Michael O’Connor
The first time I remember Tracker was in Warren Snowdon’s office, or running around Parliament House, in the 1990s. You know those people who run around the place and you see them but you actually do not know who they are, you might know the name but you do not talk to them.
So I roughly knew who he was and of course I remember his name being mentioned in dispatches when there was a Senate vacancy in the Northern Territory as well. Around 2004 he rang me up and said he had been talking to Martin Ferguson about trying to do some forestry projects in the Northern Territory, and Martin suggested he give me a ring. He said he had a range of information that would demonstrate there were some good places in the Northern Territory where you could grow plantation forestry, and that could be the foundation for a possible forest industry for some Indigenous communities. He wanted to know whether he could get some advice about forestry, not just about growing trees, but evaluating what you could do to increase the amount of jobs you could create off forestry, for forestry plantations in the Northern Territory.
So I said I was a union official, and that forestry was not really my expertise. I knew a bit about the industry of course, so I said I could easily organise people in forestry and others who I was sure would be more than happy to assist him. The thing that got me, he said he was not interested in that first off, and he basically said to me, if I wanted to help him I had to come up to the Northern Territory to see some of the communities he was talking about.
I was trying to work it out, Hang on a minute, didn’t he ring me looking for a favour, and next thing you know he had completely swapped it around, because I said I can get you this guy, he is a forestry expert, he used to run several forestries and he said, No, no mate, you’ve got it all wrong. You get up here and then we’ll work out whether you’re allowed to help us.
And then next you know, I am organising myself to go to Port Keats [Wadeye]. I do not know how he did that. When he was talking to me he said, Look, unless you know what the communities are going through, if you want to give us assistance you’ve got to understand something about the problem. You can’t just sit down in Melbourne and think you know it all because you’re doing something for the blackfellas. Get your arse on a plane and if we think you’re alright we might let you help us. So the next think you know I am on my way to the Northern Territory.
I went to Darwin and he agreed to meet me at seven o’clock somewhere outside a motel and by this stage a big controversy had broken out about the union over allegations about us and Howard in the 2000 election, because there was an allegation that we had received four million dollars. That had all broken over the weekend as I was coming up and he pulled up in a four-wheel drive at the door and said, Hey brother, if you’ve got that four million dollars, I’m the fellow to get you a dig tree.
So I got in the car and off we drove. I cannot remember if Sean Bowden was with me, but Tracker said, We have to stop off. He said, We’ve got to pick up the interpreter. I am going, What do you mean, pick up an interpreter? He just looked at me and said, What do you think, they speak English where we’re going? He goes, You don’t know much about your own country, do you? I just went, Oh! My God. Anyway so we picked up Dominic McCormack who is now a partner with Sean in the law firm there and we drove through to Daly River.
Now I had been at Daly River before, I had been there for a week. My brother-in-law lived up there for four or five years. We went through to Daly River, and spent a couple of days there. We had the interpreter and we looked at a couple of places, and they showed me the winds up there. Tracker showed me what was happening in the community and we met some of the people at the school. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me because I had never been to a place like that. I think the community had just gone through a series of violent episodes as well, this was what I was told when I was up there, a couple of the key people and mainly the women basically, had got rid of the pub. They had closed the pub. I think they burnt it down and chased the manager out of town because they were trying to get it dry, and trying to stop [the violence].
I do not know if it was true but that was what they told me. Tracker had information that there was potential there to do some things, and he was explaining to me that he wanted as much as possible to find some economic activity that was sustainable, that would sustain Indigenous communities particularly in the Northern Territory, but anywhere I think. He was talking about the Northern Territory and he was looking at forestry, and he was looking at stuff to do with crocs as well, and he was really down on a number of initiatives from government where they were not really trying to provide a sustainable economy for Indigenous communities.
He would give an example where people would collect croc eggs say for twenty dollars an egg, but if you have an incubator, with the hatchlings you can get four hundred dollars or something. The incubator would only cost one thousand or two thousand dollars – you could not get money for that, but you could get money for other stuff that was bullshit. He was always looking for those sorts of activities that could be done, and he would give examples of very basic things not happening.
That was the first time when I actually realised what it meant, when I went with him and he explained it to me. I did not realise the provocation of getting different people off different country and into someone else’s country, and the tensions and the issues that that caused, until I witnessed it, or was there and having someone like him explain to me, because as I said, I was at Daly River for a week but I never really got that. What he said made a lot of sense. It was, Hang on, why can we not make people economically sufficient, why can we not make them economically sustainable, why can’t we look at these sorts of issues and be practical about creating economic activity which supports people’s language and people’s culture? I could not understand why people were not doing this. It did not make much sense why they weren’t. I still do not know why they are not.
I do not know how many ideas Tracker came up with during that car trip, of things we could do. He would wear me ragged. I just could not keep up with him. I would say, Mate you’ve got to stop plying my head with all these ideas. Just give me one or two things I’ve got to do cause otherwise I just can’t keep up. He would go a million miles an hour. Every time he would see you he would have an idea. He needed a big bloody infrastructure around him, because there were some great ideas about what could be done, but he was basically just trying to get the logistics for the forestry through. And of course there were a lot of people who were pooh-poohing stuff, who did not know what they were talking about I reckoned.
Tracker’s whole forestry thing was based on carbon trading as well, value-adding. Basically, his view was that if you got the right scale you would provide jobs for trained foresters, and you would need trained people to be involved in the management of the forest, a whole range of blue-collar jobs as well as white-collar jobs, or professional jobs. Then there would be the value added, which would be to have people involved in anything from furniture manufacturing to framing, and then the carbon that could deliver an income stream as well. Basically a whole range of jobs, including a whole range of environmental services apart from carbon to make sure you are looking after everything properly.
The other thing I did not realise, and again I was very ignorant of how things worked, Aborigines really only had the right to be consulted and it was not actually a property right, and that mining companies could still do what they wanted. I did not realise that the rights that had been won had a hell of a way to go to call them what most of us would think would be property rights.
Sean Bowden
Tracker never forgot what was required back at home base. The work we were doing at Thamarrurr had been started but was unfinished. This was about the Thamarrurr concept. This was the most important concept at a place like Wadeye, because Thamarrurr is something that means all together or coming together, coming together for a fight against outsiders is a more literal interpretation that has been given to me. So joining together to confront the outside world might be the contemporary version of it. This had been developed, almost as a last straw, by the leadership of Wadeye who were in twenty-two different clans on one clan’s land. They realised they had to come together in a formal way. Previously that one clan had run the town and they realised all the clans had to have a say. The Diminin clan had to be respected, but the Kulingmirr group had to come together. And so they did and they asked Tracker and myself back to keep helping them with that work. We spent a lot of time working with that concept and with those leaders.
The concept came from the leadership themselves. It came from men like Tobias Nganbe and Leon Melpi who always pay tribute to Tracker Tilmouth. They remembered the work that was done between 2003 and 2007 when he was active with them. And they always paid tribute to him because in later days he would take them to Canberra as well. And then when I was with the Wadeye men in later years, I would always make a point, I learnt this from Tracker Tilmouth. They would say, Sean, how do you know these things? How do you know to do this? I would say, I learnt from Tracker Tilmouth. And Gerry Hand and then Martin Ferguson, and Daryl Melham, and Ah Kit a little bit, and Norman Fry a little bit, and Galarrwuy a lot, but Tracker Tilmouth opened the door for me and for them. That was what he did for many people. He was selfless in his willingness to do it. I was fortunate that I was there, just able to capitalise, it was good for me.
So we started meeting with this Thamarrurr group. Tracker understood it, he understood it was the only way forward, and of course he sold that message far and wide, this was the way to do things and you could not do it otherwise. It also came with a sense at the time, of what we were experiencing up here at Wadeye, that ATSIC had certainly failed, and the [Northern] Land Council system was failing. The Land Council system, at this level, was failing. It was not connected to these groups. It was not connected to these communities. It had no sense, no tactile feel of what was going on.
Tracker and I became the Land Council’s informants. We spent half our time going back to the NLC saying, This is what is happening at Wadeye, because the NLC had no touch on it. More to the point, the Wadeye people did not want them because they did not know them. We actually reintroduced the Land Council back to Wadeye and there is a history there: the Catholic Church was in a way anti–Land Council, and there had been some adversarial stuff, but that had been dead for fifteen years. To balance things up Tracker came up with a statistic that the NLC had done four hundred lease agreements in North East Arnhem Land, but had done none in the Wadeye region, and there were more people in the Wadeye region.
So we started agitating for an economic agenda with the Thamarrurr group. Then when Tracker got Richie Howitt [economist] involved, and got the technological and agricultural data and soil sampling, he used that to interest Senator Bill Heffernan. He spoke to people, not just through the prism of the Thamarrurr concept, but the Thamarrurr group as the conduit to an economic development future. And hey: we need kids educated as well. So we were able to link the whole argument. Then we started to do it publicly, and I learnt a lot during this period from him and others about the media, and we started to agitate, we started to write things, with me going to the media as the lawyer agitating on behalf of Wadeye.
We started to criticise the Labor government, and they would have been saying to themselves, Well! We were smart not to let Tracker Tilmouth into politics! But they were wrong, because if they had had him in politics he would have fixed the problem from the inside. The problem was they had become a closed and insular party, interested only in their own success, in winning the next election in the northern suburbs of Darwin, playing the race card which they did in 2005 with the drunks policy. We nearly had fistfights with other Labor people. We had really vigorous confrontations at places like the Casuarina Shopping Centre [in Darwin] where we would bump into Labor politicians and both of us would say to them, Oh! Why are you out here, running the drunks policy are you? Telling everyone how Aboriginal people are urinating, defecating and fornicating all over the place. They would say, Oh! No we’re not! and we would say, Yes you are. We had this double thing going at the time and it was just rabble. We got Chris Burns [Labor minister in the Northern Territory] one day and in the end made him admit that yes, that was what he was saying. We got him in a public domain where he was holding court in Casuarina and challenged him.
But that behaviour has its price because the political machine turns on you, and it starts to run things against you, and I copped a bit but Tracker copped much more, and when I look back on the calibre of his courage, he had a prawn farm he was trying to run, he had a loan from the government. He had a reputation, he had history, and they went for him, they went for him a lot. They never got him. Fortunately in a way it was a Liberal government in Canberra. And in the end we were big and ugly enough to look after ourselves, and we were right, the policy the Northern Territory Labor Party took to the 2005 election about alcohol and drunks was race-based and was a disgraceful thing that would not happen in any other jurisdiction in Australia.
Meanwhile, the Thamarrurr stuff started to build. The NLC then engaged Tracker on a full-time basis to do this sort of work. They realised how important it was. I had started to do some work for the Yunupingus and with Galarrwuy, and Tracker was there with me as well, and in those early days when Galarrwuy was trying to get back on his feet, when he was under all sorts of political fire having just resigned as chairman of the Northern Land Council and being himself a critic of the policies of the then NT Labor government, he was copping it. The administration in the Northern Territory turned on him, calling all sorts of investigations into him which were followed by federal investigations.
The word on the street was that Galarrwuy Yunupingu is finished, Galarrwuy Yunupingu is dead. The king is dead, long live the king is what people were saying around the place, and a lot worse. Really awful. I was furious about it because I knew that with all of the people saying that, their careers were made off the back of Galarrwuy Yunupingu.
It was a horrible thing to watch. The Northern Territory Government was on him, and they were working against him. I was acting for Galarrwuy as his lawyer, and I ended up saying to Tracker come on we have got to go over and support Galarrwuy. That was because so many people who you thought would be loyal to Galarrwuy for what he had done for the land rights cause, and the general cause of Aboriginal people, moved away from him, and they all moved away except for Tracker. Tracker got on the plane with me and over we went.
Galarrwuy can look after himself, he is a titan, but he did need support, he did need people to guide him through. I helped him legally and Tracker helped him politically for a time when he was at his weakest. Even his closest friends were saying to us, I think he’s finished, I think he’s going to lose it all. He was under investigation at three levels, from the police, from the Northern Territory Government, from the Commonwealth. The royalties that his clan derived from the Land Rights Act were under fire, and he was under fire because of that, and it was clear that this was a mechanism just to bring him down and at the same time to weaken the Land Rights Act. Everyone knows that, it is still current, more than ever actually: if you want to get the Land Rights Act you have got to get Galarrwuy. You have got to get his agreement, or you have got to get him out of the way. And back in those days there was a run on the Land Rights Act. Those were tough times and it strikes me that Tracker was not afraid of those times. He had a lot of guts for the fight.
Tracker Tilmouth
If this is a model of success, give me Soweto in its heyday…Give me Soweto any time prior to Nelson Mandela’s release or after his release, give me Soweto as a comparison and I’d rather go to Soweto. – Tracker Tilmouth on the clan riot in Wadeye, ABC Radio, 4 May 2006.
There are three classes that I see, of Aboriginals living in Aboriginal society, and one of those is in the bush, where culture and language, law and custom is enshrined, and governs the total operations on remote communities. You can have all the programs you like going in, but unless you understand the cultural and social processes then your programs are not going to go very far. It does not matter how much money you throw at it.
And this came to pass with the Intervention, where the amount of money that went to Aboriginal communities was enormous, but it had no effect on the social wellbeing of the communities. Port Keats [Wadeye] built a hundred houses and there are still eight hundred people between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five or thirty looking for work. There is no CDEP program nor should there be, but there is no prospect of work either.
Why did that happen? Well! It happened because the community built or started to get involved in building the houses, but the benefits flowed to the people who managed the program in Port Keats. They did not flow to Aboriginal individuals, the wages and so forth, even if and when they were available to work.
This is an issue involving the Thamarrurr Development Corporation, the Northern Territory Government and the Commonwealth. At the moment Port Keats still has a massive unemployment rate with no skills, or very little skills.
There was a failure of the Thamarrurr Regional Council to be able to negotiate a proper process, and the leadership of Thamarrurr was proven bereft of any real ideas on where to go. And they never had the experience neither. The management of Thamarrurr took what it could without understanding the full political picture and the processes. And today, now, it is still struggling to be part of anything significant in relation to sustainable economic development.
So you had this sort of program running, but I do not think there is a community that ever had the Intervention turn up and build houses that survived the process, or increased their skills or economy. Or increased skilled workers and skills that could be used elsewhere, or skills that could have remained there today for the next round of housing. That has never been the case. So we ended up with CDEP training programs which were reliant on CDEP funding to employ people. This was after the Intervention. Before, and after the Intervention. So the Intervention made no impact whatsoever.
This was the situation across the board and you only have to go to the social indicators to understand that, the amount of alcohol, the amount of drug use, and the amount of domestic violence, is still the same. In fact it has increased.
You get a flasher house to belt your missus in. That is all you have done. Because you do not have a job, you cannot buy your house, you cannot live in your house, because you do not have any furniture when they give you the house so you are camping on the concrete floor. Or you would rather camp outside anyway and use the house as a shed, or a storage facility for you and your dogs. And that is about it. And then, you run the electricity lines outside and you have your TV sitting outside on the verandah, or out on the lawn, or wherever, and you sit out there, sleep out there, and watch TV out there, rather than sitting in the hot, non-air-conditioned concrete block.
And that is the sum gain of the Intervention. So you look at that, then you look at the urban Aboriginal organisations like the health services, the housing associations, and everybody else. They have no real connection to the bush. In fact they have even less of a connection than before. And I know that AMSANT [Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance Northern Territory] have embarked on the process of developing a regionalisation strategy, but this would mean that the bigger health services would have to share their wealth, share their resources, share their operations with remote communities, and they are very reluctant to do that.
So they go through this process of regionalisation purely as a facade, and they are all very concerned and have all sorts of well-meaning debates, but it is like the UN General Assembly, where everyone goes, Oh! Woe is me – about Syria – but let’s not get too close in case we have to do something. Right! And that is what happens with health services and to a certain extent the service organisations. It is so disconnected that the Central Land Council, in its wisdom, decided to set up another arm called Community Development, which is a very good move because it fills the gap that was left by these so-called service providers, and health service and housing associations, essential services, the legal aid, and everybody else that races out there to support the Aboriginal community. But there is really no real support because the resources are held in Alice Springs, Darwin, Katherine, Nhulunbuy and elsewhere, as part of the centralised service provision.
So there is no connection between the remote communities and the urban Aboriginal operations, really no connection. Right! If you want to connect you have to have ownership, you have to be an agent of change, and that has been rejected on so many occasions by the organisations. The Aboriginal organisations, especially in Darwin and Alice Springs, are deciding to form an advisory team to counter Warren Mundine, Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson, and Abbott’s committee, but it is a bit late.42
It is like running around with Nero fiddling while Rome burns. And they want to get this connection in the bush, but it is too late, there is no connection. The Aboriginal communities in the bush have never been serviced by these people, never seen these people, and so all of a sudden they are now called on to protect organisations that they have nothing to do with. And this is the position that we find the remote communities in, being asked yet again to do the marches on NAIDOC Day and everything else. So it is the most dispossessed who are being asked to do most of the carrying and the work in relation to protecting the political position of Aboriginal communities.
Then you have this other group that I call the entrenched ideologues, both for and against processes through Aboriginal affairs. They are the blessed academics. They must be right because they have a doctorate behind their name or in front of their name, or professor, and they get a ticket for turning up. When you read a lot of their work, and their papers, you can see that they have a disjointed view of where Aboriginals’ survival should or should not be. It all depends who you are talking to because they’ve split their Aboriginal academics into two camps. One is pro-Labor, and the other one is pro-Liberal. And the pro-Labor people have entered the fray with a mantra – free of poverty, remain pure. And the pro-Liberal camp, their mantra is – social justice can only be delivered through business development. Now both of them sound good and are entrenched, but both of them are actually counterproductive to long-term Aboriginal economic and social sustainability.
There are the arguments that these people have never been called to task to explain exactly what you mean when you talk about the process of enforced education, therefore enforced assimilation, therefore enforced language loss. This is because you are talking to people who have been devastated by dispossession over a long period of time, who have lost culture and language, and are trying hard to find a long-lost language and culture to give themselves an identity. And you have only to watch the proliferation of the playing of the yidaki, which is a didgeridoo. It is all down the east coast now and they make a wonderful noise, but there is no song to go with it. There is a lot of grunt and the wriggling of legs and everything else, but no song. There is no old bloke singing a song that goes with that story. And when you see that, you say is that an adaption and exploitation of didgeridoo playing, or is that a cry for help? This is all we have got. We cannot show you anything else because we have got nothing else to show you. Our culture is in the museum. Our culture is in the books of anthropologists. And we have only been able to get access to our culture because the anthropologists, who have been the beneficiaries of the dispossession, have been able to hide, and keep everything secret and sacred in various guises of manipulation. Aboriginal people are not allowed to get access to that information, so what you see is this cry of: We want to return to our language, we want to learn our language, want to learn our songs. That may not involve didgeridoo playing. It is exactly the same for the universal dance of the brolga which you see at nearly every gathering.
These are the issues that you see purely as an observer, when you come from a background like I have, you can see that and say, Righto! Is this process a legitimate process, or is it the result or the adaptation of a devastated and dispossessed people who have lost culture, language and everything else, and need to regain that process, and they do it with whatever tools are at their disposal?
The real knowledge is in the universities, real knowledge is in the museums, and it is guarded and guided by some very strong-willed anthropologists, non-Indigenous, I would say. Knowledge is power. And they think that every time there is a land dispute that they have to be involved because no one knows what they know. They went around and swept up the crumbs of Aboriginal knowledge, or remnant Aboriginal knowledge that had been existent with the old people, and they swept the crumbs up and kept them very close to their chest. So the discussions [anthropologists have] of where did you camp, what did you do and everything else, make up – especially in Western Queensland where I have been working – make up for the standing and knowledge of Aboriginal groups. These anthropologists are costing Aboriginal people an absolute fortune to regain the knowledge that they gave to them.
It goes back to the question of native title and the stupid idea that you had to have a continuous connection to land. If you took the arguments that are the background to the existence of the Carpentaria Land Council, the lesson is that if you think you have got native title, act sovereign, do not wait to be blessed. This was the basis of the negotiations for Century mine where Waanyi under current native title legislation could not make the registration test, but the advice that we [the Central Land Council] gave them to give to the mining company was that, We own the land, we don’t care what you say, you prove that we don’t and that will take you ten years of delays for your project. In the meantime, we are willing to sit down and negotiate with you on a process that recognises and delivers our sovereignty. That was on behalf of the Waanyi, and negotiated by the Gangalidda and Garawa leadership of the Carpentaria Land Council, to make sure that the Aboriginal people who did not know who they were had a position that could be defended. And that is why the Century mine agreement was the catalyst [in native title agreements], because we said, You prove we haven’t and in the meantime let’s get on and negotiate. And the mining company saw that, and they went along with that process.
Unfortunately, the big organisations, and these are the land councils in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley Land Council in the west, they stuck to the very letter of native title which excluded a lot of Aboriginal people from participating, and I mean from the Stolen Generation all the way through to urban Aborigines and to some historical Aboriginals that were moved into reserves, they went for the pure examples of native title ownership. They did so without understanding what native title was all about, according to the argument that Keating, the facade that Keating gave on native title, You enjoy native title at our say-so.
So you are the traditional landowners of the mine when the mine is finished. And you have a right to negotiate, so you inherit the environmental disaster left by the mining industry if you are not careful. Under native title that is where it stops and starts. The land councils and their lawyers have been absolutely stonewalled because there is no ongoing debate about native title property rights, which was left out on purpose by Keating to placate the mining industry. Now you cannot have native title without the enjoyment of native title, which means the question of property rights.43 The right to negotiate is a very small piece of the cake. The question is, do you have native title, and if you do have native title, then how do you enjoy it?
Well! You can’t enjoy it – there is no enjoyment as such, and that means of their property rights, which is a High Court decision under Wik and Mabo. We are waiting for that to be debated, and the Aboriginal hierarchy has decided that it would upset the latte set, it will curdle their milk, if we were to start debating property rights. Someone will take the cheese and bickies off you if you’re not careful. And so they have this reluctance to put forward the debate on native title property rights, while knowing full well that all the agreements in Western Australia done by the magnificent people that work for Rio Tinto really amount to a hill of beans in relation to the total process. Whereas if you had native title property rights, the Aboriginal community would be able to accept from the Western Australian Government state-based royalties regardless of the project. And would not have to negotiate on health, housing and education, and say we will spend our royalties on health, housing and education. No, that is automatically a citizenship right.
How do you tie this failure to recognise native title property rights to the failure of the Intervention on the ground? The Intervention was based on an assumption that the Northern Territory Government at that time was broke and could not supply housing, health and education for remote communities because it was spending its money on the waterfront. Spending its money on Inpex.44
It spent millions of dollars fighting land claims over the years. Well exactly, and the Central Land Council has time and time again requested an inquiry into the funding of the Northern Territory Government, both Labor and Liberal–CLP, on what they spent their money on – both the untied and the tied grants that were identified as Aboriginal money – what they spent their money on and what were the results of their expenditure? Did they put in infrastructure? Did they build roads? Did they build houses? What did they do? And both parties have dodged that question so it is absolutely clear that we have to go and get that question answered through other political means, possibly through the unions and elsewhere. What is the current result of the Intervention, in terms of housing, health and education? And what is the expenditure of both CLP and Labor governments in the Northern Territory in relation to services to Aboriginal communities?
How did the people on the ground respond to the Intervention? Well the issue was then, as you would have noticed, according to the authors of Little Children are Sacred, that there was a paedophile on every corner, rivers of grog, the ongoing debate in relation to police and so forth.45 Now Olga Havnen did a critique of the total process as part of her role with the Northern Territory Government and a lot of people with links to services to Aboriginal communities kyboshed the report.46
I find it extremely interesting and telling that the academics and advisors to various governments decided that she had gone too far and asked too many questions. The Intervention, and the results of the Intervention, must rest totally at the foot of the then Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Claire Martin. Totally at her feet because she knew that here was an ongoing expenditure by the Commonwealth to boost the Territory economy in relation to housing and infrastructure, and she could sail in on that in the next election, and say we have got x amount of jobs, employment and everything else, and it is all based on remote communities. The line-up was immense, yet the work ended up going to Leightons and everybody else, the big companies who come out and build houses out bush, while forgetting that most communities have little housing associations with their own skilled workers that could have been doing this work. Because it was the Labor government, the unions went quiet. The CFMEU, of which I am a member, went walkabout on the issue.
It falls at everyone’s feet including the land councils. The land councils could have stood up a bit more and said, Well! You don’t have a right to enter Aboriginal land. Even though they were organisations that flowed from the federal government, the government would have had to completely, compulsorily acquire all rights and interests of that land from the land councils to get out and allow the contractors in. The Northern and Central Land Councils could have said, until there is a forty per cent Aboriginal employment rate, this contractor will not get a permit. They could have done that.
They were totally scared. The bush mob saw the army come in, they saw [the army take] all the medical records of the children, the army went and tested all the children, even though the communities already had medical records in their own health services. The remote health services and the clinics in each community already had records, you only had to inspect the child, and know that child is this, this and this. The army did not find any adverse effects of gonorrhoea, paedophilia, all the target indicators of child abuse. And the rivers of grog, that has not stopped even with more police. So most of the money that came out of the Intervention went to the Northern Territory police for housing for police staff out on remote communities.
The government did not know what they were talking about from the start. And the people in Alice Springs, especially the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Women’s Council management, they were on TV saying, Oh! What a terrible place this is, and there was vilification of Aboriginal men. So every Aboriginal male since then is identified as a paedophile, and a wife-basher. Automatically now, there is this vilification process, and the depression rates of Aboriginal men because of this public persona of them is quite high. When you go to the men’s groups that are run out of Congress in Central Australia, the issues that are being dealt with are ones of depression and lack of role in their community because they now get overtaken by a push from urban white women saying that Aboriginal women should have this role, similar to our role, and Aboriginal society does not allow that. So Aboriginal men have been displaced as decision-makers and heads of families, and so forth. And the service industry has seen this gate open, so when the white Toyota with one person in it turns up – five to each meeting, whether it is Community Aid Abroad, the Fred Hollows Foundation, Oxfam, you name it, they have all been out there, and they all turn up in the white Toyotas, all the single drivers, they go straight to the Women’s Centre. The men are saying, Well! Hang on, aren’t you talking to us? Oh! No! No! You are a paedophile.
There are no community councils anymore.47 It is all run by administrators. You are getting this process of dysfunction coming from men now that was not there before. This is reflected in imprisonment rates. It has got me beat why the land councils have not picked up this question of property rights, because the argument of land ownership in relation to communities was the invention of a past administration, and that is why there are historical Aboriginals residing in those areas, while there are also a lot of traditional landowners residing in the areas who actually own the country but are not being recognised. They cannot be recognised because the question of service provision by the government is reliant on them getting access to Aboriginal land, and the only way they can do that is through the Northern Territory Land Rights Act. The land councils gave five-year lease arrangements to the Commonwealth – but it is still not their place. The land belongs to someone who has native title and native title property rights. It has got nothing to do with the land councils. They do not own the land. They may administer the land trust, and then have traditional landowners that they represent, but the real property right [and ability to govern the land], which is what we are talking about, is actually owned by the native title holders, whoever they may be.48
This is the disconnect that land councils keep falling over, this question about what role has native title got in relation to the Land Rights Act? The answer is very simple, the Land Rights Act is the political process by legislation. This is the Northern Territory Land Rights Act. Native title is a legal decision by the High Court of Australia which supersedes any political process, and requires the property-right argument to be attached to it, which is by a decision or a declaration that we enjoy property rights as has already been discussed in relation to Mabo and Wik. So there is no need to have the legal debate. It is a question of going down to the High Court and exercising your native title property rights.
Murrandoo did that with the crocodile and this was backed up by the High Court decision on fishing rights from the Thursday Islands.49 They have property rights for fish. And there was the decision for Joe Roe in relation to James Price Point.50 He has a property right. It is his land, for fuck’s sake. It is not somebody else’s. He was given that land, or given the story for that land by the traditional landowners. He is the only one who has got the stories left. The people who said they were traditional landowners, they all went and lived in Broome, and Derby, and Port Hedland, and elsewhere. They were not looking after the country. They only turned up when the discussion was in relation to compensation. And then you had a big brawl in Broome on where the money should be spent in Broome.
That all fell through in the end. It had to. It was not based on reality. The mining company walked away, it was a legal issue. The economic issue would be: has Joe Roe got the property rights as a traditional landowner, or as an owner of the stories? But the point is that they were not game to take on the legal process because it would ultimately open the doors on property rights.
Tracker Tilmouth
The minute you saw the Intervention in the Northern Territory you thought this is madness, absolute madness. It had taken so long to get people to start [working on] self-determination [which was federal government policy], and to understand what self-determination means, and then as soon as they nearly grasp it, [the government] takes it away from them. The ideas of CANCA – the Combined Aboriginal Nations of Central Australia – was exactly where you needed to be because the next step was not going to be an Intervention. You needed the next step to say, Righto! You are responsible for who you are, you make your rules and we, as government, will back you.
These senior Aboriginal people were quite prepared to take that step, and I think even now this right-wing Liberal government might have the same philosophy, You make your own rules, you look after yourself, and we will back you. But maybe they don’t want to do that for Aboriginal affairs, I do not know. Now that does not mean attack the Land Rights Act, it does not mean anything of the sort, it means taking the services off the states that duplicate [policy, programs, funding], and allowing Aboriginal people to make their own decisions. If you want me to look after myself, give me the rights to look after myself.
Even under Australian government policies of self-determination, self-management was never really happening. It was words. When there is an invasion of land, where there is an invasion of policy, whether it is an invasion of money, you cannot [win]. If there is money coming in, you have to have the resources to be able to handle that money. You either have the economic wherewithal to look after yourself or you rely on others. The minute you rely on somebody else you are gone. You adopt their policies and politics. Then you have no leverage. You are struggling, you are stuck in the mud. So you have to develop a process that will give you the financial and educational and cultural resources to allow you to deal with it. If you do not have that then you better learn how to run very quickly, because they are coming to get you, if they have not already got you.
This is the story in the Gulf, and this is the story in Western Australia.51 They came in there and went whack and they were led by the academics, the black academics who said this is a good thing, mining companies are now our friends, and they preach that philosophy. Mining companies may be our friends but you cannot have friends every day of the week can you? You want a bit of time by yourself.
This is the way Rio Tinto ambushed the blacks, and kept ambushing the blacks. The philosophy is about ambush, nothing else. It dictated to a certain extent the policies and politics of how to interact with Aboriginal communities, especially within Australia. The idea was one of, what is the CIA term, soft, non-confrontation, low-intensity conflict. But they sink you. A history of sinking people, and they are still seen as a friend of the blacks.
So you get these sorts of philosophies that do not allow you to build the fortresses and the bulwark to stop the ongoing encroachment on Aboriginal cultural lands, Aboriginal cultural theories, Aboriginal financial processes, and everything that looks foreign is attacked by both sides. So the Aboriginal people who do not understand land rights attack the Land Rights Act. Aboriginal people who understand land rights attack everything else.
So you have attack, attack, attack. There is no cohesive plan of what we are fighting for, and whom we are fighting with. This is because there have been too many personalities on both sides, big people who want to make statements about all sorts of things and then fail to deliver. I used to smile when people say I am going to join the public service to make a change. I know who wins that argument and it is the public service, it is a meat grinder. You are going to come out as a sausage. Go in as a human being and come out as a sausage. So you have this argument that is coming, and it has not stopped coming, and it is that the next boom in the Northern Territory will be gas and oil, and they are going to say, Righto! What have you got to offer and how do we take it off you?
Diminished through the Intervention. Totally sat on our arse. Totally sat on our arse because the Intervention was the worst thing that ever happened. Did we get any arguments from the Labor politicians about the Intervention in the Northern Territory? None.
There has to be a royal commission into what happened with the Intervention. There has to be. The first thing we have got to do is to get a good case together and to go back and test native title property rights. I think both land councils are petrified of that because it supersedes the Land Rights Act. Native title property rights goes past the Land Rights Act, to where you actually own the land, not the Commonwealth. Whereas under the Land Rights Act the Commonwealth owns the land under a land trust. So there is an argument there that people are really, really scared of pursuing. That is going to take a lot of thought by people who currently run the land councils on how best to do it. It is going to happen in Queensland and Western Australia long before it happens in the Northern Territory.
Tracker Tilmouth
Compensation is another part of the argument. When we first started talking about native title negotiations after the High Court decision in 1992, Colesy and I sat down as we have degrees in economics, and we asked a question: Righto! It’s like land rights. You can have land rights, but if you cannot enjoy your land rights you might as well not have it – right? Because if you cannot do anything with it, you might as well go home and be the proud owner of an old shack, and you can go fishing whenever you want, but if you try and do any work on it, you have to get government permission [under the Land Rights Act]. So land rights is a figment of someone’s imagination.
When you put native title up against land rights – there is an argument that compensation for the Stolen Generation can be quite easily hung upon, and it is this: the intellectual property of Aboriginal people is not only having native title but having native title property rights, and they have been removed from the enjoyment of those property rights.
You will get more chance of compensation out of the native title property-rights argument than you will out of any other process given by recognition of Aboriginal people in the Constitution, which is the end. These are the games that have been played by the people who have made it in society. They are the ones who are standing up for being recognised in the Constitution of Australia. The Constitution of Australia has got fuck all to do with us.
You have got the property rights given to you since time immemorial which is your Constitution. And then you have got this argument, well forget your Constitution, of coming and joining our [Australian] Constitution, when we are the ones that actually stole your land and stole your property. But we want to recognise you now. What for? You have got nothing to give me, nothing that I want. The only way we can do this is go back to court and do a native title property-rights argument.
But if you want native title compensation, once you have got native title property rights then automatically there has to be an agreement, a treaty, because every mining company in Australia, every pastoral lease in Australia, every house block in Australia is subject to compensation because they were stolen properties.
These arguments can be mounted through the courts. I have talked to Bret Walker SC. We had dinner one day in Sydney and he said, I know exactly where you are coming from. I said, This is where we want to go, and the first cab off the rank is probably the easiest one, which is old growth forest in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Government said they own it. I said, Well hang on a minute, those trees are four hundred years old and you have only been here two hundred years, how the fuck do you own it?
When you come back to the Stolen Generation, the only time you are going to get a look in for any conversation is when you knock over this native title property-rights issue, but we cannot knock it over until we find some very good cases. We had a win the other day with the Thursday Islanders with their fishing rights. That the right for all the fish in the sea around Thursday Island under native title is a property right. So the door is already open. The question then is: Righto, when is there to be an enjoyment of property rights, as well as the dispossession that went with it, and the compensation that goes with that? There is a whole list of things you hang it off. The minute you get property rights from the High Court, do not worry about the government, the government has nothing to do with it, nothing to do with it, because it’s based on British Law, based on the Magna Carta, based on the Privy Council, everything that came out of England. So always remember that when it comes to the question of a republic, you want to be a monarchy because British law keeps your hopes alive. When they become a republic, they will change the Constitution, and wipe you out tomorrow. Whereas the instructions from Queen Victoria was that you shall do an agreement with the natives – that was the instructions.
42. Tracker mentions the names of Aboriginal people who had strongly supported the Intervention, when it was introduced in 2007, against those who saw the Intervention policies as a backwards step for Aboriginal people. He is also referring to Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Indigenous Advisory Council, established in 2013, which includes a mixture of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, including Warren Mundine as the chairman. After Tracker spoke about service delivery organisations based in towns in the Northern Territory in 2013, the federal government introduced heavy cuts to the budgets of a number of Aboriginal organisations both in urban and non-urban centres in 2015. These measures also followed the 2014 decision by the Western Australian Government to close 150 Aboriginal communities.
43. The argument is that the High Court did not go far enough to recognise that native title is an exclusive property right, to the exclusion of others. The Native Title Act only allows for the right to negotiate over the use of native title land by others, but not to supercede non-Indigenous proprietary rights to develop the land.
44. Tracker is referring to massive waterfront precinct in Darwin combining residential, leisure, business and culture centres. InpexGas Project Darwin is a gas processing plant for the development of the Ichthys gas field near Darwin.
45. Rex Wild and Patricia Anderson, Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarlt (‘Little Children Are Sacred’): Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, 2007, Northern Territory Government, Darwin, 2007.
46. Olga Havnen, Office of the Northern Territory Coordinator-General for Remote Services Report: June 2011 to August 2012, Office of the Coordinator-General for Remote Services, Darwin, 2012. Havnen produced the report as Northern Territory Coordinator-General for Remote Services.
47. Community councils were disbanded by the Intervention.
48. A land trust is a statutory body under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 that holds the title to land handed back to the traditional Aboriginal owners under the act to hold certain functions.
49. Tracker is referring to Yanner v Eaton (1999) and Akiba v Commonwealth of Australia (2013). In the former, Murrandoo Yanner was successful in arguing that his killing of two crocodiles for food was an exercise of his native title rights and did not require a licence. In the latter, the Torres Strait Islander people won a bid to secure commercial fishing rights under native title in the High Court. The group, whose native title claim was first lodged in 2001, wanted to build an economic base from commercial fishing in the a vast area of sea between Australia and Papua New Guinea. The case was strongly opposed by the Commonwealth and Queensland governments and the fishing industry. While no one contested that the Islanders held native title over the 40,000 square kilometres of sea, they argued that those rights no longer extended to the commercial trade of marine resources. The full bench of the High Court found those commercial rights still exist and had not been extinguished by Commonwealth and state laws.
50. A Western Australian Supreme Court decision, The Wilderness Society of WA (Inc) v Minister for Environment (2013), found that the WA environment minister and the WA Environmental Protection Authority had failed to follow valid processes in the assessment and approval of the massive James Price Point (JPP) gas plant.
51. Tracker is referring to the protracted struggle and negotiations by Waanyi, Mingginda, and the Gkuthaar and Kikatj and other traditional landowners with the mining company Pasminco to develop the Gulf Communities Agreement relating to the Century mine in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The continuing dilemma in this region for Aboriginal people and their leadership is how to successfully negotiate their long-term future in this resource-rich area by securing traditional lands and culture, along with economic security. He is also referring to the Western Australian Government’s announcements that they would shut down 150 Aboriginal communities.