Tracker

Tracker Tilmouth

This question is a well-known debate. It is a well-known debate for academics. See, Aboriginal society as far as academics are concerned is a historical and museumesque society. They forget that cultures in the world survive because they are dynamic and human-based. So when you come to the argument of how do you maintain your culture while you are participating in the wider economy, that is what the real question is, how do you remain a blackfella when you are receiving whitefella benefits – from contracting, employment and everything else?

Well! The argument is pretty simple and faced by every developing nation in the world, in Africa, Asia, and in Australia where Aboriginal society is a developing economy, a developing nation. So we have to tackle our legitimacy, of being able to retain our Aboriginality by also being participants in mining and elsewhere in the economy.

Now when you get these debates going the only way the academics feel comfortable is when everybody is in their right box. They can box you in and say, Right you represent that, you represent that. They own the territory, they own the information, and they try to enforce it. I disagree totally with their current position. My position is yes, you can be Aboriginal. Yes, you can maintain your cultural attachments, you can maintain a whole range of things, because Aboriginal land use is about land use, land management and management for the benefit of the community. Mining is no different. Fishing, exploitation, it is no different.

You have to have these demarcation lines between Aboriginality in terms of land management and what the existing economy requires, because the dominant society requires certain goods and services. It has got to be provided in a form that they can read easily or recognise – there are no scary bits about it. You have got to be able to adapt to that process. So when you come home you are Aboriginal, and when you go to work you are white. You have got to have clear demarcation lines. This is what a lot of people cannot work out – why they are blackfellas, when they go home there are ten people in each house and so forth and so on, and sometimes it is a detriment to the worker because he cannot get to sleep, and he has got to be up next morning and go to work.

You cannot escape being Aboriginal. Aboriginal society has to learn whatever pros and cons there are in relation to contracting and employment and everything else, but it is not a great leap over the abyss, and this is where these academics fall down, because they are waiting for the leap over the abyss and no one has jumped. Even though they predicted the jump. So Altman’s theories go into the trash bin where they should be, because they are based on the assumption that Aboriginal society would be decimated. He is one of the foremost museum nightwatchmen.

We need a lot more economists and corporate lawyers than we need normal lawyers and anthropologists, because gone are the days of the skull measurers. Everybody in the Northern Territory is listed as a traditional landowner, and since there is no difference for land use clearances or anything else, the role of the anthropologist is diminished, because saying who is a traditional landowner is all they do. It is a bit of divide and rule. Well! That is right.

Tracker Tilmouth

I want to discuss the strategies that seem to be coming in, or not coming in, from the Mundine committee [in December 2013]. To an outside observer, it looks like the [Abbott] government does not have a clue, but even scarier, the Aboriginal organisations do not have a clue either. There has not been an economic reassessment of the Aboriginal situation in Central Australia similar to the report originally done by the social, cultural and environmental geographer and economist, Professor Richie Howitt and Greg Crough. We have had bits and pieces from [Jon] Altman, and a few others, but they were pet projects of Altman’s, promoting Altman, CAEPR and people like that rather than the Aboriginal community.77 Rather than bringing in outside commercial thinkers, and building a commercial and economic framework for Aboriginal communities, because at the end of the day, the only thing that is going to protect them from the onslaught of Liberal right-wing philosophies, the only thing that is going to protect Aboriginal people, is some form of economic program. Once you are earning money, once you are contributing to the economy, you are less of a target.

People want success, and it is very hard to get success because the government has made sure that the people advising Aboriginal communities have little or no experience themselves in the commercial world. So any programs getting up are very much based on the delivery of the social dividend of employment, rather than on economics. With the amount of money spent on health services, you could build three or four hospitals by now, and have everybody working in the hospital. That has never been the case. Millions and millions of dollars have been spent on Aboriginal health but no one has made any inroads. Health statistics have gone through the roof and there is no real rethink of the Aboriginal economic position in government services.

There is a whole industry of government social services. Yes, exactly. We have been unable, because of the way were are legislated and incorporated, to unshackle ourselves from the welfare process, even to the extent that we have decided as a group, that there are well-meaning whites in government departments that will protect our integrity. We have relied on the Department of Environment, we have relied on the greenies, we have relied on ranger programs, and everything else that is going to protect our way of life, but their agenda is different to our agenda. Their agenda is to protect the environment. Their agenda is wilderness without people. Listen to any of their discussions in relation to Kakadu or national parks, it is just pristine wilderness, which Kakadu is far from being. You get these sorts of debates, but no one has been able to reconstitute the Crough, Howitt, Manning, Pritchard type of economic discussion. No one has been able to do a total analysis of the current Aboriginal economic situation and to ask, where do we go from there? What have we done in the past, if it is really good? Is it really bad? Is there need for readjustment?

You need this sort of advice, the type of think tank that would allow you to go forward because at the moment it is stagnating, except for Murrandoo Yanner’s position. His position is very clear. He is going to protect his community and their culture and their integrity by taking on the economic and commercial aspects of mining. Right! If you come to the Gulf, you come to a one-stop shop: We will provide all the services for your mining company, you will do as we tell you, and we will monitor you environmentally, and we will monitor you in terms of social impact, and we also want all your contracts. If we cannot get your contracts we want to be joint venturers with whoever gets the contract. That is the mantra and he has held that line since day one.

Now this is a very small example but you can compare it to the extremes of the Northern Land Council and Central Land Council in relation to the Land Rights Act. I think the Northern Land Council is leasing out all of its pastoral leases in light of the upbeat market in live exports. Australia will not be able to supply the needs of the Indonesians, Philippines and the Vietnamese. What we have done is this: we have handed out the pastoral leases to people who really are not supportive of Aboriginal people but see the land as an opportunity for them. Instead of doing the work ourselves and having an Aboriginal cattle company for the Northern Land Council, and one for Central Land Council, what we have is leasing out and all sorts of other stuff going on, and we have been the receivers of royalties and payments without any work. We have ended up restating the government’s intention about us, which is that we are passive observers to another boom, in the agricultural sector.

So when you add all these things together and ask why we are not protecting ourselves economically from the policies of right-wing governments, and left-wing governments as well, the reason is that we have decided it is a lot easier to do the social programs than it is to do the economic programs. So the Central Land Council has gone out on the community development line, replacing or trying to replace the government. That is not where you want to be. That is one albatross you do not want to put around your neck. Leave that to governments. They have got to have all of the funding responsibility. Leave all that to the people who cannot do anything else. Do not go into community development unless you have a hell of a big pocket. A hell of a deep pocket to be able to write off money left, right and centre on projects that you know are going to fail.

We have seen that time and time again with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, ATSIC and everything else, and [Bob] Beadman’s speeches each year reiterate the problem. Every speech is really: Why did we fail? Why have we failed? Rather than, Where do we go from here? They can talk very well about how we have failed. Yes. You could write a book on how to fail.

Who has done the analysis on where we have been and what lessons we can learn on how not to do things? We need another process put in place, to get away from the government-sponsored organisations like CAEPR, and the political highway for Aboriginal academics who decide that they do not need to espouse their policies to the unwashed masses – the unrepresented swillers as Keating would call them. They can bounce it off a few nice-meaning white blokes who will all get up and clap and praise, and then they all sit down and you get a doctorate, honorary or otherwise.

Whereas the real issues are what have you delivered to the Aboriginal community as such? What have all your activities within academia actually delivered on the ground that makes sense? The answer is zero in most cases. We have been asked to attend all sorts of forums to listen to these people, and if you read Noel Pearson’s column in The Australian newspaper every week you would be hard pushed to understand what he is talking about because he has got a language all of his own, and the answer is, at the end of the day, the great gift Noel Pearson has given to the Aboriginal community is truancy officers.

Now we ran a very successful truancy program at Congress when I was at the CLC and my cousin, who has passed away since unfortunately, was in charge of it, and he would go around and threaten the parents by saying, If your kids aren’t out the front every morning I am going to bash youse. So there would be kids lined up for miles all ready to go to school, all clean, washed, everything. It was most successful, very successful, and he only had to go around once a week and walk into the house and say, Where’s your kids? Why aren’t you at school? You idiots. He was big and ugly enough, I will not mention his name but you can guess who it was, big and ugly enough to scare the shit out of anyone. He used to tell the old blokes who would be shaping up, Look, sit down or I’ll rip your head off and shit in it. Poor thing. That sort of commentary. He was the truancy officer. The truancy program did not cost millions of dollars either. He was also in charge of the drunks pick-up program. So the drive would be the spin dry. Anyway these are the things that did work in the past. Whether you are allowed to do it like this nowadays is another thing.

Greg Crough

I first met Tracker at the launch of our book on Aboriginal economic development in Central Australia.78 This work was done with the Aboriginal organisations in Central Australia and the book was being launched at the casino in Alice Springs. The organisations invited a real cross-section of the Alice Springs community. There were government people, people from the organisations, business people, and people from communities. It was quite a large gathering and Tracker was one of the people who was speaking to launch the book.

I think this was one of the points he made, which was, You know, whenever there is any money around, you can guarantee you’re going to get big audience. He made a lot of these comments that a lot of the people that were there to see what this project was about, particularly the business people and the business community were if not completely dependent, very dependent on money being spent by either Aboriginal people themselves or their organisations. Tracker made it pretty clear that he knew why they were there and was saying, That we, being Aboriginal people, and our organisations have economic power, have a lot of spending, we know a lot of you are dependent on us for jobs and businesses and we are glad you are here. We want to work with you. We want to continue to make sure that everyone understands where Aboriginal people fit in the economy of Central Australia. I think that was a message he maintained over the whole period I knew him: We know why you’re here because we have money and we spend money and your businesses are dependent on us, all your jobs are dependent on us, we want a better deal. And saying that sometimes politely, and sometimes not politely, but the same sort of message.

I worked with him when he was the director of the Central Land Council and in other stages when he was setting up his own business, the prawn farm, other things like that, and also very heavily when the native title legislation was being drafted to make sure that the economic rights of Aboriginal people, or economic benefits that they could get from both land rights and from native title, would be protected. That was the relationship I had with him over the years because I am an economist, and there were not a lot of economists working on Aboriginal issues at the time. Still not. We were always interested in where Aboriginal people fitted into the economy, to demonstrate what they were doing, where businesses and organisations fitted in.

I think Tracker, and the leadership of the Aboriginal organisations in Alice Springs going back twenty-plus years, saw the same thing. They needed to understand how the economy worked and they also needed to demonstrate to other people what their contribution was, and where Aboriginal people fitted in to the economy. He saw that very early on. He showed me a photo of all the Aboriginal kids on Croker Island and there was the white superintendent or whoever it was in the picture, and he said, Look where I’m standing? I said, Where are you standing? Because I did not exactly know which one of the kids he was. He said, That’s me standing next to the white guy because that’s where the power is. That’s where the money is. Get close to these people and understand where they work and understand how you can work with them. He always said that. I always try to do that, I always wanted to understand the power because I knew that’s what they had, understand the economic power and work out how we could benefit as people, use our land rights, use our economic power to improve ourselves. I think I remember talking to Willie, his brother, about the same sort of thing. They saw where power lay, and you either get close to it and work out how you can benefit from it, or you distance yourself from it.

He was part of the Stolen Generation, but it seemed in some respects he had come through it a lot better than other people had. In the sense that he was damaged by it, of course, and it affected his whole life, he recognised that. But I think he also realised that he, as a person, he needed to deal with it, overcome it and make his way in life. He was sympathetic to a lot of the Stolen Generation cause but he felt there was another way which, while not denigrating what they were doing, this generation of the Stolen Generation could get ahead by doing what they needed to understand how it [the economy] works.

He always recognised that Central Australia is a very difficult environment in many respects, a very harsh environment. The fact that there are not very many people there and the economy is very limited is not surprising. So I think he always saw that there were not going to be tremendous opportunities for people to do things, but they needed to identify what those opportunities were, and people had land and in some cases there were resources on that land, and not just minerals, but also water resources, and things like growing oranges could work. Even in the Top End it is a very limited economy.

He was very critical of bureaucrats that had been around since pre-1967. They moved from job to job, and there were businessmen that had ripped people off out in the community. I think he used to describe a lot of white people out there as white trash. These people were never going to make it anywhere else in Australia and the Aboriginal community was a community that you could live off, or you could exploit. I am not saying they all were like that, but I think many of them that he saw were. They moved through the bureaucracies of Aboriginal Affairs from its predecessor which I think was Native Affairs, and it had all sorts of incarnations, Department of Aboriginal Affairs and then ATSIC et cetera, and the same people went through the programs. The same people turned up running community stores, and then you would see them in another community. He was very critical of those people. But on the other hand, he had known many of them for a long period of time, and he was reasonably friendly with them because he realised they were in positions of power in many respects.

Part of of Tracker’s problem was that he did come across badly in certain circumstances. What he thought was funny and the way he said things often did get people offside. I think that definitely did not help him. It is a little bit like Donald Trump here running for the presidency in the United States. He is a larger-than-life character and he appeals to a certain group, but then certain things he says completely alienates other people. I think Tracker had that tendency quite a bit to alienate people that maybe he wanted to alienate, because he knew where they stood. At times he could have been more careful in what he said. I think some of the comments he would make about women or about other Aboriginal people did not help his cause.

One of the things we talked about a lot was the development of the Native Title Act, and he came to visit us a lot at NARU [North Australia Research Unit] where we had people working who had experience, particularly with Canada and what happened with their land claim negotiations, and how those claims could be used to negotiate broader settlements. That did not just give them what is called native title rights, the right to hunt and fish, as important as those rights are, but the broader issues around governance and economic development and stuff like that. There was a big group in Central Australia that could not benefit from land rights because they were living on cattle stations, and the key thing was that they not have their rights extinguished because they lived on cattle stations. The pastoral leases did not extinguish native title. Otherwise a large group out on the eastern side of the Northern Territory in the [Central] Land Council area would not get anything from native title. Tracker was very strong on that, that we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to negotiate a package that does not take rights away, but gives the maximum opportunities to people to benefit from the native title legislation. I think he was very clear that people needed to be able to benefit economically from this as well. That it not just be a limited set of rights to the land, but that they be able to negotiate with mining companies, or with pastoralists, or with the government, whoever it was, to improve their position.

The issue he saw with the Land Rights Act was that people got land but most of the economic development on the land is when somebody else wants to do something, such as when a mining company wants to come in and explore. He felt that a lot of what the Land Council was doing was reacting. They were reacting to exploration proposals and mining proposals, and no one was really working on helping people to benefit themselves. Because land rights did not do much to improve living conditions.

Richie Howitt

I met Tracker probably in 1988 or 1989 during my postdoc, while doing work for the Central Land Council around the social impact of mining and mining agreements. I was looking at the Tanami [mine], but we really got to know each other when I worked with Greg Crough and Bill Pritchard on the study of the role of the Aboriginal organisations in Alice Springs in the Central Australian economy. That was a piece of work commissioned by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of Central Australia [CAO] where we worked with students at the Institute for Aboriginal Development to teach a course on political economy. It was really intended to tool up the organisations through their younger employees to take a strategic view of their combined strengths and the opportunities that they created. Tracker was one of the organisational leaders at that stage in CLC, and that really triggered some thinking for him. It was a way of looking at things that shifted his sense of the strengths and opportunities.

I think it was in 1989 that we produced the report which asked, What can be done now? Obviously there was a lot of politics in bringing together all of those organisations and those politics changed from time to time, but it was that work that allowed us to say, Look, collectively the CAO are buying an enormous number of vehicles, an enormous amount of – We had some companies in Alice Springs who were perhaps ninety per cent dependent on Aboriginal funding for their commercial revenue. We also surveyed all the businesses in town to establish just what sort of reliance they had on Aboriginal funding, and yet we found there were no special deals going on at the Toyota dealership, there were no Aboriginal mechanic apprentices, there were no bulk discounts for paper and things, there was nobody working in retail even though these companies were retailing to Aboriginal people over and over again.

It was that discussion that eventually led to ATSIC funding the purchase of Peter Kittle Toyota [dealership in Alice Springs] and that sort of thing. There were a few people who really shifted their thinking about the value of research and what you might do with it, and how you might have relationships with researchers where Aboriginal organisations defined the terms of reference.

There was also a memorable discussion that I had with David Avery [then principal lawyer of CLC] that Tracker was part of, and I was reviewing some of the Tanami mining agreements, and looking at the social impacts of the Tanami mine and the Granites mine. I had this argument with David Avery where I was saying, Look these are great agreements, because there was this one-upmanship with the boys doing deals, where every deal had to be a little bit better than the last one. And I came in and looked at them and said, Well! One of the problems here is that the Land Council does not have the capacity, neither the Land Council nor the communities has the capacity to monitor compliance with these agreements.

So you have an agreement that something will happen if it is triggered by a pollution event or a non-compliance event, but there was nobody actually monitoring compliance, nobody monitoring the environmental conditions. All you were relying on was data provided by the mining company, and if the community does not understand what is being monitored then you have not achieved anything, because nobody knows what rights they are trying to secure and protect.

Therefore the paper agreement does not actually achieve what a legal analysis might tell you it achieves. And Avery got really cranky, and said as a lawyer his responsibility was to look after his client’s interest and all that. About two weeks later after he had mulled over it, he came back and acknowledged that what I was saying was right, that he was just paid to dot the I’s and cross the T’s, and I was paid to think, so I’d better bloody well think.

I think that was another one of those arguments that for Tracker probably gave him the ammunition as a bolshy young thinker, it gave him permission to think, to be able to say, Actually you might be the expert but you are not expert in people’s lives. You might listen, but there is more than you’re currently listening to.

It was in that period that Greg Crough went to work as a policy advisor at CLC and worked quite closely with Tracker. One of the things that both Greg and I would say many times over was that it was important for the organisation, and for the leadership, to get diverse advice, not to just keep listening to the same person. Not to get a captive expert that would simply say what you wanted to hear. If you were going to draw from a research foundation, you had to get a bit of diversity into your thinking. One of the things that is a mark of good leadership is that you actually listen to people who are saying things that make you uncomfortable and test that as well, and certainly to test the evidence and advice that you are getting from people who agree with you.

I ended up popping in and out of Tracker’s connections at a number of interesting points. There was one job that I did with Tracker around the development of fruit in Central Australia – and even tomatoes. One of the interesting things about Tracker’s thinking was his willingness to step outside of the taken-for-granted. You could not rely on Tracker to ever say, Well! That can’t be done. He was always willing to have a go at thinking things through, and that led him into thinking about grapes and tomatoes in Central Australia.

One of the things that I used to say, if you were sitting down and trying to invent a regional development strategy for a new industry for Central Australia, and you suggested you pull together a few old blokes to paint some doors, everybody would have laughed you out of town. And yet that was part of the genesis of the Central Australian arts movement, and a huge shift in the economic participation of a whole range of communities. Tracker was always able to say, I wonder if oranges, or prawns, or tomatoes, or grapes, are the painting of the doors? Is there a way of thinking outside that square? It was that sort of thinking that allowed Tracker to go in and say, What about the post-carbon stuff, how do we get to thinking about what we are trying to do? How do we do it better, and do it in a way that actually facilitates people shifting into where the whole economy is trying to move?

And then there was the second moment and this is the one that led Tracker to try and do a PhD with me, around the economic development element of the Wik Native Title Amendment negotiations. And what we tried to put together there was a proposal for what we referred to as an Aboriginal rural development bank. We went back and said how did the agricultural industry, the mainstream agricultural industry get started? It got given Aboriginal land for free, and then it was given access to government money through the Rural Bank and through government assistance, with the creation of a lot of free capital through grants and so on, and access to appropriately structured loan funds as well. The [Aboriginal] negotiating team [on the Wik amendments to the Native Title Act] actually commissioned some work to develop a strategy, and Tracker was central to that work, and the person that I worked with in framing that. We needed some specific econometric advice on modelling particular sorts of financial structures. We identified a couple of people that we would like to ask for advice including the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU. In the brief that we tendered we asked people not to give gratuitous advice about what they thought should happen. We asked for specific information about econometric analysis, and not for them to frame their report in terms of a trade-off between compensation and native title rights.

I will not actually mention names, but there was an intervention by a senior academic to take over the brief from the person the working party had actually asked to do it, and when the advice came back it included the words trade-off, and it gave gratuitous advice about what should be traded off in return for economic compensation. The Aboriginal leadership group, particularly Peter Yu and Tracker, were just ropeable. They insisted that every copy of the advice be destroyed, and they wanted a written guarantee that the electronic files had been destroyed. They refused to pay for the work. It was really interesting because it was such a demonstration of the clarity of their thinking, that there was a link between the political, the strategic and the procedural, and that clarity came from Tracker. It was always couched in his humour and with his personal ability, but there was this absolute commitment not to allow the bullshit to be accepted. And of course that was an event that had echoes for a very long time, for all of us involved.

In a sense, in the 1998 Wik negotiations, that particular proposition went nowhere, like the loss of the social package from the original [Native Title] Act, that never really went anywhere.79 Then there was in the background a whole lot of ongoing negotiations, some of which I guess have resurfaced in some of the contributions and activities of some of the banks, but which have never been formulated into that bigger coherent strategy that we formulated then. Not with that thinking, Well! We can mobilise collective strength, we can build relationships with major players in the finance sector, in the mining sector, to actually improve conditions.

There is a group of people I have worked with over the years, that if they asked me to do anything I could not say no. I felt that I was obliged in a deep ethical way to make a contribution or to provide support, and Tracker was certainly one of those people. But my observation was, and I think I said this to him, that anybody who was working on these issues of resource development and environmental management, and Aboriginal participation in those things, They go and talk to you, they go and interview you, they write down what you say and then they write a PhD about it. Why don’t you just do the same and write a PhD? We talked about how the Macquarie system would allow a PhD by publications, and that all he really had to do was write up what he was doing, to write the case study materials, and develop a few papers out of that instead of everybody else getting their PhDs. He would become a qualified and recognised person out of that. That led him, I think, to make the decision to have a go at doing the PhD. But the health problems, not to mention all the demands of leadership, and working in the industry, and building that post-carbon sort of thinking, meant that he never really got around to it. When the cancer intervened he never really got back to a space where that became a priority for him.

Tracker Tilmouth

My answer to the question about the extent and breadth of my knowledge and how I became the person I am now, working at ways to build an Aboriginal economic independency on a large scale, is that I took up a space that no one really wanted. There were people playing around in it like Darryl Pearce, Wayne Bergmann, and a few other people, but no one really wanted that space because it is difficult.

It is working on the question of how do you generate income? You have got to take the plunge and you have got to get in there and immerse yourself in it, and you do not win every time. I have had as many failures as successes and vice versa, but you get up and have another go, and you look at another project. You look at something else. Nine times out of ten if you do your sums right and you do your thinking right, it will add up, but if it does not add up then move away. You cannot run it by your heart. You have got to run it by your head. If the economics say don’t do it, well don’t do it. You’ve got to have an answer to this question every morning, Is the going up worth the coming down? You need to say that every morning – Is the going up worth the coming down? – because it is a long way down. A long way up too, but it is a long way down as well and you are going to go down sooner or later. You are going to go up a few times, which is good.

You have got to be aware of the process. It is an economic process that you do not control because you are trading in service delivery. You are trading in commodities. You are trading in a whole range of stuff, and if you do not understand that then when you come to trade what you see as your human capital, your intellectual capital, you ask the question, Is it worth doing? The question is asked, What are they paying you? I say they are not paying me anything. What? I said they do not pay me. I said they pay me for travel or whatever, because they have no money. I am not like a lawyer, I do not list a phone call here, fifty cents or whatever, blah, blah.

77. Jon Altman is the founding director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at the Australian National University. CAEPR became influential after a recommendation in a government review of Aboriginal employment and trainng called for an increase in economic policy research in Aboriginal affairs.

78. Greg Crough, Richie Howitt and Bill Pritchard, Aboriginal Economic Development in Central Australia: A Report for the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of Alice Springs, IAD, Alice Springs, 1989.

79. The 1993 Native Title Act, which was part of a response to the Mabo decision, was supposed to be a comprehensive package to address Aboriginal land justice and economic and social disadvantage. The act was to be accompanied by a land fund for land justice to Aboriginal people dispossessed of their land, which became the Indigenous Land Corporation, and a social justice package that was not delivered.