Doug Turner
Tracker was just full of ideas. My understanding of Tracker is that he was a visionary. He saw things that could happen, and he went over it in his head – about how to link things together, to make things work, what support he needed, how to get that support, and what he needed to do as an individual to stimulate those developments. He became a member of the Australian Labor Party and that connection grew and helped support community things in the territory, like the Central Australian Aboriginal Pastoralist Association. In 2014 he was involved with running his own business, looking at things with the mining industry, helping local communities develop their own mining companies and setting up economic initiatives for communities across different parts of Australia, not only the Territory but other areas within Australia as well. And then he links in other mainstream businesses like white community businesses in the mining industry, to help that grow. These are mainstream white communities whom he has helped over the years for them to grow, so he is asking for favours from them now to help Aboriginal communities grow and become independent in their own enterprise operations.
He was always looking for expertise to help his visions grow. He would bring in expertise from outside Alice Springs and from South Australia or from other states, people who knew how to write and understood the whitefellas’ world basically, and how to pull things together and make things happen and write submissions for him. I mean he could write submissions for himself and he could do financial statements but he was only one bloke, you cannot achieve everything because the task is just too big. He needed to get people with the skills so that he could make things happen.
Life is short, and there are so many things you want to see happen without trying to burn yourself out. We used to always say, if those creeks could talk, if those rocks could talk, if those trees could talk, the amount of things that we went over and talked about.
Tracker Tilmouth
[Speaking at the Northern Territory Food Conference, November 2014]
Look you have got to bear with me as I am getting old. Can we have those two maps young fella, and slides? I want to show you a bit of heaven. You white blokes drive past it every day. Righto! The first map over there is about one hundred and twenty kilometres north of Tennant Creek, and estimates at this stage would suggest that it has a bit more potential with the gas, the railway, and the Stuart Highway going through the middle of it.
The water potential once developed will be twice Ord River Stage 2 and it is sitting on the Stuart Highway. The other map is the employment potential of Ali Curung, Ti Tree, and the economics of that area of land if we were to take a conventional view of it. The biggest question is, the Indonesians [delegates to the conference] sort of told you in the nicest and kindest way that we really don’t want to deal with you.
Right! They were straight up, they were talking about soya beans, they were talking about a whole range of stuff, and they asked, Can you supply our products systems, can you supply our chains, and if you can, how can you do it for us rather than us doing it. We are in the same boat. The Aboriginal community has decided that, against the attacks on the Land Rights Act, attacks on native title, we really need a segregated economy. An economy where we can develop our own systems of trade, our own systems of production, our own methods of production, and a whole range of other social and cultural needs that at the moment are not being dealt with as we go forward on a conventional system of development.
So we have an economic and commercial paradigm that we have to deal with. The Indonesians asked the question, Where did all these [Aboriginal] people go, did they go back to the towns, did they go back to their communities? Ours went to gaol. We have a gaol out here [in Darwin] called the Fish Trap. There are four hundred people out there, so we have them all stacked up, and we have the internal cultural and social problems to deal with, but that does not mean that we drop the ball and put aside development opportunities that come up.
We want to tell people that when you come and see us about resource development, when you come and see us about economic development, there is a cultural and social fabric that you need to be concerned about. There is a delivery of the social dividend if you like, that has to be done at some stage so that people actually enjoy land rights, they do not just want to get the title for a fifty- or ninety-year lease. You hear it all the time, Why? Because you are doing nothing with it. How do you know that we are not doing anything with it?
So we go through this rigmarole of investment and counter-investment, and without any real long-term strategic process. We end up with a shit sandwich, and jumbo jets parked on community airstrips which is a wonderful thing, because a jumbo jet on a community airstrip looks wonderful, but no one knows how to fly it. The pilot walks away and you are gone. We have been through this process time and time again. The agronomists, the economics people, and everybody else we had pegged to come over and help us, some idiot sent them to Manus Island, and so we have to do our own thinking for ourselves now.
At the end of the day, we have to create programs that allow Aboriginal people to live on our land, to develop our land, on a sustainable basis. Not to develop it for the sake of developing – we can do that, we have got Ian Baker [Northern Territory Farmers Association] running around, and he will tell you sell the sausage, not the sizzle. Right! I agree with Bakes, we have got programs that we can do. They were talking about soya beans today. We know where to grow soya beans. We know the prices of soya beans. We know the prices on sugar. We know what Ord River can or cannot do. We know what marine clays look like. We know the anion and cation exchange rates of marine clays. Or what type of vegetables or what type of production you can get out of those clays.
So we have been there and done that. I also spent a long time in Israel in a kibbutz. We need a long-term strategic process but where is the point of doing this on an ad hoc basis, where we have both the federal government and the state running around saying, Oh! You are not doing anything with your land, we need ninety-nine year leases, we want this, we want that?
You have a look at the project we have got up there, we have the railway, we have the gas pipeline, we have the Stuart Highway, and we have more water under that land than Ord River Stage 2. So the potential is there. Once we have identified the opportunity and the potential, we can develop the processes that allow us to go forward. But we do not see anything from the government – both sides of politics – we have not heard a word from any government that allows us to go forward, to say to Aboriginal people, Yes, we do have a plan. Yes, it is a sustainable plan but these are the constraints to that plan. This is where my argument is. I am sorry that I am hard and fast and rough and everything else, but you do not know me any other way.
So at the end of the day that is what I want to talk to you about. I have been working for some time at this. We have got projects. Yes. You can take a pick at Ali Curung, at Ti Tree, at Willowra, they are there. The numbers are there. The soils and the waters are there. The electricity has to be there. The gas has to be there. This is the infrastructure that requires government input. We do not hear anything from the government about infrastructure going in to Ti Tree. These are the long-term arguments that we are interested in. Thank you.
Tracker Tilmouth
My interest in building an Aboriginal economy began years ago. The reason is that you cannot go to the debate on a treaty if you cannot contribute. A treaty is an economic exchange between two peoples. It is both legal and economic, but it is mostly economic, followed by legal precedent. So you have the argument that your protection of your land is the contribution you make to the economy of the country. It is as simple as that.
How do you measure the contribution in economic terms? Do you measure it in biodiversity? Do you measure it in species retention? Do you measure it in land management? Do you measure it in terms of commercial development, like mining and pastoralism, cropping, whatever? How do you measure it? How does each bit of that pie contribute to your position in an economic debate? What weapons do you bring to the table to allow you to debate the issue in relation to biodiversity? What is the value of biodiversity to your people? The social fabric, the cultural fabric, the economic processes that were part of your Aboriginal society? How do those things contribute? Because that is what you are going to trade with.
You are going to give something because they are not going to give you a treaty for free. Economics plays a huge role in our ability to negotiate a treaty.
How did I develop my thinking about this? You have to get the baseline data and that was what Irrmarne was all about, getting baseline data, setting up a process.39 The Irrmarne process was about mapping Aboriginal land use and its systems, but from an Aboriginal point of view. That is where the idea of having participation and a management plan evolved. I invented this participation process because we had these idiots running around and saying we can do this and that, and we said, No, where are the rocks? I told them, You show us what the country does and when it does it. I invented all that. Then you had all sorts of blokes like the ones who used to run the pastoral section in the CLC saying, I picked it up. Oh! Wow! Every success has many parents.
Irrmarne was the next stage of that, where you could map the data on a computer screen, and map the country, and then discuss, for example, the value of getting goannas in October versus the value of getting goannas in January, or vice versa. When is the best time to get goannas? What is the economic activity of getting goannas? What are the health issues in relation to going out hunting and gathering goannas? How did that affect you and your social wellbeing, and the people who hold a story for that goanna? You are interwoven to such an extent, and that is an economic activity.
How do you quantify and qualify that, to put it into a model to say, if I left that country there, I could trade off this country over here for that, then we can do certain things? Now we got blessed, because the whitefellas went and picked all the good country for cattle. This has an impact on the good country, and on the bad country that we ended up with. We ended up with spinifex plains and rocky hummocks, and mining and everything else. But we ended up with all the water. All the water tables are under Aboriginal freehold, not under the pastoral leases. So the pastoralists wanted access to our land to grow crops. They want access to our land to grow food.
The idea of a segregated economy is a set process. But you have got to let the plane crash before people will learn – you have got to hit the wall, and they have hit the wall. The pastoral leases in the Northern Land Council are just about defunct and have been leased out to the white blokes. The buffalo industry is just about dead. They have got nowhere to go. They have no idea where to go, and I am sitting here in the box seat.
Tracker Tilmouth
The biggest argument has been and always will be the attraction of capital, and when I spoke at the NT Food Conference [in November 2014], I spoke about a segregated economy. That upset a few people but people who knew what I was talking about understood exactly, the segregated economy means that Aboriginal people develop projects that allow them to produce goods for sale, and commodities that allow them then to sell to a wider market.
But unless you segregate that economy at the start then it’s very difficult for Aboriginal people to understand exactly what you are talking about, because the pressures of a normal market are upon them, and where people are forced to do certain things that are detrimental to the program in the long term, you end up with a bastardised system of production rather than something that is going to be sustainable. That is the argument for a segregated economy, where you can talk about tax havens, not tax havens as such, but managed investment schemes and a whole range of other stuff that allows taxation to be used and to be written off to a certain extent, offset against the economy of the Northern Territory, especially in remote communities.
You have to build an Aboriginal segregated economy, because unless you have a massive employment program, you will not have the wherewithal to employ everybody, and this becomes the argument: Do you employ everyone? Do you employ half of them? Do you employ a quarter of them? Because each project is going to have a finite resource in terms of employment. Does it take four blokes to dig a hole? Does it take five blokes? Does it take six blokes? Because when you get five or six, or even three blokes digging a hole, you have lost your efficiency. You have lost the efficiency of two digging a hole.
Now where do we go? It is going to get worse because the Abbott government has cut back ranger programs and a lot of other programs as well. You have got no economy. The one economy you have got is a policy [land care] that can’t deliver. You leave the trees there. Yes, righto. We’re going to pay so much for carbon trading and everything else. Where is the industry? There isn’t one. There is no green industry as such.
Alexis Wright: Can you sketch out from the top of your head an economic plan?
Ha! You do not have one, and you will not have one, until you recognise that there is a level of productivity that you can glean from any group of people, and unfortunately you have unemployment present in two or three generations. So you are never ever going to get this good work ethic being part and parcel of it. You have got to rebuild an economy, slowly from the ground up. Long term, that is, taking the long term view. It is going to take real thinking and commitment. But at the moment people are not thinking that way. They are looking for a five-minute grab on TV, and they are getting awards for turning up. Recognition, reconciliation, you name it. Or sovereignty! There is no debate, no real debate, about where the Aboriginal community is going to in the first place. Even if we did get along, we still do not have a plan.
Alexis Wright: Have you got a vision?
No I don’t, not right at the moment. I have got a bit of a dream, but it is a nightmare.
My main argument is that you cannot go to the table with a begging bowl. If you are going to exercise your rights, and your rights are enshrined in the ownership of land, your rights are also enshrined in the economic power that you bring to the table. You cannot negotiate from a point of, Please be kind to me, I am a coon. That goes nowhere. The only time you negotiate is when you say, Righto! If you don’t listen to me it’s going to cost you. And it is going to cost you a lot more than you thought. It is delaying your project, it is delaying your resource development, it is delaying everything.
So you go back to the table and say, I want to exercise my rights, my sovereign rights. You have not surrendered. There is no one who has received your declaration of surrender. The argument for land rights, especially in the Northern Territory, is that Aboriginal people can exercise their economic rights. It is not the land rights so much, they achieved a lot in that, now it is the economics of it. Everyone is afraid of this, of what does economics mean? Community development is a form of economic development but no one is game to take it on. This is where it sits.
You have got to have Aboriginal people considering this for themselves rather than being left out of the economic process, and being an integral part of the economic process, because the Northern Territory Government’s money is based on the formula that Aboriginal people are hard to service, they live in remote areas, so they get extra money but what they do with that money is spend it on a lot more bureaucrats, they do not spend it where it should be spent. The argument is really to remove CDEP, start developing real economic programs and regional authorities that are able to handle the economic pressures.
The non-Indigenous part of the Aboriginal community is against that because these people have a social agenda that Aboriginal people are living museums. Or they believe that through your poverty you remain pure. This has been the Labor Party’s mantra and the CDEP mantra for some time under the social workers. I train Aboriginal people to recognise that the social and economic fabric of the Aboriginal communities is currently based on service delivery, based on services, and therefore it is a cost, they are unable to earn against those services. My aim is to try and turn that around so that everything you see is economic. Everything you do and say, whether you buy a bottle of beer or you get a loaf of bread, it costs you money, there is a cost involved, you are not part of the process, you are a recipient, you are a grant in aid.
The Gulf is a classic example of having to rethink the strategy and with people like Fred Pascoe, Murrandoo, Vernon [Yanner], and blokes like that who can see the argument, it is a matter of just quietly moving that argument very close to them so they get a good look at it.
Freddie Pascoe is way out in front of everybody. He is a thinker. Not only is he a thinker, he gets up and does it. Murrandoo has held back a little bit because he has got to run the Land Council and there are differing political discourses in there, so you can be distracted from the economic agenda. Whereas Fred is the mayor of Normanton in North West Queensland. He runs the Morr Morr Pastoral Company. He understands it, and gets it every day of the week. So you have these types of bloke sitting there and they are not going to have the degrees of the Pearsons of the world, or Langtons, or Dodsons, but they are going to be doing it. Doing it long before these people like that work out how to do it. To me they are neo-colonialists – they have come to colonise the blacks again. As far as I’m concerned they do not have any answers because they have not been around long enough to study the problems. You cannot have a resolution of a problem unless you know the problem and how it affects you. Part of their agenda as far as I can see is that at the end of the day you will get a Basics Card from royalties and if you are not spending it on health, education and welfare…you will not get any money.40 That was being touted, that was the agenda. Hopefully, I can get to Abbott and people like Andrew Robb and a few others I know, and tell them to kill it. It is bullshit. Based on bullshit.
You have just got to read the book Beyond Humbug by [Michael] Dillon and [Neil] Westbury, and all it is to date is that nothing has worked, they have been in charge for thirty or thirty-five years that I know of, and nothing has worked.41 They write books about how it is supposed to work, but it cannot work, because it did not work in the first place. From Maralinga to Maningrida it has not worked. From Oak Valley all the way up to Yirrkala it has not worked. And from Broome, or Port Hedland, across to Yarrabah, it has not worked. Cape York has not worked. There is nothing you can show me today that works, except for the processes of economic development. A welfare-based economy cannot work, it does not work. It is an oxymoron.
Tracker Tilmouth
I have no respect for authority. To a certain extent this has always been a part of my character, whether you are talking to the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, or whoever, you just talk. You put your point of view and leave it be. I have always had that ability to go and say what I think and let it hang where it may, or fall where it may. I have got myself in a lot of trouble doing that as well as winning a few arguments, so it has been sweet and sour results more than a few times.
The idea has been to get inside places, to walk in, to negotiate, to articulate a position. We are floundering around as a group and saying where is the best way to go. We have a lot of black bureaucrats, and you see this in relation to the recognition debate. All those people that are up in the front representing the community are all ex-bureaucrats, or are paid bureaucrats, they are part of this committee or that committee, they are part of this or that. They are funded. Well! That is not coming from who they think they are. It is not coming from the heart: it is coming from the funding. You forget that you go from reconciliation – we have done that and we cannot keep crossing that bridge – we have to find something else. We want recognition now in the Constitution. It is not even our Constitution. It belongs to the white blokes.
The thing that interests me is that the debate is not a debate that the white blokes are having. As far as they are concerned we are conquered, we have got nowhere to go. The best that we are going to get we have got out of native title, because that is what they think. And so we are waiting on issues like the Wild Rivers legislation. Noel Pearson went through that process. We went through that process with the Gulf of Carpentaria and at the end of the day they came back with a worse set of legislation than what was in the Wild Rivers. We all got bailed out. We lost the process. We lost control of the process and you cannot keep doing that. You have to go and find a legislative mechanism. You have to go and find the places that you can win on, and what you cannot win on, what you will lose on. This is part of the negotiation. This is the problem we have. Every time we have a problem we go and buy some bloke from Alaska who has been eating seal meat for the last year. He comes across to teach us how to negotiate. The wonderful people from the Sami in the Arctic, and everybody else.
For example, Rodolfo Vaz de Carvalho, the Brazilian representative at the Northern Australia Food Futures Conference held in Darwin in 2014, said how stupid we are in Australia, and he did it in the nicest way possible. You need a dictator to get this sort of project up [a northern food bowl] – that was his closing message I think. You cannot do it without military support sort of thing. He thought we were in Brazil, where you shoot the peasants.
So you have this debate going on in an Aboriginal community where we never sat down and did an inventory of what we have got, of our resources. And then we have not been able to deal with that as a collective because we are divided. You look across to where the real debate is going to be, to north and south Australia where the mining and cattle industry and everything else is located, that is where the resources are. And the wineries, and the investments and buildings and infrastructure, and the cities. We have not been able to do that successfully. We ended up with Indigenous Business Australia. We ended up with the Indigenous Land Corporation. Really they should be closed down. They should be closed down and people told to go home, we do not need you. They are getting the money of the closed-down ATSIC, being ATSIC by another name. And ATSIC did not work.
You cannot build the sort of economic framework I am talking about inside those types of organisations. This is what I am saying about segregating the economy. You cannot control the debate if you do not control the purse. The purse is the resources that you bring to the table. If you cannot control that you have lost the debate before you walk in the door. This is why there is an inordinate amount of funding for Native Title Representative Bodies, land councils and huge bureaucracies. They are all over-governed, absolutely over-governed. You talk to any organisation and they say, We’ve got no money. Hang on a minute, how much money did you get last year? We got fifty million to run the Land Council. Fifty mil! Not to build an Aboriginal economy.
There is no enjoyment of land rights. Enjoyment for land rights is someone out bush saying, Well! I love being here. This is where I am sustaining myself. This is what I want to do. These are the values I have placed on my country. Off you go. That is your prerogative, that is your choice. But at the end of the day, if you do not contribute, you get your return on what you invest, and this is the issue. If you want to be out there and do what you need to do, then when it comes to economic and commercial development, you cannot get both mixed up. When it comes to commercial development your income is reflected by your investment. This is the problem, this idea that the Aboriginal sharing-and-caring, the pan-Aboriginality, is not as strong as people would like it to be. And so people who do not have royalties, do not have mining on their land, they are second-rate cousins. You always have that divide. The white blokes can see that divide. That is what they exploit. They are not there to be nice to us. This is the problem we have got.
39. Irrmarne, 350 km north-east of Alice Springs on the Sandover Highway, was originally a stock reserve that was re-scheduled as Aboriginal land, and held under the Irrmarne Aboriginal Land Trust. The CLC Land Management Unit undertook extensive work that included analysis of aerial photography, satellite imagery, and vegetation and fauna surveys, to assess the capabilities of the land.
40. The Basics Card is a device developed by the federal government to quarantine and control the income and spending of Aboriginal people dependent on social welfare payments.
41. Michael C. Dillon and Neil D. Westbury, Beyond Humbug: Transforming Government Engagement with Indigenous Australia, Seaview Press, West Lakes, 2007.
