Tracker Tilmouth
When I went to university, I decided that the new era in relationship to land rights was going to be the enjoyment of land rights and that meant land management. Land management had to be a system that Aboriginal people could understand, and land assessment was the key to it, because you have x amount of hectares or square kilometres of land, and that has to sustain you. So the first thing to do was to sit down with Tim Baldwin, who was the then Minister for Water Resources in the Northern Territory CLP government, and I said to him, I want a water-drilling program to see where the aquifers are so that we can do some horticulture.
He thought it was a brilliant idea, so he gave the Central Land Council six million dollars to do bore-drilling programs on remote communities. So we did all the assessments of water. We were quite successful in locating the bore fields and so we knew that six land trusts could adequately supply water to undertake horticultural pursuits. And so I said, Righto! Before we go anywhere though we need to do the land assessment, that means soil types, vegetation types, native bush tucker, and what you use when you are on an outstation to sustain yourself. Which areas do you hunt in? What seasons do you hunt? All this, and document it to have a plan, so that anyone picking up on any piece of Aboriginal land would get away from this crazy idea of standing on a spinifex hill and saying this will do x or y without any scientific backup.
I set this up in the CLC, and I said they could not do this work without the establishment of a geographical information system. So I went and got Siegfried Kempinger who I went to university with at Roseworthy Agriculture College to help set it up. We set it up in such a way that the GIS in the Central Land Council today is probably the most powerful land management tool of any Aboriginal organisation throughout Australia.
That information gave us a list of which areas you could develop under what circumstances without creating a desert. Where there is mining. Where there is tourism. Where there is housing. Where there is health. All that information can be downloaded from the GIS at the Central Land Council and can be used as a community tool to determine the current status of Aboriginal society as we know today, and without doing any more reports, without any Intervention. You could pick up a community and say, right, there are x amount of people, x amount of houses, this is the income for that house, this is the current health status of that house, this is where they shop, this is what they pay for food. It gives you the whole socio-economic picture of a community in five seconds.
That is what is sitting there in the Central Land Council at the moment for Central Australia. You are dealing with information that has a commercial aspect to it, and when you get that sort of database sitting there and you can use it like that, it then becomes dangerous for governments to query your information. If you have got more data and more information than they have got you can dictate the debate.
Lesley Alford
I met Tracker in 1986 when I started studying at Roseworthy Agricultural College. We did a degree in natural resource management. We were called Nat Rats because it was an agricultural college where most of the students were studying agriculture, and we were known as the greenies. I do not know if Tracker called himself a greenie, probably not, but that was how the Nat Rats were looked at by the rest of the college because normally, they were farm fellas, or studying horse husbandry or winemaking and all that sort of stuff. We were basically studying environmental science, but it was called natural resource management.
Tracker had a fairly strong and funny personality and from memory, I do not think there were many Aboriginal students, maybe none, in that college until then. I think sometimes there was racism, some of it was institutional, but I do not remember it being very overt. Tracker used to deal with it in his own way, and he reminded me of it just a few years ago when he was in the media with the Labor Party where he referred to himself as their pet nigger.
I can remember once where he got these whitefellas who were in our course, and they were all good friends of his, to walk up to the lecture theatre like they were the pastoralists, or whitefella role models, and he would carry all their books and come along behind, really like a servant. And he would say, Come on boy bring our books, we’re going into the lecture. It was in front of a whole lot of agricultural students and that really conservative part of the college and it was just…they did not know what to do. They did not understand it. The people who understood it were probably the ones who were helping him do it. But it was just that dark humour he was really strong with, and as a student he was a fun person to have around. He took the piss out of those conservative agricultural students by being that pet nigger basically, and it was really dark humour, and I just do not know how many people at the time, and probably myself too, realised what he was really doing, that he was making a big statement. But he was doing it in a way that everyone could laugh at it. He was not making people feel really awkward.
When we got to our final year everyone had to pick a big project which was almost like a little thesis, and he asked me if I wanted to be his project partner. He managed to get resources to do an environmental survey of Mimili, which is Pitjantjatjara land in the Everard Ranges. I think it used to be called Everard Park, but now it is Mimili and part of Anangu Pitjantjatara land. For whatever reason they needed an environmental survey done on that piece of land, and so we did that, and that was my introduction to Central Australia, and to Aboriginal Australia basically. We did a few trips. The first trip he took me on we met with all the old men and old ladies and asked for permission, and they showed us around the country.
We worked out how we were going to do the project. He called it the Rocket Wurlie Project because we were using a satellite image as a base image that then had to be interpreted on the ground. He talked to those old men and said, It’s the Rocket Wurlie Project, that satellite up there is taking these photos and we are going to make this map. And when we did the fieldwork, he got a whole bunch of young Aboriginal students from Port Augusta TAFE who were studying similar sort of stuff to come with us. So there were students from Roseworthy, and the Port Augusta students, and we all camped out for a few weeks and did soil sampling and vegetation surveys, and driving all over the place. It was all really interesting because Tracker had the contacts and was able to get the resources, because we needed cars and a lot of material. We were able to do a really interesting final-year project compared to some people. I remember one fellow, he had to study roadkill that he saw on the way to college every day, boring stuff, how many dead roos and cats were on the roads every morning, to get the statistics.
There were a couple of run-ins with lecturers, you know, you have that, and Tracker had always been a bit of a rebel. I think he acknowledged that himself. He had strife with some of the lecturers and this is where I refer to the institutional racism, because there was this – Tracker’s got to work harder because he’s going to be tested harder, because when he goes out into the real world…A little bit like a woman has to work harder to get through the glass ceiling, they were saying that about him. I remember helping him fight some of those battles where they were trying to mark his projects harder because he was going to be tested harder in the real world than we would be, as privileged white ones. That was interesting.
I would not say that those people did not like him, it was just that they had a background that made them treat him like that. But his fellow students, I am still good friends with a lot of those people, and they all speak really fondly of Tracker. I mean he would do things, such as when we would go on a field trip in a bus for a couple of weeks in Victoria to look at projects, where he would go, I’m going to cook you a traditional meal tonight. We would go to his cabin, and he had bought a rabbit and cooked it in Coca-Cola with a packet of French onion soup. We were saying, What sort of tradition is this? He would do things like that. A rabbit.
That was probably my main relationship with him and then he asked me if I would be interested in working in Central Australia and he showed me a job that was on offer, which was as a research assistant in the Land Management Unit at Central Land Council. So I applied for that job based on his recommendation, and David Ross came to Adelaide for something else and interviewed me. That was the first time I met Rossy, and I got the job. I do not know if I would even be in the Northern Territory if it had not been for my student relationship with Tracker. We did not have an awful lot to do with each other in Alice Springs. He ended up being the director and he was working on a much different level than me, but we were friends. And Kathy used to always cut my hair. So I knew the family, she was my hairdresser.
I was at Utopia for much of that time and lived at Atnwengerrp just north of Utopia. He was a support to me through those years at CLC too, and a friend, but probably we did not do that much together as such. But I have stayed in contact with the family. I used to babysit those little girls in Gawler when we were at college.
There would be different ideas that came up over the years. He would ring me up out of the blue and say, I want you to work on growing coffee bush in a plantation to feed the deer farm. Do you want to work on that? I’m going to grow witchetty grubs in sawdust. We’re going to make a lot of money out of it. I want you to be the project manager. Tracker was a big thinker and ideas man. You kind of just had to nod and agree and say yes, until you found out what was really happening. I have not really followed any of those dreams to anything real in our work together, but he did come up with all sorts of harebrained schemes at times.
Rodger Barnes
I was working at the Central Land Council when Tracker arrived from his land management course at Roseworthy Agricultural College, and took over as deputy director. So all my interactions with Tracker have been in the Land Council context, and issues that the Land Council was dealing with.
I guess this was in the early days of the Land Council. Pat Dodson had moved on, Rossy had taken over, and both Rossy and Tracker were sent down south to get qualified, and Tracker had come back. His focus was land management initially, and he was particularly interested in setting up a GIS [geographic information system]. This was at the stage when we had a typing pool, and people were not sitting there looking at computers as their job. So this was a cutting-edge idea, dealing with a body that was focused on legal processes and land claims, and getting land back for Aboriginal people.
It was a bold concept and something really useful which is now fundamental to the CLC’s operation in a lot of areas from site clearances to land claims. It is being used for the recent negotiations over community leasing. It is routine to produce maps as part of the exploration process. There is a mapping team and that was something that Tracker was responsible for. It can produce all the features you see on a topographical map, from mountains, rivers, contours, places, railways, roads, all those man-made things, and the topographical features can be overlaid with cadastral land ownership, mining tenements, a whole lot of data. It is something to show traditional owners and it was a very empowering tool because you could produce the maps in large-scale format, or as maps just to look at.
As Tracker got more settled in the position he was particularly interested in mining. One of the outstanding things in mining at that stage was employment, and Aboriginal employment was not happening under the [mining] agreements, particularly at the Granites, and Tracker saw the need for the Land Council to be more proactive in getting Aboriginal people employed in the mines.
Prior to Tracker’s involvement, there was a focus on protecting cultural interests, legal rights and the interests of traditional owners, and to ensure everyone understood what was going on, but in terms of benefits received as a result of those agreements, the lack of employment was a feature at that time. It had a lot to do with people not knowing how to go about it and the reticence because of that, reticence because of the fixed ideas about Aboriginal people not wanting jobs, that sort of thing. Tracker broke down a whole lot of those barriers through his work as director of the Land Council, and through his discussions with the mining companies. The mining companies were quite reticent because of those reasons, and it took Tracker being quite forceful and upfront and in their face about Aboriginal employment to actually make some programs happen. And again, his style was to put his faith and trust in people, so he brought in Stracky [Peter Strachan] who had been working at Tangentyere Council in Alice Springs to implement the idea.
Again, this was a new facet for the CLC, which traditionally saw itself as the legal representative of Aboriginal people, and here it was pushing into the zone of an employment agency that involved mining. Tracker brought in people like Ian Manning, because business opportunities were a whole untapped area as well. I think he had Frank Baarda [a Yuendumu contractor] carting gravel out of the Granites mine. Tracker saw a huge deficit in terms of benefits that could be achieved under the mining agreements. He had involvement with the unions and was associated with Labor, and he got Ian Manning to look at the whole setup and come up with ideas. At one point they were playing with the idea of carting fuel from Singapore to Darwin. This was [thinking at] a high level. One of the practical things that happened was that Tracker also grew up with Greg Roche, so he ended up assisting Greg to get the contract on the Granites on the basis of a joint venture with Yuendumu Mining Company, and they were out there for many years doing the back fill and through that time, a number of Aboriginal people were employed.
One of the first things Tracker did was set up the Tanami Steering Committee with people like Stracky, and people from the government he brought in through the employment agency departments, the mining company and the Land Council. It was also a big thing for Tracker to get politicians from Canberra, such as Senator Heffernan and Senator Robert Hill for at least four days looking at the Tanami and meeting Aboriginal people, just laying it out and saying, This is what is happening and where is the employment? We were just bumping into the wall. In pushing that whole issue, he went to the top.
Heffernan was from the bush and between Tracker and him, there was actually another side of politics for Tracker. He saw the Howard government coming in, a conservative government was coming in, and he got them out to see what the issues were. He had operated at that level and got experts, operatives, people who had troops on the ground, and he could relate universally to all those people to make things happen.
If you flew to Canberra with Tracker he would know nearly everyone on the route. He would be friends with the taxi driver, know the lady at the Qantas counter and would engage with her, know random people who were sitting in the lounge, who could be politicians or just the plumber doing the job there. He moved across all the boundaries, and it did not matter if they were white people or black people, old people or young people, rich and poor. He knew Tyamiwa [senior traditional owner] if he went to Ayers Rock, he lives in an outstation out west and barely speaks English, like a total bushman, but he was Tracker’s friend. He sat across all the boundaries that usually help guide people in their work – like whether they were with us or against us, he just cut across that.
He was very forthright with his ideas, and he was less about discussing them than getting on with it. Laying out a clear strategy with points along the way was probably not his style, and a bureaucracy in particular needs that style. Tracker would like things to happen in his timeframe and in his way, and if setting out things in a planned strategy was a bit slow, you would find he was having things happen along the side and in front, while everyone else was plodding along the path that they wanted him to take. That was quite a tumultuous way to progress these things I guess. With Tracker it was hard to keep up if you were taking a linear, or structured approach. He had big ideas and they were put out there and everyone was expected to drop everything and go that way, irrespective of what they were doing. There are costs around that way of operating.
He really wanted to see Aboriginal people climbing through the echelons of business and economic activity and occupy decision-making positions, while creating opportunities and educational opportunities as well. It was not just the singular I get a job sort of thing, he really wanted to see Aboriginal people move and operate and dictate some of the economic activities that affected their lives, and use the opportunities that land rights created to pursue that grand vision of turning land rights into positive economic and social change, so that Aboriginal people could occupy higher levels through the economy.
There were so many Tracker stories in so many contexts. In his rascal-like way he was in a meeting with a mining company which was quite tense because we were pushing the issue of Aboriginal employment, and the miner [the mine’s boss] had a bit of froth in the corners of his mouth talking about it, and the staff and everyone were a bit red-faced with Tracker saying, We’ve got to make a move, move this along and something has got to happen. Making these excuses is not good enough. There were many reasons and many barriers being discussed as to why there were not Aboriginal people being employed at the Granites. It ended up closing the meeting because at that point Tracker told the mining company that his principal lawyer was feeling litigious, and he might be on his way down to the court to lodge a subpoena very shortly, if there was no progress or no movement on the issue of Aboriginal employment. It had the desired impact.
Doug Turner
When he moved up to Darwin he was more into enterprise than the social side of things. It was about building enterprise developments for communities in different areas, and helping them through linking them to expertise and open up doors for them in the local area. He did the same work for Aboriginal communities across Australia, and not only in the Northern Territory, to develop their own enterprise and economic independence within their community.
In order to do that, you can bring in a whitefella consultant, or you use Tracker. What Tracker brought to the party was a wealth of experience, he could bring a business opportunity for a local community, and he could link all the resources to that operation in a way that the community would benefit over the long term. He maintained that level of support and expertise in a way that was not putting pressure, or seen as greedy, or seen as whitefellas coming in and trying to take control off blackfellas.
Tracker kept a lot of things close to his chest and in one way I think that was important, because we are our own worst enemy. We see blackfellas doing well and we think, How the hell is he doing that? What’s he doing? He must be pinching money or stealing money from somewhere? That sort of talking is detrimental basically, because a lot of our community people are not experienced and they are not real knowledgeable about different things. We are becoming more and more knowledgeable, but the level of expertise in our community has been drained because the kids have gone out, and have taken a long time to come back.
The younger generation in the communities today is still growing, and it is good for the younger generation to go out and get an education and come back and work in their own communities and have this connection to the country. But that is all changing as well because of the pressures on our Aboriginal youth today, with mobile phones, iPads and everything else, and they are changing their interests. I mean, my interest as a kid growing up was I wanted to go and see what was over that hill, or I wanted to see what was down this creek. I was interested in country.
Honesty is the best quality, always tell the truth. In any business if you are not honest, I just think that is the worst thing you can be, dishonest. Anything you do you need to be genuine, supportive and honest, and I think Tracker operated this way. Anything he could do for a community anywhere he would go out of his way to try and help that community. He was not only doing this for Aboriginal communities, he was also working with whitefella businesses and helping them as well. People do not see that side of Tracker. A lot of Aboriginal businesses and non-Aboriginal businesses grew from a bobcat, then a tip-truck, to bulldozers and trucks, and a bigger operation. But people do not see that side of things. They looked at Tracker and would say, Here comes that fucking, excuse my French, snake in the grass again. What’s he up to now? Trying to rip off some community. They looked down on him and that is where I say we are our own worst enemy. We have to move on from that attitude within our communities and be a bit more positive about asking the questions, How do I link the resources? If I don’t have the skills where do I go? Who do I see? How do I bring those resources and make that happen in our community? If you wanted somebody to do that, you would talk to Tracker.
He could get people with financing skills, who have economic backgrounds and could understand the stockmarkets and all that stuff. There are plenty of those fellas in our community today and they are Aboriginal people. We have got Aboriginal people with skills in our community today that we can use, and they are there to help us grow. They also have a cultural understanding and knowledge about culture in their area. That is the sort of stuff Tracker was about. There are a lot of us out there, a lot of Aboriginal people who are doing that same thing because we want our communities to grow. I mean it has got to the stage now where we are actually competing amongst ourselves to make things happen.
We all grew up in the bush basically, and we saw the level of poverty and despair and the past government policies on remote communities, and we knew about the history of pastoralists rounding our mob and shooting them out in the middle of nowhere. We can take you to these places today and the bones are still laying there. That is how communities in Central Australia were set up. Not only in Central Australia, right across Australia. We had this knowledge of brutalities forced upon our communities. So you had to be tough as nails, have thick skin, thick skulls and this hate and love and desire in you to survive. And if anybody said something out of place, you would stand up and say stuff back to them. Tracker’s madness gave him sanity.