who is impeding the individual? It is going to be the legal services, the social organisations like health services and the land councils that are all urban-based or centralised. So you have this debate that is going to go on and on, and when you go back through it all, go back to where it first started, the leadership within Aboriginal organisations is lacking, is lacking on having a grand plan of where we are in twenty years time, and what we will have achieved. No vision. We have no vision of where we should be.
What we have got is a situation where even the health services – and I found this quite alarming when I was at Congress and I had some medicine for some treatment and I went to pay for it, they said, No you don’t have to pay for it. I said, What do you mean I don’t have to pay for it? Oh! No, it’s free. I said, No, I earn x amount, I should be able to pay for it. They said, No we don’t do means tests. So any Aboriginal person earning a hundred and fifty grand a year, or your wife, your family and everybody else, you are earning quite a lot of money, you do not pay for your medicine. That is up here in [Darwin] at Danila Dilba Medical Service as well. There is no means testing on anyone walking through the door for their ability to pay for the medicine or the service. You wonder why the bill for the health services is going through the roof. You cannot afford that because it is Aboriginal money. If you are earning good money you should pay. If you are not earning good money, or you are unemployed, or you are disadvantaged, or have a disability, or are on a pension, whatever, well and good, get it for free. But if you are earning good money pay for it.
When you get those sorts of examples staring you in the face, you say: Well! Where is the political agenda, where is it going, if we can do this to our own mob then we have no responsibility to anyone. We have no clear understanding of our political agenda. We are there for the ride. That has been the problem, there are too many people having too many rides. You get the debate – I can sit down say with the executive of Congress, of which my brother is chair, and you can see the executive when you talk to them how they spruik the same policies and all the acronyms that go with it. But there is no agenda behind it. It is like turning on a tape recorder and you get the ad of Congress. All the right words in all the right places, but when you turn the tape off everything stops. There is no agenda. There is no debate. It is a spruik. They say that and then they get paid, and off they go home. And they say that is an Aboriginal organisation executive meeting.
Alexis Wright: How are people going to develop a vision?
Well! You can’t. Until we get another Smithy Zimran, or another lot of people out bush trying to lead the dispossessed and the disillusioned out of the urban centres, they are not going to get any more visions. People have run out of visions because the people that supported them and put forward the visions were not supported by the [Aboriginal] organisations.
The [Aboriginal] visions cut across the agendas of the entrenched ideologues, the white people that saw Aboriginal people as a captive audience. The last thing they want to do is have Aboriginal people escape. Escape through the fence and go into the paddock where you can dream the unthinkable dream. They were very worried for Aboriginal people, that democracy would break out, rather than guided democracy which we enjoy at the moment. The guided democracy is still in place. And so Aboriginal people do as they are told, when they are told, by whom they are told because they do not have any control over the finances. Anyone who says to me Aboriginal self-determination, I would say you really want to think about that statement before I hear it again. And so, this is why we need the Michael Dodsons and the Michael Mansells of the world, because Michael Dodson was probably one of the hardest thinkers on these issues. And when you get him by himself and you talk to him and understand him like I understand him, then he is worth listening to. And the same with Mansell. Mansell is brilliant. He can tell you straight up what he thinks, but you come back to the mainland, and everyone is bought and sold.
The Kimberley renaissance of Aboriginal activism has disappeared – it has gone sideways. All we have got now is young Wayne Bergmann [then director of the Kimberley Land Council] talking about resource development which is wonderful, but what is the rest of the community going to do? If you do it as an agenda for the community then you have to include the community. If you do it as an agenda for yourself then you are outside with every other white person and you forget your Aboriginality and go for broke. You cannot trade on your Aboriginality and say, Well I’m this or I am that, and then go off and expect to drink at the white man’s trough, because you are going to get shot one way or another. You are going to get shot by your mob and shot by the white blokes for doing it. This is the problem for these blokes who can be activists but only within a rarified environment. This is the greatest problem we have. We do not have clear lines of demarcation between self-interest and Aboriginal interest and that clouds the issue.
I do things differently. I have no problem in entering an economic debate or discourse with someone who is already in the industry, because our ability to understand the mining industry or resource development industry is pretty limited. I understand what they do, they dig holes and they mine, and they sell the materials overseas. That is the nuts and guts of it. But we do not know the finance exchange rate, we do not know what the spot market does, we do not know what shares do, we do not know what the stock market does in relation to share trading. We have no understanding of that. We do not know about paper profit versus real profit. We cannot understand a balance sheet. We do not know what the words CAPEX or OPEX are. So when we come to mining, we come to a cargo-cult mentality where the Toyota dream is at its best – If I’m smart I’ll get a Toyota out of this. We fight over the crumbs. The Toyota lasts two or three years at best, and someone rolls it because they are drunk and that is it, the end of our resources, rather than saying, Wouldn’t it be better if we put half the money away to invest, and with the other half, to send the kids to school to get educated in areas of land use and land management that we need, and let’s bring them back, let’s not send them off to government departments, let’s bring them back to the community and let them work here so that we do not need the CDEP bloke to go from CDEP to being the pastoral manager, or the administrator, who had only originally turned up to run an unemployment program. These are white blokes you would not normally employ anywhere else. But all of a sudden he is an administrator, or a community advisor. He has got this intelligence and all of this advice from osmosis, from reading books.
So we have this argument and I do not know to a certain extent where Noel Pearson is going. I do not think Noel Pearson knows. He is yet to paint the picture. I cannot understand what he writes. I do not have the grasp of the English language even though I have a science background, and if you talk to me about the four laws of thermal dynamics I can debate you. I can talk to you about land, anions and cations and exchange rates, I can talk to you about ionisation of clays, all that sort of stuff, but I cannot understand what Noel Pearson says. I cannot grasp what he is talking about. I have great difficulty understanding what Marcia [Langton] is talking about. It is all academic. I find it difficult to understand any of them. I know Mundine, his debate is pretty limited. His experience would suggest that he has limited exposure as well.
They appeal to the non-Indigenous society by the very nature of them being acceptable. They are not going to let the caffè latte curdle. They eat the right biscuits at the right time and use the right fork for the cheese. Their discourse can be in language that white people find amazing, that Aboriginal people use the English language better than they can. This is why the white people like them, because they know it is cheaper for the white blokes to have a mob of blackfellas discussing points of view without any effect, than actually getting out there and doing what needs to be done. It is too expensive to do what they need to do, so they would rather have a discourse with a mob of Aboriginal intellectuals, then find it comfortable to say that we have had the debate, and when you boil it all down, we do not know what we were talking about, so no one has to do anything.
You cannot have a social structure imposed on an Aboriginal society if they do not own the social structure. It is as simple as that. You can play with all the economics you like, you can pull the rabbits out of hats and do everything else, but unless the Aboriginal people own it and share in it, then it fades, and you fall into the same trap of the accused – just about every white community advisor I have known and worked with, who I have accused of parking jumbo jets on community air strips. It is wonderful, it is magnificent, but no one knows how to fly it, and if you did take off, you were definitely not going to land, you are going to crash and kill everyone in the community. So parking jumbo jets on community airstrips is what I try and avoid.
Murrandoo Yanner
Tracker knew most of the people in the Aboriginal struggle, white and black, famous people, whom I also met through him, and he was quick to point out their flaws but also their strengths. He said to me the first time I ever saw Michael Mansell when we were down at some big native title bill negotiation thing, the original native title bill, or the amendments down in Melbourne, and Mansell got up to talk and he leaned to me and whispered, You know the problem with Mansell? He seemed quite fascinating and intelligent, which Michael obviously is for Tracker to pay him this compliment when he said, His problem is he’s twenty years ahead of the rest of us. The things he is speaking about and the way he’s looking and he’s right, he’s talking about sea rights, and we’re still looking at land rights and things.
When I have seen Tracker and Marcia in the same room it was like throwing gunpowder and matches. I respect Marcia, she is a highly intelligent woman. I once saw a photo of her as a beautiful young woman, and obviously it took a lot of balls standing in the Brisbane mall lobbying for land rights in the Joh Bjelke-Petersen days. She was alone lobbying – no one was with her. She had to do it on her own. I think she is highly intelligent but she wastes all that by going with the established authority of the day, or by following Noelie [Noel Pearson]. She is smarter than Noelie, or as smart or more experienced. I have got a lot of respect for the woman but I have got to agree with Tracks that she could and should be contributing more on our side. I do not know where the thing comes from with them, but I have to agree with him that she scowls at the smell of him, let alone the sight you know. She hears his voice on the other side of the door and she would be smiling, and then it is like bang, the trap closes shut.
Absolutely, he would stir her up and I have seen him do that. He did not hold back on anyone, he would call a spade a spade.
Sean Bowden
He also learnt from Charlie Perkins, I have got no doubt. I spent a bit of time with Charlie, not the two of them together a lot because in my time they were in a little bit of conflict because Tracker was the director of the Land Council, and Charlie was trying to do things with the Land Council.
I think with Charlie, they were not his greatest days but he was just an incredible person, with incredible insight and knowledge, and very generous with that knowledge. I missed working with Charlie in his prime but I still got access to and learnt from this incredible person who was responsible for so much for Aboriginal people. But when I worked with him he was still Charlie and I know that without Charlie, Tracker and a lot of those guys would not have got a leg up into the world that they went to. Charlie used imagery brilliantly, and had lots of sayings. I think Tracker picked a few of those up along the way. And, like Charlie, I think his use of humour was an effort to not just become homicidal with rage. He used it well with politicians and again sometimes maybe he overused it, but it was a mechanism and it was the way he was able to walk into Robert Hill’s office, for instance, and have the four- or five-star generals vacate the room, as happened on one of our trips to Canberra.
There were so many Tracker quotes that it is difficult to nail them down. It was usually in this incredible narrative, in the incredible and quite unique way he spoke. One was about Trish Crossin who was at the biting end of one of Tracker’s best, or worst comments. Trish turned up at Big Bill Neidjie’s funeral, wearing a green dress with yellow sleeves. Tracker waited for his moment and said to her probably in a crowd of about fifteen or twenty people, Have a look at the wheelie bin over there. Ever since, Trish Crossin has been known in certain circles as ‘the wheelie bin’, to the point where people would ring up and say, That bloody wheelie bin. All because of Tracker.
Marcia Langton was always frustrated by Tracker for things like that. There was a very funny time, I was having a barbecue dinner with Noel Pearson and Marcia and a group of Yolngu people in Arnhem land. We were at a hotel and we pulled the barbecue out, and Noel and I were telling Tracker stories. It was very funny. We had had a hard day’s work. What about Tracker this? What about when he did this? What about when he did that? Marcia came roaring over in high dudgeon and said, You two are obsessed with that man. Noel and I looked at each other and almost at the same time said, Who’s obsessed?
But the thing is that Marcia, because she is hardcore operator, was reflecting that frustration that some of us had with Tracker, that he did not reach higher planes. Marcia was very fond of Tracker and had great affection for him, but she got frustrated that he was too glib at times, that he made the smart-alec remark at the wrong time, and sometimes at the expense of the wrong person.
Owen Cole
He used to also clash with a lot of the Aboriginal leaders – some of whom he used to call the intelligentsia, and I can always remember the time when I bumped into Marcia at the airport, and Marcia said to me, Your mate. I said, Yeah, which mate? She said, That Tilmouth bloke, he’s a misogynist. That was the first time I had ever heard the term misogynist and I said, What do you mean? She said, He hates women that bloke, and she told me that Tracker was interrupting her when she was making a speech at the conference. So I got the lecture of what a misogynist was on Tracker’s behalf. That was Marcia, and that was in the Canberra airport, and I popped into the plane and went to Sydney where I bumped into Olga Havnen at the Sydney airport, and Olga came up and called him misogynist as well.
When the occasion arose and he thought it necessary, he would sit down and make little comments while people were making their presentations, and they regarded it as being very abusive and disrespectful, but that was just Tracker. They hated him one minute and loved him the next I suppose. That was a relationship a lot of people had with him. So misogynist! Honestly I did not have a clue what it was, and then to get whacked twice within two hours.
And of course with Pat Turner that was the same. He would interrupt her while she was making speeches, and she used to get the shits with him as well, and then he would go, Hey! I’m only messing around with you, what ya getting serious for? They would say, You just rubbished me during my speech, and made snide remarks while I’m talking, Tracker. You’ve got no respect. Of course he would just say, Oh come on, you’re taking yourself too seriously.
Chris Athanasiou
Tracker was a complex person. He always accused me of over-analysing, so for once I will take his advice and briefly recount some of my experiences with him without trying to work out why he was the way he was.
I went to the Central Land Council in 1994 to work as a native title lawyer. Tracker was the director. Native title was a political issue at that time and this meant that I had a role in native title policy. This involved Tracker and that is how I got to know him. He had a considerable intellect and a quick wit. His ability to quickly grasp a situation, and place himself and his point of view into it, were evident from the outset.
I came to understand that ideas outside the norm were always bubbling to the surface with Tracker. Many people have enjoyed the experience of Tracker enthusiastically running his latest idea by them, usually ending in them being enlisted to help him make it work.
My first real taste of the way Tracker could completely change the feeling in a room was at a parliamentary inquiry into the Stolen Generation in 1995. The inquiry was taking evidence in Alice Springs. Everyone was looking serious, and rightly so. Tracker understood this more than anybody, but it got to the point where you could see that he wanted to break the ice. So he said, You know, I was probably the only one in the Stolen Generation – when they took me away everyone cheered and when I came back they all cried. The panel tried to consider what he said in all seriousness, but, of course, people started laughing. He then made a number of points, with the panel hanging on his every word. Mission accomplished. Because I was very new to it all, I looked at him and thought to myself: I think I’m in for an interesting ride here.
In 1995–96, some early problems with the Native Title Act drove the then Labor government towards amendments. The National Indigenous Working Group emerged, facilitated by ATSIC. Tracker supported this national response. Early work was done in developing Indigenous Land Use Agreements.
In 1996 the Commonwealth government changed and the High Court handed down the Wik decision. The former government’s proposed amendments were put aside and the government came forward with the Ten Point Plan.
At that time, there was also a push from the conservative Territory government to amend the Land Rights Act. The Central Land Council was opposing this. Our fundamental task with native title was to try to keep the native title rights as close to that of the Land Rights Act as we possibly could. It was good for native title holders, and Tracker’s concern was that the greater the gap between native title and the Land Rights Act, the more focus there would be on watering down the rights of Aboriginal people under the Land Rights Act.
Tracker was a significant force in the Ten Point Plan debate. People like David Ross, Mick and Pat Dodson, Peter Yu, Marcia Langton, Aden Ridgeway and Noel Pearson were all dominant.
Early on, Tracker had been prepared to trade off native title processes to secure recognition, economic development and heritage protection. Those were the keys to him, and he tried to move the National Indigenous Working Group to that position. He didn’t have the time to do so. It was a bridge too far and that was one of his disappointments. The agenda moved to: what can we salvage from the Native Title Act? The introduction of Indigenous Land Use Agreements as a viable alternative to agreements under the right to negotiate depended on it.
Tracker was always active behind the scenes. He would be working the room, working the leaders, working the politicians. He used humour to move things along. When a meeting became bogged down, he would size up the situation, find the humour in it, and out would come something incisive, funny and bordering on the absurd. It usually worked. People would stop being precious about a particular detail that didn’t matter in the greater scheme of things.
Tracker strongly supported the strategy of engaging on the issues through the Senate processes and this, I believe, was crucial to an outcome that tempered many of the negative changes that the government sought to impose through the Ten Point Plan.
In 1999, after the dust had settled on the Ten Point Plan, the Northern Territory tried to bring in its own native title regime. Native title holders faced having Territory magistrates decide their native title matters – not something that Tracker was at all keen on. The only way it could be stopped was through disallowance in the Senate. Independent Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine had the balance of power and his support was crucial to the Territory proposal. Senator Robert Hill was brought in by Prime Minister Howard to broker an outcome.
As had happened with the Ten Point Plan, Sydney barristers John McCarthy QC and Dr Jeff Kildea were brought in to advise Senator Harradine. Senator Harradine’s time in the Senate was almost over, so Tracker was clear on our approach. Find legitimate fault in what was being put forward and convince Senator Harradine that there wasn’t enough time for him to vote on the matter before he departed the Senate. And that is what happened. The reconstituted Senate disallowed the Territory’s legislation.
Near the end of that process, we were in Darwin, in [Chief Minister] Denis Burke’s office with Senator Hill, a couple of other Territory ministers and bureaucrats and Messrs McCarthy and Kildea. They were berating us for not accepting the Territory’s proposal. It got quite heated because they could see it all slipping away. Denis Burke turned to Tracker and said, Why are you guys doing this? Tracker’s humour and irreverence came to the fore – he looked up and said: Denis, Denis, Denis, old jungle saying, when crocodile open mouth, don’t put head in. You could see Burke was about to erupt, but he realised it was all over and there was no point. In the end everyone was laughing. That was the end of it.
In a quieter moment I once told him: You know, Tracker, I reckon the world has missed out on a bloody great stand-up comic because you didn’t take to the stage. I meant it as a compliment, but I was never sure he took it that way. Perhaps he never fully understood what a gift his humour was to those who experienced it.
Murrandoo Yanner
Fred Pascoe was the first proper Aboriginal elected mayor of redneck Carpentaria Shire in Normanton, and in the next election no one even stood against him, black or white. That was unheard of. This was a place where you could not even get a blackfella on council forever. And he is one of Tracker’s, as is my brother Bull. They are close, and contributors from the inside of Century – within the corporate system there – fighting from the inside. They were both mentored and tutored by Tracker and I know Fred continued to use him for Delta Downs, the first Aboriginal pastoral lease ever bought in Australia – for advice on that and probably other things. People like him and Bull and others are to contribute a lot more in the coming years as Tracker’s ideas continue to take hold, because some of these ideas were so deep it takes a while to understand them. But in this whole region, anyone who is worth half of their weight in sand or salt out here – there are probably ten or twelve of us in the whole region – have all at one stage or another been strongly influenced by him.
He would say, The struggle does not knock off, so how can you? If you put your rifle down at the front line and go for a holiday, who’s guarding the trench? Because he said the enemy is still going at us relentlessly, you know? So you never knock off. He was tireless. He remained very prominent even when you could see he was fairly crook, at least the treatment he was receiving could knock him off his feet a fair bit and it must have hurt him a lot, and no one would have thought an iota less of him if he took a break, but he pushed himself. He contributed more when he was bloody crook or tired than half these bastards do when they are entering the morning fresh and starting work. He never stopped working, whether it was at a restaurant in a social atmosphere, or at midnight later, he was still working the room, or working people.
The biggest thing he has really left with me, that sticks with me, and that I live by and am nourished by, is that there is no limit to the imagination, and if I can implement that in a negotiating room or in agreements, then anything is possible, there is no rule book. There is no putting me in a box or square yard. And that is from him, he used to say, Dare to dream, brother, dare to dream.
There was a time here when blacks were nothing but slaves on properties and dumped, not even allowed back to fish or hunt their own tucker, and shot at by bloody station owners and choppers even up to the mid and late 90s. He used to tell us during Century, Don’t worry. I would say to him, You reckon we can really get those properties and that? [the five large pastoral properties owned by the mining company that were included in a handback arrangement to the traditional owners in the Century Agreement]. He said, Brother, we’ll get em. He goes, Hey! Why do you think we won’t? You’ve got to dare to dream. Don’t let them limit your imagination. And even today, whenever I think of doing anything, even a little thing with the Burke Shire, I will look at the bloody extreme, everything and anything, and then during the negotiation I might compromise or trim back but I dream, I dream of having a little sovereignty, a mini-state within the Gulf again one day in the future. There is no limit and that is the real thing that sticks in my head, what he said, Dare to dream.
25. Tracker is using the mourning name of Mr Smithy Zimran.