The Human Sewer Rat

John Liddle

Did he tell you that George Pell story, you know that George Pell, the archbishop or whatever he is, he was walking, and this might be less than ten years ago, he walked through the Sydney airport and he had a bit of an entourage with him. Tracker sees this George Pell coming and says, How ya going George?

How are you going Tracker?

He looked around and made sure that everyone was watching, and he said, I hope you excuse me, I’m not going to kiss your ring this time. All the workers behind George Pell nearly fainted. I hope you will pardon me, but I’m not going to kiss your ring this time, he reckoned, and he looked around and smiled at everyone. That silly bloody smile he had.

William Tilmouth

I remember Phillip Ruddock when I went to Parliament House and Phillip Ruddock said he had seen me. He thought I was Tracker and he came over and said, Hey you. I said, What? He reckoned, You, the last time I saw you, you were tearing down the wrong side of the road on the Tanami Highway and I was sitting in the back going as white as a ghost. I said, Me? Must be my brother, Tracker. He looked and he looked again and said, Yeah it was, sorry.

And I went outside Parliament House to have a cigarette and one of those white government cars pulled up and I knew it was Bob Katter, because of his white hair and his white cowboy hat. He got out and I am standing up on the side having a cigarette and he comes up and he starts chatting to me, laughing and joking. I did not know this bloke from Adam. There he was, laughing away. I was not responding and he looked at me and said, You’re not Tracker are you? I said, No, sorry mate. This went on for about five minutes. Then I got a few looks from another mate of his – [Bill] Heffernan, Heff, Tracks called him: No, you are not Tracker…He knew a lot of people, Peter Costello and all of them. It is a small world with him. A small, small world.

John Liddle

Tracker and Bill Heffernan went all over Central Australia together when they were talking about those Centrefarm projects. He knew how to do that sort of stuff, get people [politicians who he took on trips through Central Australia] to understand what is happening up here, host them, and send them out with people and get them to understand what the hell is happening in this area.

And you have got to do that. You have got to sell the product you’ve got really.

He had no shame. And I think he sat on Bronwyn Bishop’s lap in Parliament House somewhere, in her office and gave her a kiss and said, I’ll go you halves in a coloured kid, or something like that. I said, Shit, don’t tell me that please.

No, I did, he said. I do not think her staff could believe what happened to her. She is a big old girl. Bronwyn Bishop and one of those other old politician women have been there for years.

I reckon he has some sort of storytelling aspect to his life. Like I said he spent so much of his time with a lot of those older people and listening to them. He was only telling me last time he was here, but I have heard the story a thousand times, that when the mob used to go on business he used to drive those old bosses, old Nosepeg, and all those old kings of culture, and they would have all the stuff, sacred objects, sitting in the truck with him. So he would be driving along in the truck and they would just have them there, in their football bag sort of thing. There are not many people they would let do that, you know, but they trusted him.

He was a very intelligent man, Tracker. He acted silly, but he had a lot of brains. I have ridden on his back a few times and I have said, Shit, that’s a bloody good idea, why didn’t I think of it? But then he just came out with them, and the next time you saw him he had another bloody box of them.

Sean Bowden

He told me these stories about how he knew Bronwyn Bishop who was a very senior player at the time. Back then, Bronwyn Bishop was a potential next prime minister. He knew Bill Heffernan. He knew Robert Hill as well as the range of Labor people, Kim Beazley, Daryl Melham, Martin Ferguson, Gerry Hand, who I came to know as well at the same time. All this stuff links when you fall into a clique and people start to know you. I guess we started to form a loose group and I was the lawyer for that group in different ways.

Tracker knew that he needed a lawyer on some of the things that he wanted to do because he had endless energy, boundless energy to do two sorts of things. One, he was a sort of a flamboyant, frontier-style entrepreneur which never seemed to quite come off, but he spent a lot of his time and energy exploring these things. The other was he genuinely did the right thing, and assisted people who were disadvantaged, or in need of a bit of social justice through good political and legal action.

I think he moved beyond the protest era, and in 1998, he learnt what he could do by co-opting different parties and knocking over statehood [for the Northern Territory]. I started to follow him into these worlds. The first was probably Wadeye.31 The Commonwealth Government had formed seven or eight trial sites, where the idea was to coordinate government services and operations for the community, and Wadeye was one of them. There was a man down there called Terry Bullemor [then from the Thamarrurr Regional Council] who Tracker knew, and Wadeye was very much out of sight, out of mind in those days. It was a mythological place, a scary place. It still is a bit, but it is much more now in the public mainstream thinking.

It was known for having gangs and for being remote and wild. It is remote. It is not wild, but it is remote. But the gangs were building up, they were getting into trouble, and the community was in trouble. The community was horribly neglected. The Catholic Church had a very strong handle over the community and a whole lot of things conspired to bring the social and economic problems to a head. I always suspect that part of this was the generosity of spirit of the people at Wadeye, in that they just accepted what was given to them and did their best with it. That came from the Catholicism and the fact that it was so far away, and the fact the CLP had maintained a jurisdiction over there, the CLP represented that seat. Because it was conservative Catholic, the CLP politicians managed to win the seat but then did not deliver.

And then there was the remoteness, the inability to access the place. No road, very poor air transport, barge once a week, once a fortnight sometimes, no political voice, and a man called Terry Bullemor out there, who is a saint. Tracker rang me up one afternoon while I was doing a lot of work in Queensland on native title matters, and it was very controversial work, involving [Geoff] Clark and Sugar Ray Robinson [then chairperson and deputy chairperson of ATSIC].

Tracker said, Bowds, we’re going to see Bullemor. I said, Who’s Bullemor? He said, Bullemor, you know Bullemor? I said, No, I don’t know Bullemor. He said, I saw him yesterday. I said, Okay, we’ll go to see Bullemor. Where is Bullemor?

Wadeye, we’re going to Wadeye.

I said, My goodness, where is Wadeye? I know of Wadeye, I’ve heard of it.

What are we doing?

He said, We’re going out there to see Bullemor.

Why?

I saw him and he said to come out, and Dougy Taylor might come too. Who’s Dougy Taylor?

He’s a contractor, a mate of mine, and he is working out there.

As it turned out Tracker might have got Dougy Taylor to pay for the charter. This was classic Trackerism. He had bumped into Bullemor who was the CEO of the Wadeye community, he was struggling and under pressure, he had been there seven or eight years, and he had been banging the drum as hard as he could. Now he had finally got the spotlight on him, they were having this coordination trial. He does not know how to do it. He didn’t know what to do, and Tracker was there to get involved.

Terry Bullemor operated the most extraordinary office at Wadeye which was an open office. If you can imagine a community of about two and a half thousand people, he had an open office. He had no computers. His computer was at home. He had files everywhere and his office was open. It was in a corner of the building, at the front of the building. Like in the bow of a ship, there was Terry. And so anyone in the community had access to him. It was extraordinary. And they loved him. And he had a good second-in-command. He was not an administrator and he was not very tactical. He knew that. Obviously he had thought, with Tracker, I can pick Tracker’s brains and see what he knows. So there we went. I got on this charter. I can still remember it very clearly. A sweaty little Cessna with the three of us, Doug Taylor, Tracker and I, and Doug and I did not really know what we were doing there, or what Tracker was doing there, but we went and we had a meeting with the community, a small group of leaders.

It became clear that Wadeye needed a little bit of help. They did need some political help and they did need some legal help. So Tracker said, Well! This is Bowds. I said, Actually my name is Sean Bowden. I’m a lawyer. I grew up a little bit around Alice Springs. I’m now in Darwin. Yes, I’m happy to assist you. It was always my role to formalise things. Anyway away we went.

Terry suggested, We would like you guys to formally assist us. I think Tracker formally assisted for about a year or so. I am not sure really what he was doing day by day. He was just opening doors and things, and I started doing the legal work which was fascinating because we had every departmental secretary from every department in the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory come and see us at one time or another, often in groups. It was exhausting. So I was forever getting on a charter to go down there and meet with these people. We had a coordination trial, and it didn’t coordinate, it duplicated, it was like ten times the red tape. Incredible.

We had to kill the red tape that had come about from a trial designed to kill red tape. Wadeye went from thirty-four grants to one hundred and thirty-four because the bureaucrats all came with their little grant, their little fifty grand, or their thirty grand. There were people higher up the chain who they wanted to impress by showing they were actually involved with the trial at Wadeye: We can give you this. We can do that. It was driving us crazy. It was driving Bullemor crazy. And Terry, this man Terry Bullemor is an extraordinary human being. He nearly died with his boots on. He was collapsing at meetings. Tracker’s friend Bob Beadman arrived one afternoon, having made an appointment, but Terry had forgotten, or it had not been done properly, and people just assumed they could arrive.

So they arrived on a charter and demanded to see Terry. He had two or three other things going on, and Bob Beadman, who is quite forceful, got really cranky and demanded the meeting. Terry walked in and collapsed and they medivaced him out. The next time I saw Bob Beadman I gave him a piece of my mind, which was the best way to talk with Bob, who is a good mate of mine also. So Bullemor collapsed and then he came back, and before he did, he found a piece of paper and he gave it to Tracker and me, and that piece of paper was a letter from 1979 that gave a commitment from the Northern Territory Government to the Commonwealth Government to maintain education spending at Wadeye at the same level as the Commonwealth had spent before self-government in 1978.

Around the same time Terry had a guy called John Taylor working with him. Dr John Taylor is Australia’s best demographer, certainly in the Indigenous domain. He is absolutely supreme. He came up with the statistic that said Wadeye was receiving twenty-six cents for every dollar spent on a school other than Wadeye. Wadeye got twenty-six cents in the dollar yet the disadvantage was extreme and the conditions were incredibly difficult. Terry produced this letter and the Taylor Report,32

and Tracker and I looked at each other and went, Wow! Tracker said, I’ve been waiting for something like this for twenty years. We’ve got em, we’re away here. That triggered us to run a human rights case which Tracker was the instigator of, and which caused fundamental generic change at bush schools, really positive. I would estimate that has probably over a decade added two hundred million dollars into remote schools, because the government had to change their funding formats. They were underfunding the remote schools run by the Catholic Education Office by at least twenty million a year, if you can believe that. And through this action, which was led by a wonderful and decent leader Tobias Nganbe, and through my work with Tracker, it gave me the courage, and others like Tobias Nganbe the courage, to start to talk publicly about this stuff. And to get the result.

At the time Tracker said, Bowds, we’ve been waiting for this. We’re going to Canberra. We’re going to see Billy Heff [Bill Heffernan].

I said, Hang on, hang on, we need to have a strategy first. That was my role. He said, Alright, pardon the politically incorrect language here, but, We’re going to see the Jews. I said, My goodness, who are the Jews?

We’re going to see the Castans, we’re going to see Melis.

I said, Oh! Yeah, who’s Melis?

Melissa Castan, Ron Castan’s daughter. Ron had passed away in 1998 I think, and Melissa had set up the Ron Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University. Beautiful person, wonderful person.

And we got the Northern Land Council involved and this took a special art. Getting the NLC involved could not have happened without Tracker. He got the Northern Land Council to pay for the fares, and he got John Sheldon involved. We took it to Norman Fry and to the NLC and said, Look at this. If this isn’t within all of our mandate then nothing is. I was really fired up about it too. Here it was in black and white, what we all knew: that the system in the Northern Territory, at its core, was rotten. It was so low that it would deprive children of money, of their entitlements to go to school, and then ignore them and lie about it.

So we got on a midnight flight with John Sheldon who was the policy officer of the Northern Land Council, a very good guy, very decent person, a good sense of right and wrong. He said, Righto! I can do this. This is within my mandate, let’s go. We went down on a midnight flight and we get off in the morning and we catch a taxi into the city. We have breakfast, and Tracker still has not told us where we are going. I do not think he actually knew. But we ended up at Nellie Castan’s Gallery which is in South Yarra, and Melissa came and saw us with Sarah Joseph, the head of the Centre. He still had not really prepped me as to what to say. I knew we were meeting someone, I knew her name was Melis and that she was a Castan but I did not know where. So we got there and Sarah Joseph who is a professor said, Tell us about it. I went, Okay, and Tracker looked at me, Go on Bowds. I should have known my role by then, but I was still learning my role. So I explained the situation. They said right, let us look at it. A month later we got a phone call from Melissa who said, Yes this is real, and we’ll try and help you. I said, I need some lawyers. I think I had come away and prepared another document that really laid it out and said, This is it legally, as best as I can do. Melissa took that around to some lawyers, to Maurice Blackburn and others, and it was Arnold Bloch Liebler, Peter Seidel at Arnold Bloch Liebler, who picked it up and said we will do this.

The others rejected it, I think because most Melbourne lawyers were interested in sexier issues that are more in line with their progressive views, like anti-uranium and anti-environment action. This was a human issue. It was complicated with a community that was complicated, a community that had overtones of violence, and it was already in the newspapers for being a violent place, where the kids did not go to school. We had to make the argument that the reason kids did not go to school was that there was no school. The reason there was no school was because the government neglected to provide them with a school.

So we are probably into late 2005 now, and the next trip was to Canberra. John Sheldon went with us to Canberra from Melbourne to see Billy Heff and others. We went to Canberra and we ended up staying with [Daryl] Melham MP. I said, Where are we going to stay? We didn’t have much money. Tracker said, We’ll stay in this apartment first, and then we’ll stay with Melham on the second night, which was great. I had met Daryl Melham, the federal member for Banks, who was a great friend of Tracker. Daryl had convinced the then Prime Minister Paul Keating to make sure that the original Native Title Act when introduced did not suspend the Racial Discrimination Act but validated certain titles. Daryl was also instrumental in ensuring that the issue of whether a pastoral lease extinguished native title was left to the courts, and not extinguished in 1993 with the original act as many people wanted.

So Daryl was absolutely critical to making sure Aboriginal people got rights over the Australian pastoral estate out of the Mabo decision, something that people forget was not in any way guaranteed at the time. He was a terrific parliamentarian who sacrificed himself for principle and had his career harmed because of that, when he resigned as the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs because [Kim] Beazley supported [Peter] Beattie [then Queensland Premier] on racist and regressive native title laws which were subsequently withdrawn by Beattie because they were wrong and didn’t work. Daryl resigned on principle and paid a price. Not that he ever complained, he is a great man, a great politician who knew the difference between right and wrong.

So in politics you can have these periods of victory, or success, but I unfortunately got to watch Daryl go through a period where his career waned, just because he did the right thing by Aboriginal people. The native title legislation that Beattie had brought in to the Queensland Parliament and which Beazley had supported was so offensive it was eventually withdrawn.

Anyway, Tracker says we are going to see Billy Heffernan. And I am saying, Why? Because he’s the guy who can talk to the Prime Minister, that’s why. I said, But he’s Billy Heffernan. He’s a right-wing New South Wales Liberal, hard man. Tracker replies, He’s a great bloke Bowds, you’ll love him. I said, I can’t imagine that I would. He says, Don’t worry. Billy, he’s a great mate of mine. I am saying to myself, This is really getting out there. I could not believe it was true, that Tracker and Billy were great mates.

I found out though through my father that Bill Heffernan was a practical bloke, a straight shooter, because he had come to Tangentyere Council, and funded something Dad wanted funded to do with underprivileged kids in the Alice Springs Town Camps. So we got up to Canberra, went off to breakfast, and this was a huge experience for me. We were going to Parliament House, for me it was the first time, I was going with Tracker Tilmouth to see Bill Heffernan. We have got an issue to prosecute, we were all quite excited.

This was what made Tracker tick. This was what got him out of bed in the morning, doing something real. This was real. And so we go to the Senate entrance. I did not know how to get into Parliament House, but Tracker did. He got someone to book him in. We walk through the Senate entrance, we walk into the corridor, and a head came out of a door a hundred metres down and yelled out, Tracker. It was Billy Heffernan. This is a true story. John Sheldon and I, our mouths just dropped open and Tracker goes, Billy. Wild Billy, he called out.

It was like being in the Tardis, Parliament House, you do not know where you are once you are in. It goes forever. And down we went to Billy Heffernan’s office. I had learnt to play my role by then, and I knew that I was going to have to explain things, and I did. Of course Bill was harder than Melissa and Sarah Joseph, and he wanted to know all sorts of things. Off we went. He said, Righto! That’s good. I’ll take it on board and I’ll come and see you. I’ll come up and have a look myself. He was good to his word. Then we went off around Parliament House and this was my first experience with the self-described human sewer rat, which Tracker calls himself when he goes in to Parliament House.

Now follow me Bowds, I’m the human sewer rat, I know exactly where I’m going. People who have been in Parliament House for ten years get lost, but Tracker knew his way around Parliament House like you would not believe, and he taught me it was all about the colours on the carpets, and having a basic sense of direction, which you do lose. Off we went. He had a very good sense of direction. In fact, he would still roll me badly in a walk around Parliament House, even though I have probably been there three or four times more than him nowadays. I still get lost even though I am following the carpet. So off we go. We went and saw ‘Bronny’ as he called her, who was really Bronwyn Bishop. We just walked in, walked into the office and there she was. He yelled out through the entrance to the back office and Bronwyn came over, Tracker it’s so lovely to see you. They embraced and she rubbed his belly. She said, My boy, look at that belly. She rubbed it. He said, Leave it alone. Leave it alone.

She said, You need to lose some weight young man. He said, I’m not that young, well okay, I am. They had this banter and off they went. It was fantastic to watch. I thought, what a treasure this man is. Billy Heffernan! And now Bronwyn Bishop, he could go and talk to Bronwyn Bishop, what an asset. Later on I am saying to him, You’re unbelievable, the cheek of doing this. He said: Learn it mate, learn it, do it, just do it, I’ve learnt it.

You see, Tracker wasn’t the guy who did the one meeting, came to Canberra for the one meeting and dressed up, came in and made a hoo-ha about the meeting, and then afterwards put out a press release. Tracker was determined to use his time better. People like Gerry Hand would warn me about the same thing. Tracker would say, I have as many meetings in a day as I possibly can and then some more. We are going to make use of our time, Bowds. We are going to see everyone we can. I said, Do you have appointments? He just said, It doesn’t matter.

So off we went and I think by now it was getting close to two o’clock, which was Question Time. I was saying, Tracker, come and watch Question Time . I had never been to Parliament House before other than maybe as a tourist once, but not properly. He said, Yeah! We’ll get there. It was half past one. He said, Got to see Hilly, who was Robert Hill, the defence minister, and we had been past his office and he was not there. Tracker said, Come on, we’ll go back to Hilly’s. Oh! How?

Just follow me, I’m the human sewer rat.

Off we went up stairs and we get to Hilly’s, and Tracker walked in.

You can see through, there was a conference room – in every ministerial office is a conference room, just adjacent behind the secretary. In this instance the door was a little bit open and you could see Robert Hill in there with four-star or five-star generals sitting there, three of them. Tracker yelled out, Hilly. The secretary was not there. Tracker walked around, and I must have followed him, which was how I got the view in and he yelled, Hilly. Robert Hill looks around and says, Tracker, how are you mate? Great to see you. Are you here for long? Tracker says, which was not quite true, I’m off shortly. Robert Hill turns to these generals and says, Gentlemen, will you just give me a moment? The five-star generals, maybe they were four-star, maybe they were five-star, fully suited up, walked out, and Tracker and I walked in to Robert Hill’s conference room twenty minutes before Question Time. It was just amazing. He just did that.

Tracker started to talk to him about other things. He was keeping the contact, letting Robert Hill know that he was around, that he cared, that he had issues to talk about, that he was a player and that he was on a mission. Fantastic. Every Aboriginal leader should learn from the Tracker Tilmouth Handbook. Every single one.

Of course we went and saw all the Labor gang as well, we didn’t miss them, but the challenge was to engage the government, the people in power at the time, and that is what we did.

Nowadays when I go to Canberra I still find it very hard to drop in on people but I make the appointments and I make sure we get three or four or five meetings. I take Tobias Nganbe [from Wadeye], and I have taken Galarrwuy [Yunupingu]. When I started to work with Galarrwuy really properly in 2006, 2007 and 2008, I knew what to do because Tracker had taught me, and Galarrwuy in a way did not know what to do, because Galarrwuy hated it in Canberra. He said, I don’t want to go to Canberra. Why? It’s a waste of time. I said, We’re not going to waste your time this time.

I remember showing Galarrwuy an itinerary I had developed to see people with Tracker helping me at this stage and Galarrwuy said, Okay, I’ll go. Previously, one time Galarrwuy said, I’m never going back to Canberra. I was on that trip in 2003 or 2004 with Tracker when ATSIC was being dismantled, and we all went down in a lobbying effort to see whether anything could come out of the remains. Galarrwuy said at that time, I’m never coming back to this place. It’s a waste of time. I’m never coming back. I got him back, and I got him back on the Tracker Tilmouth formula, in 2007 and 2008.

So we did the Robert Hill meeting, and then we did the Labor Party in the afternoon. That was much easier because they were in Opposition, and we met Martin Ferguson who subsequently became a great confidante to myself and others, but I inherited that from Tracker. I owe Tracker. He gave that contact to me. Here you go Sean, this is a good man. You can trust him. He will tell you the truth. He has got a good heart and he will work hard. Not in those words exactly, but that was really what he meant. He took me to Melham of course, and it was the most outrageous, one of the most outrageous meetings you will ever go to. Daryl is single, he has never married, he lived with his mum at the time. Poor Daryl, I think Tracker had twenty-five humorous variations on that theme for about the first hour of the meeting. In the end Daryl said, Tracker, you’ve been belittling me, having jokes at my expense for the last hour, now what the hell are you here for? At which point we got down to business again, and then we were staying at Daryl’s that night.

We did that, and then we went off for dinner somewhere. We were all exhausted by then, had an early dinner, no drinking. No drinking. It was one of the great things about Tracker, no drinking. I drink alcohol and I quite like it. When I was young I probably drank too much at times. I suddenly found, though, how professional and innovative you could be when you were not drinking. Drinking was a bad way to do business, particularly if you were coming in on behalf of Aboriginal people. Then we went off to Daryl’s place. Daryl made us a cup of tea in his pyjamas, and we talked some politics, lots of politics actually, then he made our beds for us and tucked us in and got us up in the morning in his pyjamas with another cup of tea. It was a freezing Canberra night, and by the end of it all Tracker was saying, Melham, why don’t you put the heater on in this stinking place. Look at you, you’re like a big koala bear, look at ya, look at the koala bear. We get out of bed in the morning and he says, Bowds, a koala bear just served me a cup of tea, did you get yours? One of the incredible things was this constant banter. Sometimes it was infuriating because he would let it contaminate a serious moment, and sometimes he used it too often, and he would use it when he was under pressure as well. When it was pure, when it was just pure humour, he was the funniest, most hysterical person I have ever met.

Sam Miles

Charlie Perkins was the only other person I know of, when you were in a meeting, that had to be the dominant figure. When Tracker was in a meeting, he had to have the attention otherwise he was not comfortable. Two things I remember about him. It was on TV and Dr John Herron [a former Minister for Aboriginal Affairs] had been criticised after he made his speech and there was a bit of booing or carrying on, and Tracker got to the microphone and said to him, Hey brother, pass the water will you. And that just changed the whole atmosphere. Herron was relieved because he could smile and pass him the water. Tracker had the focus.

Tracker was also good at times when a whitefella was talking. He would chip in with an analogy or a metaphor to simplify it, to get it on track for them. He was good at that. Sometimes it was funny, and sometimes he would say it right. He was good at getting attention. Once at one of these business type meetings in Darwin, Tracker and I were the only ones who were not serious money people or anything else, and the meeting was about forestry on Aboriginal land. Tracker got a bit bored and said, Ah! Well youse government, they couldn’t find their arses to wipe themselves. You can imagine he had the attention straight away. What he had was what the Jews call chutzpah. Boldness, forward with ideas whether it was a government minister or whoever. Pushy.

There was one time in DAA, for some reason or another we all went down to Canberra, a lot of us. The rest of us DAA blokes went to Parliament House and were just floundering around, and Tracker was more junior than us and he said, Hey! I’ve got a meeting with a minister organised. He had organised it, and we met this bloke who was the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Malcolm Fraser government, who was the dumbest bastard you have ever seen in your life. But it took Tracker, this junior bugger from DAA in Alice Springs, who had gone there and knew how to work the politics. He just cut right through and did it. The trouble was we went in there and we did not know what we wanted. The minister expected us to say we wanted a hundred thousand for this or that…and of course we did not have anything in mind. That is what I remember of it.

Owen Cole

One of the funniest stories was when the native title legislation was going through. I think it might have been the ILC legislation that was to create the Indigenous Land Corporation, and we went down to Canberra and we were sitting around with the Labor Party blokes – Simon Crean and Martin Ferguson – at a Chinese restaurant at Manuka, and Bronwyn Bishop walked past, so Tracker called her across.

He knew the Coalition was opposed to the native title legislation and he goes [calls] to Bronwyn and says, Bronwyn, and I will give you the sanitised version here, Bronwyn come here. She goes: Tracker darling. He says, Bronny we want you to support the legislation that’s going up tomorrow or the day after. She goes, Oh! Tracker, you know I’ve got to toe the party lines.

Tracker goes, Well! Bronny, if you go against party lines to support the legislation, I’ll come around to your place and give you a kiss, or words to that effect. Or, I’ll pash you, something like that, Pash on the weekend. Of course all the Labor Party blokes, Ferguson and Crean they were sliding under the table. David Ross was there and I was there, but he could get away with it. She went off in a bit of a huff. But there she was walking down the stairs and she was smiling at Tracker.

Of course the legislation got through but I do not think it had anything to do with Bronwyn supporting it after that. He would say those type of things and get away with murder occasionally. The rest of us would not even have the gall to try it. I always remember that. Honestly, those Labor politicians actually sliding under the table, trying to get away from Tracker, what he was saying to a fellow parliamentarian.

Of course, that is the sanitised version of it. He would have said something a little bit riper than that.

Geoff Clark

Then we came to the native title debate of 1992, in Canberra. We spent a hell of a lot of time in parliament, lobbying ministers and whatever. I remember one day we were walking down the corridor and Bronwyn Bishop was walking the other way, and Tracker raced up and started dancing with her and joking, and said she looked like a Boston bun walking down the aisle. He made these comments to people, and he did not care what their status was, or where he was. He would be wanting to dance with her, another time he would be doing a bit of a waltz, walk up and do a bit of a waltz with her. Every time we had a meeting Tracker would come in with a joke or two and sort of upset the meeting. It was always very pointed, he would articulate some very pointed opinions, but he would do it in such a manner that people had to laugh, or cry, or try to ignore him.

The worst thing you could ever do was try to ignore Tracker when he had an audience. He would just roll it out and it would be an opportunity for more jokes.

Laurie Brereton

I first met Tracker when I was the member for Kingsford Smith in the House of Representatives, and it was during the period when the government was formulating its response to Mabo [1992]. I am not actually sure how he came to turn up on my doorstep but he introduced himself, and I think he had been around to see a few friends of mine, Bolkus, Melham, and he got into the habit when he was in Canberra of dropping in to see me. That was how it began.

I think at that point I was the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister and then a cabinet minister following that. These were more social calls than work, and I was a keen supporter of the push in the Cabinet to get the very best legislative response [to the Mabo decision]. We were fighting a great fight. We had the National Party and the then Opposition marking out the ground, promising bucketloads of extinguishment in the words of the deputy leader, Tim Fischer, and we all know what a difficult period that was, and we all know that what was fashioned was good work at the end of the day as a result of some inspired leadership from the Indigenous community, and the commitment of the government and particularly Prime Minister Keating to get the best outcome. But in terms of being a prime mover, no I was not, I was basically one of those pressing to get a just and appropriate settlement, or response actually.

Tracker was basically briefing me on what was required in his view, and there were many people who did that, but Tracker kept coming back and then it became a friendship, and in the years that followed I made a habit whenever I was in the neighbourhood, whether it be Alice Springs or Darwin, of looking him up and so the friendship blossomed.

I did a few bush trips with him. Probably one of the nicest was a trip that started off in Alice and ended up in Darwin but involved the Tanami Track and communities, Kununurra along the way, and then across the Top End with my two sons who were both schoolboys then. Tracker very generously organised that trip because, he said, You boys ought to understand us and the land. He brought along a couple of mates of his and a couple of vehicles, and he took us out and explained the songlines, the Granites [mine], how you take a killer at Mistake Creek, how you get it butchered up, how you swim and not get too worried about freshwater crocodiles, even when all their eyes are looking at the kids at night. It was a great trip. That was the first of a number of expeditions, shorter and longer that I undertook with Tracker.

Tracker never stopped talking about projects. He always had a project. If he did not have one he was looking for one, always driven by ideas and ambition to do things, commercial, cultural, educational. He was full of thoughts.

All of Tracker’s projects are difficult. Tracker never had a no-brainer, they have all been challenges. I have never done anything with him commercially, but I have tried to get some of his ideas over the line, whether it be Ti Tree and a great horticultural venture in the centre of Australia growing melons, or trying to export live camels to the Middle East, or trying to make productive again some of the grazing properties of Central Australia that would afford opportunities for Indigenous lads to get some training, some experience and to be the cattle masters again that they had been. Tracker was always dragging an idea or two along. Of course you had to go and look at them, you could not just talk about them.

You had to go and have a look. So in subsequent years we spent quite a number of trips around the MacDonnell Ranges and back up Ti Tree, and up in the Top End looking at his prawn farm [outside of Darwin] and fishing, in Kakadu on the locked gate trails and having a lot of fun, and being cleaned up by mosquito plagues and all sorts of things, but always an experience with Tracker.

I have been up the Gulf of Carpentaria with him. He had an idea of a project involving cattle right at the very top of West Arnhem Land on Murganella Plains which is immediately below the Cobourg Peninsula 350 kilometres east of Darwin. So we tracked around out there and surveyed properties where he thought there was some potential to get an agricultural operation going.

You were laughing or crying most of the time. I mean that was the way it was. He had a view about everything and I would have heard hundreds of funny stories. He was a big-picture character, and he always had a number of building blocks, and was always charging along.

He wanted to help with the feral camel problem and live camels appealed to him. Getting a camel abattoir as part of the business was also important, but live camels were particularly attractive. He wanted to open that market up almost before anyone else had got near it. That was at the early stage before the rest of Australia learnt about the numbers of camels coming into Docker River and other places. Tracker was onto it like a ton of bricks. We would be looking at the logistics of this, and Tracker had some fellow designing a cage that you could put the camels in in order to get them onto the rail line and up to Darwin, and out of the country. He was working through the logistics of how you actually get something with a long neck that gets through the top of the cage on a train safely to the point of export. But in a remote location you can imagine the challenges of rounding up substantial numbers of camels and then getting them into a loading facility and onto the rail to Darwin. All challenging. A spur gas pipeline down to a mine that he was interested in, or having a plan to put properties together with different strategies, both purchased in the market place and leased from traditional owners, and building relations with the TOs in the respective areas that he was interested in.

I met Bluey Pugh who was involved in Tracker’s attempt to get into the camel business and, oh yes, we thumped around the roads in the centre of Australia with Bluey and Tracker, hilarious times, camped out or stopping at Tilmouth Wells, and of course the stories of what it is to breed crocodiles and export them, legend again. But that was something I did not get involved in.

We fished once in darkness, and he wanted to show us a particular place at the back of Kakadu with a heap of fish – barramundi and mangrove jacks. We got there about the time the biggest plague of mosquitoes descended, fishing in the dark, and ended up locked in a car with a state cabinet minister and another parliamentary colleague, with more mosquitoes than you could believe in the car with us. It was worse outside. Driven mad. But we got a lot of fish and lived to tell the story, and barbecued much of it in the traditional fashion, un-gutted, and I must say I still prefer my fish gutted but the company was terrific and the experience just wonderful. Freshwater turtles and all the bush tucker that Tracker introduced us to.

Tracker was a funny bugger. I think his ability to make fun of things was a key part of his makeup, and that is why he got on with all of us so well. Tracker had a serious side, but he was always fun. He never stopped and he had a larrikin streak at the same time, but he could be deadly serious about something that he really knew and wanted you to know was important and needed to be done.

He had a rich life in every sense from his childhood through those early years of hardship, and there was a lesson in every one of his stories but they just came so naturally. He studied and became interested in horticulture. He had an international perspective. His work with the Central Land Council and everything that followed on from that. Everything was a story about Tracker’s life experience, what he thought would happen next, and what you might be able to help me with. And if in doubt he would ring up and say, What do you think about this? Absolutely day or night. And if he thought someone was valuable as a potential future leader, he would want you to meet them. He would want to bring them around for a barbecue or whatever to make sure that they were tuned in, and you knew who they were.

Anything anyone ever told him went straight onto the memory stick, bang! He was a very clever fellow.

Bill Heffernan

I think when Tracker was [in the Central Land Council] I got to know him. I had a few meetings with him and obviously did a bit of work with him and it was pretty disappointing in some ways, to go out there and find people that were, shall I say, taking advantage of Indigenous people, in the art world for instance, and in the housing setup there.

Tracker was always a very articulate advocate for the Indigenous mob, or as we call it in a nice way between ourselves the blackfella problems. I think it is not an offensive term where I come from with people that you deal with, because it’s like being a good bastard, or a bad bastard. So I got to know and admire Tracker and he got involved in that Centrefarm arrangement in Alice Springs, and then moved up to Darwin, and as I recall him telling me, he was a separated kid and he said the whiter ones in his family went one way and the darker ones went some other way. He finished up being brought up in the lockup in Darwin somewhere. It was an adjunct of the local prison or the bloody police station, I have forgotten how he described it. It was not because he was in any trouble – that was the only place they kept the kids.

This is going back a good few years. He must have been the first Aboriginal graduate from Roseworthy College, with a science degree in resource development. He was brought up as a separated kid who was taken into some sort of orphanage arrangement where the definition of which way you went was the colour of your skin, it was pretty poor, and who would come through all of that as cheerful and self-confident and proactive as Tracker was, always wanting to have a go? He was always working for the cause and he would come down to parliament on a reasonably regular basis as I recall, and he would walk the halls there, and did it all in a very positive way. There were no sour grapes in the way he presented himself.

One of the things that Tracker was keen on was for Indigenous people to have the opportunity to own their own home, instead of living in some sort of government setup where the mob comes along and kicks all the windows in. If you own your own home you take pride in your home and if the glass gets broken you fix it, that sort of thing. He was certainly very keen, which he demonstrated with his own family, on a good education for kids. At the time when we first talked, there were several thousand kids in the Northern Territory that did not have a high school to go to. There are still quite a few in the same situation. I got to know some of the issues.

Tracker was always interested in further development of Northern Australia and obviously the winners, if the government ever gets it right, will be the Indigenous mob because they own the bulk of the land, in one form of title or another. There were some title problems with carbon trading and so on because carbon credits would have gone to the government, instead of the Indigenous people. He was helpful in teaching: where to go to see both sides of the story. I mean it was interesting to go to Uluru and stay in the flash hotel, the resort, and then go around the corner a couple of kilometres to the people living in sheer poverty.

I think we went out on the Finke River [to Aputula] at one stage. We went down the paddock and kicked a football with a few kids, and what they wanted most of all was a pool to be able to swim in. Tracker was always interested in diet, and he would go to a place like that where too many kids ate chips and drank Coca-Cola. He was very keen to have vegetable gardens set up and a hothouse sort of arrangement.

The hothouse might have been twenty yards long and ten yards wide, and it was marvellous the amount of tucker you could grow in that and feed several families just by putting your mind to it. So he was certainly a contributor and wanted to make a better place for our Indigenous people to live. Obviously, part of that is education and being job-ready. I know he was keen on having residential colleges for kids to graduate through the education system, and to be job-ready when they came out the other end. He had lots of ideas in those areas, residential sort of teaching facilities.

We went on a couple of camps and I can remember the first time I ate a raw witchetty grub. He bit the head off and downed it and I went, Aagh! Seeing the harvesting of native foods, it was quite an interesting experience. I remember camping at a bore. I know Robert Hill was in the party and we put our swags down to sleep on the ground and one of the Indigenous people came along waving his hand, and said, No, no, not there. The story was that there was a well-known local snake that used to go to the dripping tap on the tank between where we were camped and the tank, and we were on its pathway. You could not help but be empathetic to the issues when an advocate such as Tracker was on the job. He was conscious of some of the lurks, and some of the things that could go wrong in Indigenous funding.

I think it would be fair to say about Tracker, that had the opportunity presented itself, he would have represented his people and his country in parliament, if the right sort of circumstances had fallen his way. He was involved in lots of ideas and plans and would have been a bloody solid member of parliament. He was proud of his family and he was articulate. I recall in his early days he was a fairly strong supporter of one side of politics but he did not let that get in the road. He most definitely did not let that get in the way, and he articulated his case in all political climates and atmospheres.

I think we may have gone out to Wadeye with Tracker and saw a police station that was a compound with razor wire around it. I can remember standing out the front of this police station and the policeman came up in his patrol vehicle and got out and shut the gate. I said, What did you say to your wife when you said you’d been posted here? I said, Where are you from? He was from Darwin or somewhere. What did your wife say when you got posted here? thinking there would be an interesting reaction. And he said, We wanted to come, which I thought was a bloody good answer. He said there are lots of good things you can do here.

I remember walking down the street and seeing these women lined up and thinking that it was like half time at the footy. They were lined up down the footpath and I said to Tracker, What are they doing? He said, That’s the Centrelink phone. There was this black hole in a wall with a phone in it, and that was the Centrelink office. We did something about that because it was just a phone back to bloody Darwin or somewhere. So as a consequence of complaining about that, they got a Centrelink person on the ground.

Tracker, I suppose, was my mentor in getting my head around the Indigenous perspective on some of the issues, some of the complexities of the communities, and some of the internal politics, and like all things, there is always contest, ideas and personalities. It was quite an interesting time in my life.

Another thing I recall was the dialysis. In whitefella communities, in Sydney or elsewhere, you can go to someone who has got diabetes or needs dialysis and they have their own dialysis unit in their own home, but you go out there, and some people choose not to go into Alice to get their dialysis. They choose to stay home and die. You go along the Todd River and there are people camped along there who have come to town because of health problems, and so to think that whitefellas just take it for granted you can have that at home, these people have to uproot themselves and go hundreds of kilometres into Alice. These are the sort of things that the average person just does not think about.

I was sort of thinking back then, one, I would not mind being a minister for this, but then you may recall that I buggered up a certain speech in parliament and had to resign as the cabinet secretary. Hmmm! Anyhow there you are. It had nothing to do with Indigenous Affairs, it had a bit to do with a certain judge. So there you are.

You couldn’t help but want to help Tracker because he wanted to help everyone else. There was no question about Tracker working like a one-man show in a really hard environment. Coming up to elections he would be on the phone saying, This is what we ought to do Bill, have you thought about this, have you thought about that?

David Ross

I will tell you about the time when we first met Robert Tickner. He was a minister [for Aboriginal Affairs]. We were having a Council meeting up at Hatches Creek and we had not met him before – brand spanking new, had just appointed the first three ATSIC commissioners, there was Lowitja [O’Donoghue], Gus Williams and I cannot remember who the other one was. Anyway, we were having a Council meeting at Hatches Creek and, Oh! The minister wants to come, Yeah! By all means come along, come to the Council meeting. We get up there the day before the Council meeting and the following day the minister was going to arrive, and somehow this bloke from DAA turns up and says, We got to put these tents up for the minister. Oh! Yeah! Well we’re camping down here.

Is it safe?

It is safer out bush, nothing is going to get you here.

This is the first time we had ever seen tents at a Council meeting. There is a bloke from DAA turns up and puts up tents for the minister. Oh! Yeah! Putting up another. Who’s that for? Oh! This is for the commissioner, Mr Williams. Oh! Jeez! He gets a tent too. Another one for this bloke. He had two or three tents being put up. It was all brand new. Later that afternoon, Geoff Clark was there, he was at the time the coordinator for the National Federation of Land Councils. He was a guest at the meeting, he and his wife Trudy as guests of the land council.

At some point Tracker and Clarky decide they were going to get a killer and they come back, and it is dark and they quartered it up and left it hanging in the tree. At some stage the minister had turned up and was in bed. The minister gets up in the morning and there are these quarters of bullocks hanging in the trees, and he wonders what the hell is going on. So Tracker cuts some meat off and he is feeding the minister this beef. I am not sure if he is the first federal minister…who owned the killer we had no idea, but technically it was stolen meat. And here was Tracker sweet-talking this minister about how nice the meat was, and how you should have some, minister. Brand spanking new minister. Mr Williams knew exactly what was going on, but he was having a piece too. Geez, here was Clarky and Tracker feeding the minister.

So that was Robert Tickner’s first meeting with the CLC, eating – oh lovely meat it was too, geez it was beautiful meat. Them two. Tracker was a butcher so he would have taken Clarky along for the ride. Some of these things are outside the normal day-to-day work, and all the big things that have taken place.

Nick Bolkus

I spent quite a bit of time in the Northern Territory and you could not go to Darwin taking an interest in Aboriginal politics without coming across Tracker one way or another. So we met in Darwin. In the Senate I was on the front bench when I first met him, and I met him through Warren Snowdon MP, and Daryl Melham, former MP for the Labor Party. We kept on catching up with each other in the Territory and in Canberra and it was always a whole raft of issues, from gossip to issues as important as native title we would talk about, and I found Tracker to be a really valuable source of insight into the Aboriginal community, and into the broader community as well.

We stayed pretty close to each other on issues such as heritage and native title. I was delegated the role of taking an interest in the so-called B Team during the Mabo debate. Gareth Evans had the A Team, but I spent a bit of time with Greens senators from WA and their advisory base and support groups, and so on. Having Tracker to bounce ideas off at that time was extremely valuable. I then had carriage of the Wik legislation in the Senate after we lost government in 1996–97 and 98. It was a pretty torrid legal and political debate and Tracker to me was an anchor into the Aboriginal community. He could see through the fraudsters who pretended to represent Aboriginal interests. He could in very colourful language describe who was worth listening to and who was not. He had an enormous store of support from people in the Central Land Council who worked very closely with me, legal advisors as well as people like David Ross, and he was a good store of information on Aboriginal communities from the Cape to north-west Australia.

The thing I found about Tracker was he had a basic instinct that could assess people very quickly, whether they were government ministers or junior lawyers, and my view of those people was very close to his as well. The Wik legislation was the longest debate, through its second reading, in the Senate’s history, and there were issues after issues and Tracker’s capacity to instinctively understand where Labor should be taking those issues was very valuable. So yes, we developed a good close working relationship, as well as a personal one, over a ten or fifteen years or so.

Quite often in working with him, he would say, This was the way to go. You will get yourself in trouble if you cut corners here or there or whatever. He understood that because he would talk to a lot of well-informed people, from lawyers to the Opposition, and when I say Opposition, I mean Liberal and National Party people. As a consequence, his advice on strategy as well as on policy was very valuable. For instance, he could argue with Bill Heffernan by using the sort of language that Bill would use, and he could argue with Gareth Evans on Gareth’s language, while playing around as well. No one saw Tracker as being a mug politician, everyone respected him. His capacity to say, in a very endearing way, You’re talking bullshit, was one of his characteristics.

Tracker was very much the big picture. Big-picture policy directions. It was not just the policy, he was involved in projects in the Territory, whether it was prawn farming or supplying food to Aboriginal communities, where he had the big-picture view. The details sometimes escaped him, but that was quite understandable given the sort of character that he was. He expected people to understand and go with him, but he soon found that they did not quite appreciate things the way he did.

There was one day when we were in Darwin and both Mary and myself were at Ros Paspaley’s home for a barbecue and I said invite Tracker, I had not seen him for a long time. So Tracker rolled up, not on his own, and he goes for a walk around the house as if he was casing it and Ros said to him, What are you doing Tracker? He said, Well! When I was a kid, we used to live across the way and I used to get a few dollars out of playing pool and all the Greeks used to bet on me. But I often looked at this house and wondered how I could break in. It wouldn’t have been hard. We all rolled about laughing after that one. He did have that background. He had to make a buck one way or another and when he was a young kid he was playing pool in Greek coffee clubs, while a lot of old Greeks were sitting around gambling away, and putting money on him.

There was always a story, always, for him to take you aside and say, Bolks, you’ve got to learn about this, or I’m going to tell you this story, something about aunty so and so. And then of course his background. I still cannot identify which of the number of stories he told me, about his Afghan or Indian or Greek whatever blood, I should believe – probably none. You always thought with Tracker that there was that mischief-making aspect of him, that made him even more enjoyable to be with.

There were trips where we went through the centre of Australia with Tracker, myself, Laurie Brereton and Simon Crean. We went camping one night and we went for a swim. Before we went for a swim, we all had to ask Tracker for an assurance that there were no crocs. Of course he gave us the assurance. We went for a swim. We had the campfire. Woke up the next morning and we were surrounded by crocodile tracks. Oh! Yes. We never trusted his advice on swimming in the Territory. It was somewhere close to the Territory and WA border, across from Yuendumu. The next morning there was some mysterious laughing and chuckling. He did not go swimming with us. That should have been a giveaway at the time. His sense of mischief was more irresponsible than not. He must have done something about those crocodiles, or he might have just walked around making crocodile tracks around our sleeping bags.

There was one night we had him around for dinner at home at Henley Beach. He rolled up about an hour late and: I can only stay for an hour, I’m being picked up. I don’t need you to take me anywhere. About an hour and a half later, this car arrived which was a remnant of the psychedelic 60s, painted in all sorts of colours, with three women, a couple of blondes and another one. He assured us that they had been students together somewhere in his dim past. He looked old enough to be their grandparent.

I think the good thing about Tracker was he could actually see through people, and see their strengths but also their weaknesses, and I think he identified a few of Noel [Pearson]’s long before other people did. We should have got him into parliament representing the Northern Territory, he would have been good. I have a few sayings that I cannot repeat actually. He left his best sayings for the politicians from the Northern Territory. He had an enormous degree of respect for the Dodson brothers, Rossy, and [Harold] Furber, and a couple of lawyers from the Central Land Council who he was very close to, a young Greek guy, Chris Athanasiou, and James Fitzgerald.

It was really fascinating listening to conversations that they would have together – the three of them. Those guys were technically very, very smart and adept on native title issues, and all issues affecting Indigenous rights whether it was heritage or native title, and Tracker was able to follow intricate points of law and would be able, in a funny way, to monitor the conversation, and then intervene with his perspective of how whatever we were thinking of doing would be met by Indigenous people and others. He was no intellectual slouch.

Michael O’Connor

His stock in trade was telling stories and there was not a well-known politician in this country that he did not know at a national level, and he had a story about nearly all of them.

I got to know Tracker when he turned up at the ALP National Conference, and I will never forget the time he was with Laurie Brereton, and Laurie is a mad fisherman, and he was going fishing up the Top End, and telling Tracker how he had employed people to show him how. And he had got a great bargain and he was going to pay x amount. I remember Tracker just wetting himself laughing and I did not know what he was laughing about. Afterwards he said he had paid like three times the going rate, he was an idiot. And then he told me what happened when Laurie went fishing, funny stories, it was hilarious. But ALP National Conference was where I have been involved with him as well as the ACTU Conferences.

The union, when it does look at doing something in the area of Indigenous Affairs, we would normally bounce stuff off him informally. He had been like an unofficial consultant to us. If I had a request about doing x, y and z, and I was not sure what was the most appropriate way to respond, I normally gave him a ring, and he was always up-front and very honest, and fearless about what he said. He was not ducking and weaving about the issue, he was right into it straight away, and that had been very helpful for me and I think for the union as well. And that was the other thing I did not realise when I got to know him, that when he did come to some of the union forums so many people had heard of him – and they had a major amount of respect for him around the trade union movement, especially people who have been involved with working with Indigenous communities. But that time at the ACTU Indigenous Conference, with the Indigenous people he was it, he was the source, it was unbelievable.

He talked to everybody, absolutely right across the board. The person on the plane who was serving you, he made friends with everybody. He was amazing that way. I will never forget this minister from a South American country, when I said to him, How do you know her? he said, I just introduced myself an hour ago. I said, What the hell is going on here?

Daryl Melham

I first met Tracker during the original native title negotiations and debate in 1993, when the Keating government was formulating a response to the native title decision of the High Court. I knew him or got introduced to him through Gerry Hand and Warren Snowdon and people like [Robert] Tickner. I was just a backbencher then, I did not have a lot to do with him but that was my first contact. I was a junior member of the government, although I did play a role in preserving the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 in that debate.33

It was after that that I got to know him a little bit more. Indeed when the government lost in 1996 and I became Shadow Minister for Aboriginal Affairs from 1996 to 2000 I had a lot to do with Tracker amongst other Aboriginal people, seeking his advice and counsel and knowledge of how the show worked, particularly the Central Land Council. I kept in contact with him even after I resigned as Shadow Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

Tracker had always been a bellwether. The thing about him was that he had no fear and always spoke his mind and that could be off-putting for some people, but for me, I always found him to be quite incisive in some areas, and ahead of the action. I can remember in the debate on native title to do with the Wik amendments, where there was at one stage, amongst Indigenous people, a view about the right to negotiate that would have undermined us, and Tracker brought me along to a meeting, and we managed to convince people that it was their right to negotiate, not the miners or farmers. So very, very bright. Tracker had the capacity to piss people off too with his quick wit, and dry wit, but I think that belies how bright he was, and how creative he could be.

Whenever you are negotiating or when you are representing Indigenous interests particularly in the parliament, you are dealing with a minefield, you are dealing with people who turn on you at any opportunity, so it was always important to have a range of people you could rely on, and also to reassure you – to take you through the minefield. And Tracker – at times tactically we all make mistakes, he was not perfect, he had a propensity in the past to be very quick, and acerbic.

He was an ideas person, and he had a science degree. He was no mug. He could put it out there, but sometimes you needed to have someone else to close the deal, and that was the point. From my position, I always needed people like Tracker around to provide me with the ideas that I could then process, and become their advocate. Tracker famously said to me, We don’t want you to save us, Melham. I saw myself as an advocate, but I think in that small phrase he captured the whole thing. I did not adopt a missionary approach, and they did not want a missionary approach.

With me most of the battles have always been about protecting native title, protecting the winding back, the undermining of the Racial Discrimination Act. He understood the significance and the potential in all these things. What he was about was to have a place at the table, it was about giving Aboriginal people a seat at the table and then they could negotiate. He understood the importance of the right to negotiate. That was in relation to all matters.

I think the problem was that there were very few allies that we had inside the whole show. So you did not just have to worry about the opposition, you had to worry about the jealousies and rivalries of your own side. There was not a lot of help from people who came from remote areas because they were not necessarily across some of the issues. They might be supportive but they were pests in a sense. People think the Labor Party naturally is a supporter of Aboriginal people and it is not the case. You have really got to get the leader on side.

He would ring up and ask for advice, whatever, and I would say, No Tracker, you’re on the wrong track. Most of the time he was on the money. It all comes back to roughly the same things, the right of Indigenous people to argue their own cause and to not get done over, because there were all these attempts to keep doing over Aboriginal people. He talked to everyone: he would sit down and sup with the devil if he had to, which was his right, because you have to be at the table.

He was there throughout the whole of the native title debate, and he was there on the Stolen Generation debate, the Apology, and all of those things, and putting a good perspective on it.34 He played a role with Murrandoo Yanner and with others to settle them down and reassure them when it came to the Century zinc project in the Gulf of Carpentaria. He played a vital background role to seal that deal which was very important for Aboriginal people. If it was not sealed all hell would have broken loose.

He was a character and he might have been a pain in the arse at times, but he was our pain in the arse. I regarded him as a friend, and in politics you have very few friends. He was very supportive of me when I had been down and out with fighting the battles. He never walked away from me. Well! I know he had fallen out with certain people at times, we all do in this game because it is a hard game and sometimes we are hardest on our friends, but I just liked the guy. Firstly, he was a character, but I think he was a decent bloke whose heart was in the right place. Not in it for himself.

Murrandoo Yanner

Tracker’s connections with federal Labor were extremely beneficial to me personally, politically, and to the cause out here and the battles with Century. This was the one thing I have always found from the first time I ever went with him to Canberra, when we went to see John Faulkner, the sports minister. Daryl Melham was still there, and [Warren] Snowdon. There were three or four government ministers, and we ended up at this little Chinese restaurant late in the evening, but that day we went into parliament, the first time I had ever been in there, and every bastard knew him. From the security guards outside fifty metres away who were all stern-looking while putting everyone through, and they start giggling and I thought, What’s up here? Soon as they saw him, and it did not matter which door we went in they all knew him, and were calling out to him and joking, Hey, how you going Tracker?

It was even more the case when Barnaby Joyce was standing behind us when we went down to Canberra to the Wild Rivers conference two or three years ago.35 We got Tracker over to the Gulf of Carpentaria to help us when Abbott was trying to push his bill through parliament for to gut the wild rivers, and we were standing up at Joe’s Coffee Shop, little Joe, an Italian dude who had the only coffee shop in parliament, who was calling out to Tracker – What are you having brother? And he was jumping out and hugging Tracker, and it was that crowded with federal pollies and famous people, but they did not get that treatment.

Tracker introduced him to me and little Joe said, What are you having brother, you never pay for coffee, like this fellow, when you’re with him, he never pays for coffee. What stuck with me about that scene, standing behind us was Barnaby Joyce who had to pay for coffee, and his face was all screwed up. Then Tracker would go into these ministers’ offices, into Faulkner’s office and he knew all the staff. They were all affectionate with him, and while they were in parliament, he would walk into Faulkner’s room and put his feet up on his desk, and he would open top-secret files, and the secretary would come and slap him on the hand and say, You can’t do that. He said, Oh! It’s bullshit, there’s nothing in here. It is all gammon. He was just amazing. They obviously all liked him, but they also took him professionally and seriously, even when he was being a clown sometimes.

A lot of people would get turned off by it because he could be slightly eccentric, but I think the depth of his intelligence was that great. I never knew what my old man meant when he said, Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. He used to say that a lot when we were kids, but only since I met Tracks I have figured that out. He was obdurate with some of his best ideas, and he would say, Don’t tell any bastard about it. When we’ve done it and it’s all over they can read it and weep. If you tell them beforehand they’ll stuff it all up, sabotage it. I think that is what he meant when he was trying to explain something, when he made jokes or talked silly at times, with people who got turned off, who could not scratch below the surface.

I went with him to the Bringing Them Home report, the first ever conference at Darwin, and I was sitting next to him in a room full of people crying out their hearts, literally crying and pouring out their pain, and I do not know if it was his way of hiding whatever happened to him as a kid there, of being taken away and put on Croker with Mum mob, but he sort of embarrassed me and put me on the spot.36

He said, and I am just sitting there next to him and the room is crowded, and he gets up after about half an hour of all this and he says, No one bloody took youse away, your parents gave you away and look at you, I wouldn’t blame them. I thought, Shit, and everyone looked daggers at us and we get up and walk out and I am like, Ooh! I wanted to be elsewhere, but I think that was just his way of dealing with it. It was very funny in hindsight, but at the time there were a hundred eyes staring at us leaving.

I think a lot of people – Stolen Generation, including my mum and her family, and all her family were the Stolen Generation, and her mum and the oldest brother, it really put us behind, stuffed up mentally a clear majority, not half and half, but seventy or eighty per cent. I think only about twenty per cent are very lucky to come through almost fully intact. There are people who can hold a professional job, but they are a bit of a mess in their heart and mind. Tracker seemed to have the whole package, like nothing ever happened to him. It was just a sign of his strength I guess because a lot did happen, and should have affected him, but it did not show.

Tony McGrady

I suppose there were two episodes between Tracker and myself. The first one was back in the early 1990s when I had just been appointed the Minister for Mines and Energy in the Queensland Government. The Wayne Goss Labor government had established the Carpentaria – Mount Isa Mineral Province and I had carriage of implementing the Province. The whole idea was to get more development particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and one of the large potential mines was the Century mine.

I look back now and one of my best friends is Murrandoo Yanner, however back in those days, he was trouble. You had this new brash young Minister for Mines who thought he could teach some of these blackfellas up in the Gulf a thing or two. Of course Murrandoo and his team had different ideas. Anyway we fought the battle out on the national stage, and it had come to the stage where really there was no way in the world I was going to allow a potential mine employing thousands of people not to go ahead and of course I really believed, as I still do, that the development of the Century mine was going to provide employment and training for the Indigenous people in the Gulf.

Anyway, it almost came to a stalemate and the government brought in Tracker Tilmouth to be the mediator and as a result of his wisdom the mine has been in existence since about 1992. And the funny thing was, at the opening of the mine, the head of the company presented Murrandoo Yanner and Tony McGrady with these accolades because without us two it would never have happened. Of course they really did that tongue in cheek, because if it had not been for Tracker’s mediation it may never have got off at the time it did.

Murrandoo Yanner and myself laugh about things now because he was this brash young blackfella who was hell-bent on stopping the development of the mine, and you had this new Minister for Mines who wanted to make an impression and teach one or two people the facts of life. Maybe at that time, maybe, maybe, I was thinking to myself, Well! I am not going to let this little upstart here stop this mine going ahead. He was brilliant.

So without being disrespectful, Murrandoo was only a kid at the time, and he was surrounded by similar-type people who really had no practical knowledge of negotiation. They had a dream, they had a vision, but they did not have the ability to transfer those dreams onto an agreement. When you had some of the top bureaucrats and others coming along, they left because they did not have the technique to actually finalise a deal. That was where Tracker came in. He was Indigenous, his wife was a Cloncurry girl, and although they were up in the Gulf, she was perceived as a local girl, and you had people like Martin Ferguson and others involved. I think Martin in those days was probably still in the trade union movement, and was recommending Tracker as a mediator.

That was what he brought to the table, knowledge of people, been there before, could talk the same language to the young gun and, I do not want to be rude, young visionary. Do not forget, in those days when we negotiated the Century deal it was only a very, very short time after the native title legislation had been introduced. People from both sides, from the companies and the Indigenous people, were still searching, and it was even before the Paul Keating Redfern Speech.37

So we, as the government, had never been involved in native title negotiations before. The Indigenous people hadn’t. We were both floundering, but you have somebody like Tracker who was black, who could come in and talk the language of the blackfella, but also the white government people, that was what he brought to the table. I am not being disrespectful but going back to 1992, it was like the blackfellas were blackfellas, and we were whitefellas. Back in those days when the native title legislation really had not started to bite, nobody from either side knew the implications of it. We were searching around in the dark. So when somebody like Tracker came in who obviously had the respect of the company, the Queensland Government, and was gaining the respect of the Indigenous people, that was what he brought to the table.

I think Tracker has seen opportunities with his skills to get a better deal for Indigenous people, but at the same time, if Tracker had been a whitefella he would have succeeded in business. He had all the attributes that are required to run a successful business and I suppose at the end of the day he worked in the Darwin office of one of the big mining companies. He worked for them in a very high position so even if he was not Indigenous I think he would have risen to the top, but because of the special skills and affinity he had with Indigenous people, he was ready-made to do negotiations. He had a brain, and I have seen him demonstrate this in recent times, looking at what happens to the Century mine when the ore body runs out. He had dreams of forestry, quick-growing trees, so his mind was working all of the time. What do we do with the dam out there? Could we use the water for forestry? Provide jobs for people who used to work at the mine. That was what he demonstrated to me. It is all very well to deal with what is happening in the present, but you have got to have a vision, you have got to have a dream, and you have got to be looking for what happens at the next stage of this development. I think that was where he shone.

Bob Katter

We were probably distantly related – not by marriage, because no one ever bothered much to get married in Cloncurry.38 I first ran across Tracker in Mount Isa and discovered that he had been one of the people heavily involved in the Century mine deal in which he negotiated arguably two hundred million dollars worth of benefits.

Now the benefits that he had negotiated were kidnapped away from the local people, but undoubtedly he still cost the company who had a very, very arrogant attitude to the people of the area, including the people of Mount Isa.

Certainly as a state member or the federal member – if we were not rooting for the First Australian side of the argument up there, we most certainly were encouraging, and the reason for that was the company gave no jobs to the area whatsoever. It was not until Tracker along with Murrandoo Yanner bought into it that he negotiated some jobs, but even then, the contractual arrangements that came down to Indigenous jobs, the mine allocated these Indigenous jobs to a lot of people in Townsville who I most certainly would not consider to be First Australians.

And also in the fly-in and fly-out arrangements with a lot of these people, they might have a great-great-grandmother or something, but I certainly would not put them in the category of being First Australians. That was not Tracker’s fault, it was the lawyers’ fault that we were all let down so badly, but it was an extraordinary settlement and whilst there are other elements to it, [including the work of] Richie Ahmat and Murrandoo Yanner, it was a most extraordinary settlement. And enormous really to some degree, [by establishing an] insurmountable precedent for the future. It brought home with a vengeance just how capable this bloke was. There was never anything that would have been worth more than twenty million dollars in any project that I had ever heard of, no matter how giant the project. This was a ten-fold increase.

But with this big multinational foreign corporation, they just thought they could walk all over the top of us and Tracker threw up a number of legal and strategic barriers. He carefully utilised the state and federal representatives, who were made well aware that the company had no intention of providing a single job to us, thereby provoking the entire population of Mount Isa regardless of background, nobody agreed with that. Really the only jobs we ever got out of it was a few jobs that went to local people of First Australian descent, but we would have been skinned alive if had not been for Tracker.

He mobilised the media, he mobilised trade unions, he mobilised the state members, the ALP member, and the federal member who was a National Party member at that stage. He does not go for outright confrontation like for example Murrandoo Yanner, and he does not go in softly, softly like Richie Ah Matt. He could show ruthless brutality in the negotiations combined with very effective cleverness, some would say deviousness, and really at the end of the day, what was done was quite brilliant.

Tracker was a delightful and attractive character, he was the most charming person and God gave him the good looks to go with it. He would charm the tail off a bloody donkey, Tracker. There are very few people in this country that can ring up a prime minister, and the next prime minister, and the next prime minister, but he had been the go-to man for all of that mining region.

When Tracker negotiated, or Murrandoo or whatever you want to say, the two hundred million dollar deal, the level was raised, and since all governments ended up accepting the arrangement, therefore a new benchmark was created and every single deal was going to be constructed off that benchmark arrangement.

So whilst I would think this was a bad thing for the country as a whole and a very bad thing to happen, and the government should not have allowed it to happen, what they should have done was not stop us from negotiating that deal. What they should have done, the government, was force the company to base the workforce locally, which was the law until the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government fell. Up until then you would have to take the workforce locally. You would not fly in, this was banned.

But having refused point-blank to become involved in any way, shape or form, the idiot Queensland government of the day had left the company to their own provocative stupidity, which Tracker was able to take full advantage of, by not only turning the local First Australian community, but the entire community of north-west Queensland against them. There was not a single person on the side of Century by the time the dust had settled. I think to a large degree the lead singer might have been Murrandoo, but the choirmaster, or at least the person who did the musical arrangement, was in fact Tracker.

When they tried to close the [Northern Territory] land councils down, my own feelings were that they should be closed down, but I listened carefully to what Tracker was saying on that. I said, Tracker, they are not representative of nor do they represent the people of the area. I would go to locally elected shire councils because I had set up shire councils in Queensland, community councils they are called actually, which have considerably more power than local government powers. They went much, much further than local government, very extensive powers, for example, they had control of the police force. But they did not have them in the Northern Territory and Tracker said, We need a shield. If these people on isolated communities did not have the Land Council for a shield – we were in an isolated community on that day – he said, The people here, you’re telling me they’re going to be able to negotiate with mining companies? They’d be run around the mulberry bush forty-eight times. He said, It is a shield of protection. More sophisticated people with capabilities would enable them to negotiate on a level playing field with aggressive representation.

I had better not mention names here but we met once in the Carpentaria Land Council offices in Mount Isa, and Tracker said, What’s going on here? And I said, Well! I am backing up [our local bloke against the minister and the department].

But you know what’s been going on here?

Yes.

Tracker said, What did you say to the minister? I said, He is the head stockman from the Gulf Country, the bloke that been’s elected. Every second word was a very naughty word. He screamed obscenities. You have to have absolute discipline because it is like being on a football field, being on a mustering team you know, because if you are head stockman you tell the owner what to do, the owner does not tell you what to do. You move into a tight disciplinary regime once you are in the saddle. It is a different world, and of course he had taken that principle back to the Land Council, and Tracker was killing himself laughing at the thought of me trying to explain to a minister in Canberra that this was the way we talked to each other. The minister was saying, Do you know the horrific things that he’s been saying and doing? Well! I mean the other thing if someone questions you, the head stockman would just go bang and down you would go.

But Tracker, the very thought of a confrontation between myself and the minister in Canberra, he nearly died laughing with the thought of trying to explain to a bloke in Canberra how a stockman conducts his regime. That was one of many stories. On another occasion, a bloke was trying to get a mine off the ground. He was a good bloke actually, and I said, Look, just any problems that you’ve got, we want this mine to go, we want these jobs – badly. He was using local blokes in the jobs and so I said, What do you want me to do? He said, Shoot your cousin Tracker Tilmouth. I nearly died laughing but he was serious. So I said, Righto! We’ve got to get this going, what do you want me to do? He said, Shoot Tracker Tilmouth. Alright! What’s the second thing you want me to do?

It is hard to separate out the First Australian thing from the bush cattle-ringer thing the way Tracker told stories, but they are inextricably linked – the image of the traditional ringer Australian stockman and the First Australian in the saddle. As Mick Miller used to say, the Australian cattle industry was built on black backs and that was true. Black feet and stirrup irons anyway. First Australians were very good in this industry and still are, but we have not been able to unleash that because if we cannot get the title, we cannot borrow money off the bank, and without the title deed and without the money from the bank we cannot buy any cattle, and so even though we are capable of getting the cattle in and moving them on to the market and looking after them, the water and fences and branding and castrating and everything, whilst we can do all those things, we cannot get the money to buy the cattle because we do not have the title deed. We have got land tenure, but that is not the title deed that banks loan money on. With an inalienability clause there is a comfort there, which I am sure that Tracker fought on.

I think that a lot of what has been accomplished in Australia would not have been accomplished without Tracker Tilmouth and his ability to feel at ease with the prime minister, and feel just as much at ease with some old bush Murri who spent a life in the saddle, camped out bush, and the people that have fallen into the grip of alcoholism and he treats them the same as he would treat one of the bush blokes, or the prime minister. He would treat all of them no different. That is very much a First Australian characteristic, and I think all Australians have got that sense of egalitarianism from the First Australians. I can see that in a person like Andrew Forrest. I can see it in a person like Tracker Tilmouth and in that they were very similar people. That ability has yielded enormous benefits for our people, and not only for our people black, but also for our people white. Put the list together and be one group of people and call them Australians.

Murrandoo Yanner

Some doors would close for us at times because he had obviously ruffled a few feathers, or pissed them off. I know for the Wild River stuff when we took him to help us lobby Jenny Macklin that might have backfired slightly because he said, How ya going, Genocide Jenny? You could have heard a pin drop and pistols drawn at twenty paces, and the whole thing went sour pretty quickly.

He said it to her face, bloody oath. And we thought it was a joke between them but obviously it was not, I think she had been dodging him since she got elected and did not go against the Intervention policy. And similarly with [Trish] Crossin, instead of trying to do the decent thing, this federal Labor government stuck with John Howard’s Intervention when they had a chance to do the right thing by us and dump it. I think she had been dodging Tracker and this was his first chance to speak to her face to face. I do not think she expected him to turn up with us that day. So she got a bit of a surprise too that he was there, but it was too late by the time she realised.

She was withdrawn into her shell pretty quickly. She still stuck to the meeting with us, but you could see it ruffled her feathers and she knew what it was about, because they had obviously been making public comments on other things during the last year or so when Labor was in Opposition. He was referring to the taking away and further deprivation of hard-won rights in the Territory by the Howard government, and she, when she became the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Labor government, despite saying in Opposition they would not continue it, and would change it, she went ahead with the whole thing and even made more bloody restrictions for us.

So then it was really silly of her to come in and hear him say that, because he had said that publicly in the papers. He just said, How ya going, Genocide Jenny? And Marty [lawyer for Carpentaria Land Council] said later, Did you hear what he said? Yo!

Martin Ferguson

I had known Tracker since the early 1990s when I became the president of the ACTU. Initially, I knew him through the Indigenous community of the ACTU and then subsequently over many years through a variety of activities, not just in the Northern Territory. All these discussions over many years were about economic opportunities for employment and training in the context of Aboriginal land rights and Indigenous Land Use Agreements. Not focused so much on royalties but more on the capacity to set up businesses, and training and employment for Indigenous people, and Tracker was very good at this.

One of the most important trips I did with him was to the Tanami [Desert] in Central Australia with David Ross, and some of the people from the Central Land Council, where we actually went to the [Newman Tanami Project] mine, camped for a couple of days and then met with the Indigenous community, the traditional owners, and I might say that the management of the company saw in practical terms how when you sit down and work out proper arrangements, they can be of benefit to the investors as well as the local Indigenous communities.

Strangely, this trip happened to be just prior to Keating announcing how he intended to go forward with legislation as a result of the Mabo decision. When we returned to Alice Springs I did a media conference and it was not planned, it just happened to be on the day or evening of Keating moving on legislative proposals.

They were already working on the Tanami mining agreement, just like they were working on agreements around Darwin, the Alice Springs railway, and right across the Territory, as both the Northern and Central Land Council had been for years, part of the leadership with the country in terms of how you work with business and get returns, and not just of a royalty nature. But they were also working, not just in terms of mining agreements, but to clean up the community stores, to get the grog out of some of the communities, to get improvements in nutrition, proper fruit and vegetables, and decent meat. I can remember discussions about whether or not we could grow grapes and oranges in Central Australia and eventually, Tracker developed Centrefarm. There was already a community farm in Alice Springs for Aboriginal people with alcohol problems to dry them out, which was growing fruit and vegetables.

I think it was in January 2008 in Melbourne, where there were discussions [between the Labor government and members of the Aboriginal leadership about the lease of Aboriginal land for the construction of homes]. If I remember correctly they put a proposal on the table to short-circuit negotiations and came up with forty-year leases, because the life of a home in these communities is about forty years because of the nature of the climate. So rather than fighting about ninety-nine year leases [which the government wanted], it was, Let’s get on with the job and do a forty-year deal and get the houses built. So they always had an idea about how to get the outcomes to suit the people they represented, and bring government business with them.

Tracker also worked at different times on his concerns about nutrition on Aboriginal communities, for instance, trying to think through seafood and prawn farms. He had lots of ideas, and worked with a whole heap of different communities over the years, testing ideas. He was always on the phone to me or my staff. They all knew him. He was a frequent visitor to Canberra and my office, and other minister’s offices, the shadow minister’s offices, and ministers on the other side too. He used to go and see Heffernan fairly often. He knew how to get in the door.

He would just hound you, and pester you. At times you would have to try and pin him down to determine the practical outcomes, because he would have a lot of ideas, and some you would have to try and work out how you would actually implement them. Which as you know, we have not always succeeded in doing.

There were frustrations on both sides – the government trying to make programs flexible, and give flexibility in different communities. It did not come easy. It was all about trying something new, something different. I think sometimes the flexibility in some of the government departments could have been made easier for Tracker. You’ve got to take a few risks whilst not exposing taxpayers. And I think from time to time there were people in Indigenous departments and offices who thought they knew better than Indigenous people.

Some of the strategies Tracker used in his work was getting the coalitions together, business people, union representatives, government people, Indigenous leaders, getting leadership of the party into meetings. I can recall a discussion in Alice Springs one weekend at Warren [Snowdon]’s house, and in the back room out there, Tracker had a whole assembly of some of the key Indigenous leaders in Australia talking to Kim Beazley about social disadvantage and what had to be done.

He never stopped. But he also got respect because he was hard-working. He knew how to conduct himself, he had a good turn of phrase, good sense of humour, but also, he was very disciplined in that he was not on the grog, or things like that. He brought a sense of decency to the task.

For him this was not a job, this was a commitment. Clearly he had responsibilities, three daughters whom he and his wife gave good opportunities to in life, all educated and doing well. But whatever work he did it was not just about his responsibilities for his family, he had a lifetime commitment to try and do something.

At times it was not easy. I can remember the Apology to the Stolen Generations. He was invited, but this was one of the first times I saw him emotional and he could not go, and he could not sit through it. He came down to Canberra a couple of days beforehand and gave me a collage of photos of him and his brothers in the community where they were sent. I was looking at it the other day when I was cleaning out the office, looking at the different photos of Tracker and the way the kids were looked after, well dressed et cetera. He always had the cheeky look on his face compared to the others. Though he was taken from his parents, he was not bitter about it. But still very emotional. He broke down in his own way and said, I can’t come to the speech. There are too many memories. But I just wanted you to see this. And he had got it together and brought it down for me. I kept it in my office as a minister and when I resigned I kept it and now I hand them over to you, because I know how much that meant to him, to show me the background. He brought it all the way down from Darwin to bring to me.

But to be fair to him, he did not carry a sense of guilt about what occurred. There is an Anglican nun in [Northern Victoria] whom he still treats with absolute reverence, who looked after him and his brothers. She is referred to as an aunt by his daughters, and whenever they are in town they are expected to go and see her. He saw them [the mission at Croker Island] as giving him a start in life that he might not have got, which ended up in him going to university and getting an education, which did not happen to a lot of his mates.

I consider ourselves lucky at times to be in some of those meetings of the national Aboriginal leadership and I remember one in my office. Often you do not see the Indigenous leadership work it out amongst themselves but I was lucky enough to be in a discussion once with David Ross, the Dodson brothers and Tracker in my office in Canberra, and going hammer and tongs at one another as they argued about what had to be the position to put to the government and the Opposition. I was lucky enough to be a participant in that meeting which is a rare event. They normally sort it out amongst themselves and come to see you with the outcome but this was a ding-dong bloody argument I can tell you, because they knew they had to sort it out and they trusted me to be in the meeting. They are all tough operatives. No one wanted to give in.

They were all forceful negotiators. Considered. Tracker always had a lot to say because he was so bright, and liked to dominate. They had different styles, but Tracker was always out there and the others were holding him back saying, have you thought about this? Then all of a sudden David Ross, who would sit quietly, would speak and everyone would listen. As I said, you had an interesting collection of people, especially the Dodsons [Patrick and Michael], Tracker, Peter Yu, David Ross. Tracker was the one who had the analysis, and would throw it like a dead cat on the table and force the discussion.

If it was not for people like Tracker and David Ross and the Dodsons and others, we would not be where we are today in terms of the resources sector, and having to come to terms with the fact that native title is a fact of life. We went through all the legal processes and the High Court with the original Mabo decision, and Keating as the prime minister was working it through. It is one thing to achieve a legal outcome, but there is another even bigger challenge to achieve an acceptance on the ground that this is the new way of doing things. The conservatives were saying this is going to be the end of Australia, with Tim Fischer sitting on a TV program holding up a map of Sydney, a map of Sydney Harbour and everything else.

It was the leadership of people like Tracker which meant that they [Aboriginal leadership] had actually sat down with the mining industry and negotiated, very quickly, a series of practical agreements and were sending a big message, We really want investment. We are not just interested in handouts, we actually want an economic benefit. When I think back to those meetings, the debates with all of them, sometimes in my room in Canberra, you would not know those emotive days from the reality of today.

Those discussions were pretty instrumental in reinforcing my view that we should butt out. It was not work for the dole, it was a system of, you front up to responsibility and bring a sense of discipline and order back into the communities. It was their understanding of their communities which really taught me and a lot of the union members to actually front up to the fact, the gentrified area from which some of those people came from was entirely different to the reality of remote communities.

Tracker always had a colourful phrase for different situations, sending a message to people, that too many of you still think we are different. He would do an interview and refer to the nigger on the verandah type thing, which was, I am telling you in a tongue-in-cheek way about how you still perceive us. He always had those smart-arse one-liners which were also serious messages. I found that you could take him to Brisbane, to a meeting with a major mining company, where he could sit down and be on equal footing, but even then in a very serious discussion you would shake your head sometimes with the one-liners that would come out, and think, Christ Almighty, where is this going to lead us?

I can remember meetings with Yanner and Tracker – the old and the new bulls. Yanner having a lot of respect for Tracker and them feeding off one another: who was the smartest in the room and could give the most cheek. Tracker was a very good person for the young people to learn from. He had been around so long, he could do business on an equal footing, but you could also go bush with him, and he was at home with his community, which is not easy. He never forgot where he had come from.

He worked across the political divide. He would go to Canberra including the media gallery, and go up and chit-chat Laura Tingle of the Financial Review, and go and give Bill Heffernan a bit of cheek whilst also trying to work out from Bill what was achievable from a conservative side of politics, to go into different Labor Party offices. He could work the political divide but he had also seen the green movement for what they are, opportunists with no real concern for the Indigenous communities. Used them up and abused them if they do not toe the line.

He would go into a meeting knowing what he wanted, but he also knew that life is the art of compromise. He had objectives in his mind, which were always about the people he represented. He had a good business head and from what I have seen, business knew that they could deal with him. They knew he wanted development, but he had to correctly represent the people he represented. And the deal would get done and he would honour it and police it. And that has been for everything from oranges to grapes, oil and gas, and at one stage prawn farms in terms of nutrients and exports for the communities. He always had an idea. His mind never stopped. He did not seem to sleep. He knew the country like the back of his hand, and he would text and phone all hours of the bloody day. He worked the phone. Some people had a love-hate relationship with him too, because Tracks was Tracks. They loved him but also hated him at times. I had been with him out bush, driven around communities and towns, and I remembered the way he was received. They knew him and he knew them. They saw him as one of them.

I stayed in contact with Tracker because it was a question of respect. You knew he was not about himself. He was trying to do something to help others. When I first went to the Territory in 1977, half my union executive on the North Australian Worker’s Union was made up of Indigenous people. I knew the Ah Matts, the Coles, the Clarks and now we have lost a generation. Tracks was a bit younger than those people and he was lucky that he got an education, but he used it to try and overcome social disadvantage. He was worried about – not just his own children, he was worried about the community at large. You were always going to try and help him because he was trying to do something, trying to get outcomes. That was why if he rang, I would try and help him. I thought the world of him.

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31. Wadeye, on the western edge of the Daly River Reserve, 420 kilometres south-west of Darwin, was one of the Aboriginal communities selected to be a part of a program agreed to in 2002 by the Coalition of Australian Governments. The trial was a new approach to the delivery of services to Indigenous communities, based on a whole-of-government, cooperative approach to improve social and economic outcomes, with agreements of shared responsibility between the Commonwealth and Territory governments and the Aboriginal communities involved in the trial.

32. John Taylor and Owen Stanley, Opportunity Costs of the Status Quo in the Thamarrurr Region (Australian National University, Canberra, 2005).

33. By requiring governments to deal with native title in the same way as other property rights, including the payment of compensation if native title is extinguished or impaired.

34. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a formal National Apology in parliament to the Stolen Generations on the 13 February 2008.

35. The Queensland Wild Rivers Act 2005 was brought in by the Labor government in Queensland to preserve the natural resources of rivers that have all or almost all of their natural values intact. The legislation divided Aboriginal communities in North Queensland, particularly in Cape York, because it would prevent them having an input over the conservation and commercial use of their rivers. The Wild Rivers legislation was repealed by the Campbell Newman Queensland Liberal government in August 2014, and the thirteen rivers in Cape York and in the state’s western Channel Country will now be protected under the new Regional Interest Planning Act to prevent inappropriate development from going ahead.

36. The Bringing Them Home report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, April 1997, was a federal inquiry into the Stolen Generations.

37. The Redfern Park Speech was made by the Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating on 10 December 1992. The speech dealt with the challenges faced by Aboriginal Australians. The speech, written by Keating’s speechwriter Don Watson, became famous for the statement: ‘We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.’

38. Tracker’s wife Kathy was from Cloncurry.

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Croker Island – Tracker knew how to read well from a young age Lois Bartram Collection

Tracker’s mother Betty on the right William Tilmouth Collection

Tracker’s father, Roy Tilmouth William Tilmouth Collection

William, Patrick and Tracker on Croker Island Lois Bartram Collection

Lois Bartram with the twelve boys of Victory Cottage. Tracker is first from the left, front row Lois Bartram Collection

Victory Cottage Lois Bartram Collection

Tracker catching a fish on Croker Island Lois Bartram Collection

Tracker rode Timor ponies on Croker Island from a young age Lois Bartram Collection

Tracker collecting quandongs while working at Angas Downs Tilmouth Family Collection

Tracker, Johnny Liddle, Lawrie Liddle and Tim Lander at Angas Downs Maggie Urban

Tracker riding in the Camel Cup race in Alice Springs Tilmouth Family Collection

Tracker with Charles Perkins and Doug Turner CLC Archive

Tracker and Greg Crough, Northern Territory Aboriginal Constitutional Convention, Tennant Creek, 1993 CLC Archive

Tracker joking with Bob Hawke CLC Archive

Tracker and Greg Crough, Northern Territory Aboriginal Constitutional Convention, Tennant Creek, 1993 CLC Archive

Tracker with Robert Tickner and Billy Baker at the Warlpampa, Warlpiri, Mudbura and Warumungu handback of traditional land, 1995 CLC Archive

Tracker, Mick Dodson and John Patterson at the United Nations, Geneva CLC Archive

Tracker (as deputy director, CLC) and David Ross (director, CLC) CLC Archive

Tanami mine manager Stan Paget, Tracker, Simon Crean and Warren Snowdon at the launch of the Tanami Employment Strategy in 1995 CLC Archive

Tracker with Nick Bolkus and Brian Harradine at the Kalkaringi Convention CLC Archive

Tracker with Governor General William Deane, CLC chairman Max Stuart, and CLC deputy director Harry Furber, 1998 CLC Archive

Tracker with Bill Heffernan and Robert Hill in Central Australia CLC Archive

David Ross and Tracker working with CLC Media CLC Archive

Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Tracker and Steve Hatton at the Northern Territory Aboriginal Constitutional Convention, Tennant Creek, 1993 CLC Archive

Forrest Holder (Central Land Council), Tracker, Ross Ainsworth (consultant vet), and Steve Craig (manager, Mistake Creek pastoral property) CLC Archive

Tracker with Wenten Rubuntja, chairman of the CLC, and Mr Long, in Canberra, Central Land Council days CLC Archive

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