My Agenda Is to Set Up a Food Factory
Tracker Tilmouth
You have got to have fun or try to enjoy what you do because it is a terrible task going out in the bush and seeing the communities and the conditions that they live in. If you are not affected by that you are really not seeing anything. The distance to health, the distance to good food, transport issues, what is not available in the store, you would wonder why these people are still alive. The meat’s off, you get the twice-boiled, oily fish and chips – it has got to be twice-boiled! It is full of oil, and sloppy and greasy, and chicken that should have been thrown out before it got cooked, and lettuces that are non-existent.
Look, that was my agenda and it still is my agenda to set up a food factory where it does not matter if you have diabetes, or heart disease or anything else, you can go into the store and pick up a pack of food that is already cooked, it has been frozen, it has got a green tag on it and that is for diabetes, red tag for heart, yellow tag for something else, and so on and so on. You ask for the green tag, and it costs you about five bucks a meal, and you go home and put it in a billy can of hot water for ten or fifteen minutes, then you have got yourself a little cooked meal with everything in it. That is my agenda to develop one of those food factories.
We have tried to do this with horticulture but we are getting resistance from Centrefarm, and other people who do not see their role as being farmers, but as consultants and so forth, so it has never gone anywhere. But it will go somewhere when I get around to doing this horticultural stuff up at Bootu Creek. I will get around to it. It is one of those agendas that needs to be done, so it does not matter what your disease is, you can go back to your community and know full well that you can get good food that is cooked for you and has a doctor’s signature on it, or a doctor saying this is good for this, this and this, that it has been made by Congress and the health services on communities.
I have talked to Centrefarm about this. I wanted to do it but no one wanted to do it if you know what I mean. They make you laugh. Everything is all, Woe is me, and it is a terrible thing, the health service, and I feel so bad. Ah! Well! What are you doing about it? Oh! Nothing. What are you feeling all uptight about? If they are doing nothing about it then it cannot affect you. So many times I have seen the director of Congress or the director of Danila Dilba with a furrowed brow, or seen the health services, and I have asked, what are you doing about it? Do you want to do something about it? Let the status quo remain. And the argument is yes, you enjoy what you do, but you do it because you can achieve something. If you cannot achieve something then you must get awfully frustrated. A lot of people like to be paid for being frustrated. They do not look at productivity, they look at being paid for being frustrated. There is the gnashing of teeth, the screaming and crying. The degrees of frustration you see are represented in your salary package. Well you look frustrated. It must be terrible. Here is some more money. There are a lot of people who have been paid good money over many decades to be frustrated. They have not done anything but been frustrated.
Danny Schwartz
Tracker did not have one idea a day; he had twenty ideas every day. And the problem with Tracker was that he was not a details man. He was a big thinker and he needed people around him to do the detail.
Tracker was really an engineer – that was his background. When [Gary] Foley went to China and [Michael] Mansell into Libya, Tracker went to Israel. Tracker went and learnt about irrigation and farming practices. He has talked about the Northern Territory being the food bowl of the world for the last twenty years. And he is right. The water is there, the capacity is there, the sunshine is there, and he has been pushing this barrow for twenty-five years. Only now is Tony Abbott talking about this notion, and now that Asia is growing, it is going to happen. There is no doubt it is going to happen and one day someone is going to turn around and go back to this blackfella who had been talking about it for the last twenty-five years and when it should have happened.
The reality is there are a lot of issues. For example, Tracker and I had been talking about setting up a kibbutz up in the Northern Territory for years. The problem is that we did not have a community to set it up. We needed a dedicated community who were desirous to stay on the land and to develop the land and to work the land. There was the analogy of the Israeli immigrants in the 1890s all the way through to the 1940s, they were people who loved the land and loved their community and worked the land and built their community to a position where they were providing for the whole country, this brand new country of Israel.
Today the kibbutzim are not only involved with agriculture, they are also involved with technology, they have factories. There was a time during the 1980s and 90s when it was thought that it was going to be the end of the kibbutz, and in fact they reinvented themselves, and now they do technology and they are producing silicon chips and laptops for the world. The kibbutzim developed agricultural notions of drip irrigation that Tracker worked with in Australia.
There is an obvious correlation between socialism and the way the blackfellas live, in a quasi-socialist environment. You do not produce something for yourself. If you are the boomerang-maker in the community you make boomerangs for everybody, you don’t just make them for yourself. It is the same for the kibbutz. So we thought it was a great mix and marriage, but unfortunately, we were unable to find a community to work with to do that.
Tracker was the big visionary. There was no doubt that the Northern Territory has the potential to be the food bowl of the world, but he needed to have the people around him to help him. The ideas that he had for energy provision, agriculture, food, both with meat and agriculture, were incredible ideas but unfortunately for Tracker, he did not have the people around him to handle the detail. He was the big-vision man and he needed detail people. But he was responsible for many success stories, and that one young fella who did the boats, that got the sub-licence for fishing, that was just one example, there are many examples of young fellas who have been inspired by Tracker to follow their dreams and do their own thing. In a sense it is counter-intuitive, in that they are not the socialist community-minded people, they are more the individuals who have gone out and done things for themselves, but Tracker inspired many people, many blackfellas, to go out and do their thing.
Toly Sawenko
It was when I was asked to manage the land-management section of the Central Land Council that I got to know Tracker and worked with him more closely, because he had a very passionate interest in looking at how people could utilise and manage the land for the future, having got back areas of land through the Land Rights Act.
One of his big sayings was the enjoyment of land rights. It was one thing for people to get back significantly large areas of land through land claims or previous reserves being converted into Aboriginal land, or even pastoral properties being purchased and turned into Aboriginal land, but his whole notion was, Well! The land has to continue to bring benefits to people and offer them a better way of life. So enjoying the benefits of land rights was something that he worked for always.
Tracker came into the Land Council as deputy director and later as director in a period in the history of the Territory when Aboriginal people who were fortunate enough to gain land, were moving from the phase where it was all about claiming land and land acquisition, to actually owning land and managing it and utilising it for all the benefits that land ownership can bring. When I was working in land management, it was all about developing resources and skills to do land assessment, to assess the economic potential of land. This was something that Tracker understood in detail and it was something that came out of his training at Roseworthy. He had seen all that from the scientific perspective in his training, and he wanted to apply that to land in Central Australia.
The work started out with having scientific analysis and assessment of the capability of land. A lot of the land that Aboriginal people gained under the Land Rights Act was not of high economic value. In some places there was mining activity so there were benefits to be had from mining agreements under the Land Rights Act. Some people acquired pastoral properties through government funding and that land was converted to Aboriginal land. Some people made the transition from being workers on a cattle station to actually owning the cattle station, and then operating it as a cattle resource. So Tracker became very involved in the operation of these Aboriginal owned pastoral properties and he established the Central Australian Aboriginal Pastoralists Association. He was always keen to look at ways that people could manage those pastoral properties profitably, and learn the skills to do with managing them, and there were efforts that the Land Council made to make sure that Aboriginal traditional owners received knowledge and training and advice in how to manage those properties.
He was also very involved in looking at how people could gain lasting benefits from mining agreements, because under the Land Rights Act Aboriginal landowners had some leverage to negotiate agreements with mining companies about how mining activity would be conducted on Aboriginal land. I did not work in the mining area or pastoralism, but I was certainly aware of those things going on in the Land Council. I moved out of land management and worked closely with Tracker on looking at other options for economic development on Aboriginal land. That led to the establishment of Centrefarm which was all about looking at the horticultural potential of Aboriginal land. We were aware that commercial horticultural operators were looking at Central Australia, in fact establishing enterprises there, which demonstrated there were other economic land uses in the Centre apart from pastoralism and mining and the ones that people knew about.
It focused very much on the story that emerged from the table grape industry, around Ti Tree north of Alice Springs, where there were a number of factors which advantaged that sort of business. There was a substantial underground water reserve that could be used to irrigate table crops, and other crops as well. And because of the climatic factors there, table grapes could be grown and ripened early for the market, and then because of that could get a premium price, so it became a very profitable venture and could overcome some of the problems, like being so far from the markets.
Tracker was really the instigator of that idea and with Sam Miles, who was an agronomist and consultant, we worked together for a number of years, pulling together all the relevant information, getting technical information around groundwater and soils, mapping the potential areas for development, and consulting with the landowners in those areas to see if they were supportive of the idea. There was quite a number of years work involved in that, and it also led to our study tour of Israel, which was one of the highlights of the process. It was really all about changing the mindset in the Land Council, but also in the Aboriginal landowners’ eyes, and in the eyes of the various government agencies, that there was economic potential to be developed on Aboriginal land, beyond what had already been done before.
One of the important things was to work collaboratively with Northern Territory government departments whose expertise was all about hydrology and underground water basins and yields, and water quality, and all those sorts of things. This technical information was important to demonstrate that these areas of land could be used for irrigation. There was also working with the landowners. I mentioned the trip to Israel, but most of the Aboriginal people who made decisions about what happened on Aboriginal land were the senior people in the community who had grown up in the pastoral industry and maybe had some experience of mining, and their idea was if you are going to do something commercial with the land, that was what it would look like. So there was a story to be told about what commercial horticulture might look like on that land. Part of the the process to change people’s mindset was to take five representatives from different land trusts in Central Australia, and show them what a country like Israel had done in terms of horticulture and land use in a desert environment with very few natural advantages, and poor quality water. That was a real eye-opening trip for those landowners. They could actually see the reality of what their land might look like. Tracker had been to Israel before and he knew what it looked like, and what he wanted to achieve there. He wanted the traditional landowners to see that something was possible on their land which they otherwise would not conceive of.
We met Bedouin people in Israel and they had a fairly nomadic existence travelling across the country, subsisting on herding animals, goats and sheep and so on, and knew how to live in the desert environment in that way, but they were also becoming more sedentary, a bit like traditional people in Central Australia living on settlements. So they identified with the Aboriginal group visiting them, but one of the interesting points of conversation was when they came to learn that these five landowners and their families owned areas of land larger than all of Israel. They were perplexed that people could own so much land and yet have so little in terms of resources or wealth, and were not using the land in a directly commercial sort of way.
The Bedouin people could see in Israel what had happened to land there run by the Israelis, where there were all sorts of successful innovations in terms of desert horticulture. The Israelis themselves, the managers and agronomists and commercial horticulturalists that we met, were also somewhat puzzled and almost envious of these Aboriginal landowners who had such large areas of land that was essentially undeveloped in terms of commercial activity, and they came to realise that though the traditional owners had these large resources of land, what they lacked was management expertise and capital to invest. So that was part of the trip, to make people aware, but the rest of the story had to continue back in Australia, and that was in terms of the ingredients you need to make a venture like this succeed, and the land and water was one thing, but what was also needed was a market for the crop, business-management experience, and also investment of money in the project to get it started.
The government support was there at the technical level but the missing part of the equation was the involvement of professional operators who had management experience, and who brought capital to the equation, and were able to work with Aboriginal landowners to set up joint ventures. That was the sort of model that was developed over time for horticulture on Aboriginal land. Tracker was there right through that process and he understood that all those elements were needed to make the project work.
There were difficulties all around because this was groundbreaking work, and particularly in the area of Aboriginal affairs and funding for commercial projects, there was a fair level of scepticism about doing anything new and the risks of failure. A lot of work was done working with organisations like the Aboriginals Benefit Account, which had funding from mining royalty revenues to distribute, and also the Indigenous Land Corporation, which had funds to develop Aboriginal enterprises.
It was hard work convincing people in those organisations that business ventures which had been identified as potentially viable on Aboriginal land should be supported. There was always a lot of resistance and scepticism, and delay. Probably the worst thing was the delay. It was not difficult to find commercial interests that wanted to look at the idea of a joint venture of growing a crop on Aboriginal land and proving that it was economically viable, but it was very difficult to get timely agreement from the Aboriginal side, from the funding bodies that would assist the landowners to put some capital into the project, so that by the time some of those agencies got around to taking it seriously, the business investors had to walk away. They could not just stand there waiting with their money to invest. It was quite frustrating in those early years to pull that story together. Tracker had to be a persuasive advocate of the importance of doing that, and I think it was something he did for his entire life really. He was always looking at economic opportunities for Aboriginal people who had Aboriginal land resources, or even those who didn’t, but had some kind of business enterprise that they were aiming to develop.
Part of Tracker’s dealings with people was to raise their sights and lift their eyes to something a bit broader than just running a CDEP program, or some kind of make-work program that governments had developed on communities to keep people occupied. This was basically another form of welfarism. He had no time for that, to be bogged down in that world. He wanted to raise people’s aspirations to participate in the mainstream economy in a big way. A lot of his communication with landowners was all about getting them to see that, getting them to see that they could do so much more, that they could participate at a much higher and more influential level. Some people in the communities got that very quickly and really jumped to it. Others took a while to change their mindset and their thinking.
When you worked with Tracker, you did not always know what he was thinking. You just kind of went with his energy. He was very much a driven person. He had very strong ideas about what he thought was desirable and important in terms of advancing Aboriginal people’s interests in Central Australia, but he would not always sit down and articulate them to you. If you worked with him, that emerged through the work.
He was very much action-focused, and he was also multi-tasking, doing lots of things at the same time. He would be working on potential deals for Aboriginal pastoral businesses to work together and identify market opportunities, and with potential individual projects on individual properties. He would be talking to people at a high level of government and in the political parties about employment and mining agreements, and had such a broad agenda that when you worked with him you did not always know what he was doing, and you did not see the whole picture the way he did. But when you look back on it, the consistent ideas that were driving him are quite clear. It was all about people doing better than just surviving on welfare. It was all about people maximising the opportunities that they had by owning land or having access to land. It was all about real jobs and participating in the real economy.
Tracker did not often talk about his own personal journey and how he came to form the views that he did, but you can see that his development as a person and his working life were very much driven by the idea that he was not going to accept and be defined by disadvantage, and the impact of things that had happened to him through the Stolen Generation policies. He had grown up and worked as a young man at the beginnings of the self-determination era and the land rights era, and he was well aware of the civil rights movement, and the political rights movement in Australia. He fed off that, and what he took out of it was something that would give him strength and confidence as a person, a sense of what he was capable of, and he thought everyone could be capable of that and should not settle for anything less. So while he understood the difficulties of people living in remote communities, he never thought, Oh! Well! That’s all they should ever have, just to live on very limited opportunities. He always thought there were better opportunities to be had if the people who had influence and power could work to support those ideas.
A lot of the people that I met through my friendship with Tracker, socially or through work, were people who had initiative and went out and did things and set up businesses or ran businesses and saw opportunities and acted on them. Or they were people who had positions of political power and influence and were actually shaping the way things work in the country. He was very much attracted to people who went out and did things. I think he wanted to participate in the political world with people who had the power to make decisions and shape and influence the lives of others, because that was what he wanted to do. He wanted to be influential in improving the lives of people.
There were no class divisions in Tracker’s world. He would, if we were walking down Todd Mall or walking down the street in Darwin, stop and talk to numerous people of all backgrounds and persuasions and connections. They might be family and relatives, or just community people who knew him, people that he had known through his childhood. Then it might be a [government] minister or a chief minister walking down the street, it was all the same to him. He had a vast network of people. He did not see any boundaries in terms of how he wanted to engage with what he was doing, whether it was talking to the prime minister or talking to one of the members of his family or his language group.
Working with Tracker and socialising with Tracker was never dull. His sense of humour and his behaviour with people was so full of wit and cheek that you were laughing all the time. He valued that. Sometimes when I was working with him at the Land Council, he would come into my office there and say, Tol, let’s go. I would have no idea where we were going but we would get in the car – this is during working hours – and you could see that he had been sitting at his office there, doing the administration of running the organisation or whatever other roles he might have had, and he just wanted to get out and mingle with people. I would say, Where are we going? He would say, Oh! Just gonna go down town and rattle a few cages. His idea of rattling a few cages was to turn up at Congress or Imparja TV, breeze his way in there, say hello to the reception people who he always knew, have a bit of a joke and a laugh with them, and then go in and see somebody like Owen Cole [then manager of Imparja], or Johnny Liddle [then director of Congress] and just chew the fat with them and tease them, make jokes and tell them some juicy bit of gossip, or try and find out some juicy bit of gossip from them. It was just his way of getting into the flow of what was going on, and enjoying that kind of teasing sensibility that he had. After an hour or two of that he would have done what he wanted to do, which was to break free from the shackles of being a bureaucrat, which some of the roles of his work required him to be, and just be himself, by tuning into what was going on and putting his antenna out there.
He was totally uninhibited when it came to putting an idea out there. When we were on the trip to Israel, the fact that five traditional Central Australian Aboriginal men wearing Akubra hats, with Tracker and myself and Sam Miles and others, were travelling around kibbutzim and farms in Israel, did get media attention. The local TV film crew set up the camera and started interviewing Tracker with the rest of the entourage there, and his first comment on the question of why we were visiting Israel was, Well! We had our Holocaust as well. That got people’s attention, I can tell you. But he managed to carry it off instead of making it as a sort of totally provocative, disrespectful remark. He used that to draw attention to the way Aboriginal people had been dealt with by history in Australia, to the way they were trying to overcome some of the impacts of that history, and take a step in a new direction. He was totally uninhibited about putting what he regarded as the truth out there and he did that without fear or favour.
Chippy Miller
We were talking one day about some business dealings and Tracker said Hang on, I’ll ring this bloke in Melbourne, he knows all about this company, so there we were sitting around his mobile phone having it on speaker, and having a discussion with this bloke down in Melbourne. That was the sort of bloke he was, Hang on and I will ring this bloke and find out for you. He would go into somebody else’s business and tell them what their staff should be doing and everything else. If they were any good he would say, Look, you should come and work with me.
Nathan Miller
Originally I met Tracker together with Toly Sawenko. I was working for Netafim, which is an irrigation company, and they came to see if I could help them organise a study tour of Aboriginal landowners to Israel, which I did. The trip to Israel was undertaken in 2000 and ABC TV made a program about the trip. I was the sales and marketing manager of the company and I think that we were involved together with the Pratt Foundation, and someone had given them my name because I organised a lot of study tours of winemakers and viticulturists at that time to Israel and the United States.
I always had this soft spot for Aboriginal issues and things like that, and Toly and Tracker were different, both of them, to the people that I used to deal with. So I was quite drawn into, let’s say, doing more than I usually would do, and then they asked me for some help with the Central Land Council. That was before the establishment of Centrefarm. I travelled to Alice Springs and somehow we became friendly – it was a kind of chemistry. I was interested in Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal life, and Tracker started more and more to see if I could support them from a business point of view.
Every time we met with Tracker it was a new idea. It was not a strategy, it was quite often a crazy idea and, Let’s go for it. If it did not work we dropped it and that was it. I think Tracker’s ideas were much faster than the bureaucracy could accept. A lot were excellent ideas, but did not eventuate. Some did, but at the end of the day a lot of good ideas for one reason or another did not eventuate. The idea on its own was a great idea, but there was a lot of work around it, and a lot of patience was needed for it, a bit too much patience. I mean a good idea can take five years to eventuate. I do not think Tracker could wait five years.
I am not an expert on Tracker’s psychology, but Tracker would have a very good idea that would eventuate when other people took it on. He needed other people to take it on and to drive it, and nobody had better charm than Tracker. First of all Tracker could really get you on board with his enthusiasm. Number two: he was an extremely likeable person in a very rough way. The minute you get to meet Tracker you fall in love with him. He might sound or look completely crazy but you would fall in love with him. That was how he would get people to do things with him.
Centrefarm was one of Tracker’s ideas that worked. Getting the Aboriginal landowners to understand the potential of the land is not something that you can put a value on in the short term. But the minute people understand that the dirt is not dirt on its own, that dirt is a producing tool, that is very, very important. That was one of the things, through all Tracker’s crazy ideas, that managed to rise to the surface, that there is land with potential. That was very important. The minute you got a farmer to invest and start working the land, definitely quite a few things eventuated. I was the matchmaker. I must admit I had a few ideas, because I wanted the Aboriginal community to form their own irrigation company. I wanted to give them accounts from all the major suppliers, things like that. I do not know why it did not happen.
The only thing I can say is that if there would have been an easier way to implement Tracker’s ideas, it would not even come to the surface. It was just not in his nature to do it easier, it could not happen. He could also annoy you no end. He could phone you, I wanted to speak with you. I say, Okay. And it was nothing to tell. Okay, it was nice. And then he would bombard you with another phone call you did not expect, and with information that only in his own mind there was a connection for, but it was very difficult to find the connection. Through his enthusiasm about everything and also his way of giving you information, he needed you to understand in what way it was connected to the objective. He did not explain why it was connected to whatever he wanted. He would give you the information and that was it. But I loved it. For me it was perfect.
I am interested in and love stories. Especially at my age you do not remember everything, but certain things you remember more than others, or you remember and will never forget. While I was in Alice Springs to attend an Aboriginal cultural festival in the 1990s, Tracker’s brother [William] spoke to me about the Stolen Generation, and he said to me, I will never recover from it. I asked him why. I do not remember the sequence of the conversation, but I know what he said, he said that he would never be able to go completely back to his people because he could not speak the language anymore. He could not communicate with his own people. And that for me was like you punched me in my stomach. He cannot go back to his own people, and it is a free country you can go anywhere, but he could not speak the language. So that was one thing. The other thing was Tracker saying half-jokingly – but if it could have happened he would have jumped on it – that he wanted to be the ambassador to Israel. He said, I want to be the ambassador to Israel. I said, On what grounds? He said, I’ve got all the qualifications in the world. He said, I’m an Aboriginal, I’ve got a Muslim background, I’m very pro-Israel, I’ve got all the qualifications you need to be ambassador to Israel. I actually thought as funny as it was, it was a good idea. So I took him to meet the Australia– Israel Chamber of Commerce and made a very nice conversation.
He told me about travelling to Israel and that at the time the government gave money to young Aboriginal potential leaders to travel the world to learn, and most of them went to Libya or places like that, and Tracker decided to go to Israel in order to see how a community developed from agriculture. It probably emphasised, more than anything else, his vision. To understand as a young man that what Aboriginal people need is to find a way to support themselves and to develop a community – that is a vision.
I went with him to South Australia, I do not even remember what for, there were so many things that went on that I do not remember now what is connected to what. But I remember going into this Aboriginal office and everyone was in awe, Look who is here. Look who is here. I was astonished. I was absolutely astonished. All the women and everyone were saying, Tracker is here. It was not a question of impressing me, I was not impressed by it, but it put him in a different light because I knew him, we talked to him, we would be sitting at dinner or lunch and talking shit and whatever, but to see how other people saw him, all of a sudden, responding to him like a rock star, without the screaming and those things, but in a very sort of cultural way, it was really impressive.
Yesterday I spoke with him about politics. He said that he was happy that Rudd came in, that he did not like Julia Gillard. I said to him, I just can’t take Kevin Rudd, I cannot bring myself to vote for him. I actually would have voted for Julia Gillard. He said no, he did not like her. I said, Rudd, Kevin Rudd, he doesn’t like Israel. Tracker said he was the one that said sorry to the Aboriginals, and I said, Yes, and the Aboriginals also don’t like Israelis. He said, No, we do like Israelis but we also like Palestinians, we like everything, but we do remember that when we had to struggle in the courts and everything, the Jewish community was always behind us, and all the lawyers passed away – whatever it was he said – We never forget. I do not know how serious he was because we were always talking half-jokingly, but I presume he meant it.80 He said we never forget the Jewish community helping us. And he could throw around a few words in Yiddish and things like that. He kept trying. He never gave up. I think humour was one of his major strengths. If you would get it. It could be crude, it could be stupid, but it was humour. We need it all the time.
Sam Miles
I first met Tracker when I was with Dr Trevor Cutter, the physician that started the Central Australia Aboriginal Congress in 1975. Tracker had come bounding out of the old Baptist church. Trevor Cutter was the fellow who found me and probably found Tracker. He looked for people who he thought could provide solutions to whatever he was doing. After that, we worked together in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. I remember him there mainly because he wasn’t there, he was helping a mate – Dave Simpson, who was building his house and had an antique car business. Tracker used to disappear and people wondered where he was.
He was quite an enthusiastic young bloke when we first met, about eighteen, nineteen or twenty. He was not shy. I remember him getting pissed off once. In those days in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Alice Springs, if you were in government you dealt directly with Aboriginal people and the politics was fairly intense. It was not like these days where there is no interaction between government and say a client, where there is always somebody in between. And DAA was a pariah, the government bloody pariah. Anyway, Tracker was in there and Alison [Anderson] was another one in there, but I think she came a little bit later. So he applies for a job and I can remember this one whitefella who was going to be his boss who did not like him at all, in the sense that he was a cheeky young bloke and never turned up and, Go on, what am I going to do with him, that kind of thinking. I do not think there was anything too personal about it. Anyway Tracker did not get the job. You can imagine it would not have suited him, and anybody had every right to think they did not want him working for them, because he would have done his own thing.
Then he was going to try to bring together Aboriginal-owned land with pastoral activity to set up the Central Australian Aboriginal Pastoralist Association. And they had their meetings and Tracker was the manager of that. Then they had the butcher shop on Lindsay Avenue in Alice Springs that they had bought off Terry Lee who, as the vendor, financed it. In other words they did not have to pay cash to get in, and Terry Lee said, Righto! You’ve got to pay me back every month, or whatever. They did not get their cash flow right because we were having to pay. Part of it got funded from ADC wages and we managed ADC. Mike Sheargold was the boss. So we had to pay wages out of that, and they would reimburse it when they got the money. We had it under control then Tracker had to…he had a fairly acerbic wit at times…and Lois O’Donoghue [chairperson of ADC] had it reviewed and found that we were theoretically lending cash, so they closed everything down. That was one thing I learnt about Tracker, you had to be fairly cautious when he got a bee in his bonnet, he was going to have a go. He had serious run-ins with Lois, very serious. Oh the old auditor, did he enjoy himself, he found something to report! So we copped it pretty seriously.
That was when he decided, Well, I better go off and do something, and I think he went to uni. He disappeared from the scene for, how many years was he at uni? Four, I reckon.
The other time of course where he and I worked together was setting up Centrefarm. Tracker was sitting on a plane with a bloke and they got chatting and it turned out the fellow, John Burford from South Australia, had a packing shed for citrus. The bloke wanted him to see his navel oranges and Tracker said, Yeah, we can grow them for you , you know, the usual Tracker. So the next thing they contracted me to go and look for a spot where they could grow two hundred hectares of citrus. I had to go out and I found that the only place where there was a big groundwater basin was Utopia.
So then we went through this great big thing. There was groundwater, and with citrus, you need a certain amount of water. You have got two hundred hectares – it is a big block, and you have got to find a groundwater basin on Aboriginal land that can sustainably irrigate two hundred hectares. In those days that was quite a big ask.
We had to go out and find the area, get the money to drill the bores and prove it, identify it. Tracker and Toly did the negotiation, discussions with the traditional owners. Then we had to get all the consultants together to do the planning, and we were looking at quite a big project, maybe ten million dollars to get it across. And it was going to be funded, and a bloke called Barry Hansen did a lot of numbers for us. And then another consultant came up from the south, and we did all the feasibilities and the bloke from the south was happy with it.
It went from there. Then we needed the money. It was something like six million dollars to get it set up. I reckon we were trying to get money from ATSIC, ILC and ABA. And all the talk and carry-on, it dragged on and then something happened, and the bloke decided to pull back. I think we were to grow navel oranges, early-season navel oranges. But the Valencia market fell and things went into a bit of a hole. So nothing happened. And the problem was, we had the three different funding bodies involved. None of them could make up their mind. It was too big for all of them, just too technical. There were three bureaucrats there who knew nothing about business. It has not changed I might add.
So out of that, when it collapsed, I think Toly and Tracker together decided we needed to have a strategy for horticulture, and that was when they got me to do the strategy. They had the four pillars. There was a developer, a financier, a lead funding body, agribusiness and training and employment, the four pillars. The first one, the developer, that was Centrefarm, which it was set up to do, to pull the whole package together, to identify the resource, and work with the traditional owners.
That got it all together, and that was how Centrefarm got up. And Toly was the first manager of Centrefarm. Out of that, I recommended that they go to Israel and have a look at the kibbutz idea, and we all went to Israel. There was Tracker and Toly and traditional owners, and a few government people. I said we had to change the mindset around, those were the words I used. We needed to go there and it was no good just one or two of us, so Land Council people went, that was Toly, Tracker, two different government departments, I cannot remember which ones. Geoff Kenna [former principal horticulturalist, Department of Primary Industries in Alice Springs] was one, and I think the ABA bloke was another who went to Israel. It was paid for by the Pratt Foundation and Netafim Australia. We had a great time. The Pratt Foundation flew us over and Netafim hosted us.
Centrefarm bumped along the bottom for a while and then about 2005 we got our first round of funding. Tracker was the chair and then he went off and started his prawn farm, and became chair again after that. Toly was manager for a year when Pratt funded it and then the Land Council kept him in the position until the money came.
Of course with Tracker there was any amount of toing and froing with Centrefarm, because he was always calling on us to do something or another. Full of ideas. He was a driving force and I think he got Centrefarm into the Darwin area. We operate under Centrefarm, but it wears a different badge up there, I think it is called Top End Farms. So Centrefarm staff are doing what they started in Central Australia. They are finding the resources, doing the scoping studies on about four different areas. That has been the progression.
It has been a battle because the original strategy for Centrefarm was for it to be the developer, and we needed a lead funding agency. So the concept was, you find the resource, you do the pre-feasibilities, go to the lead funding agency and work together to put together the package. The lead funding agency would find the money. That never happened. The idea when I first did it was that probably ILC would be the funding agency and do all of that. It just never happened. I do not know what the reason was.
From there we did the work on Ti Tree and Ali Curung, and Utopia. We got the water resource at Ali Curung and the money to do that. Jenny Macklin put the funding in for the application to the ABA for the bore field, and Jenny Macklin came down and Allan Cooney [manager for Centrefarm] sat in the car with her to Ti Tree and back, and she had had enough of them and just signed off on four million dollars, three point two million for the bore field. If she did not plunge in, I am pretty sure the bureaucrats would have said it was too big for them.
We have got to develop regional economies, where you develop Aboriginal land as a resource. How do you make sure they have got equity there and it just does not get taken over, that is the difficulty. And trying to package all this government stuff together with the Remote Jobs Community Program, it is just ridiculous, it does not work. You have to combine CDEP with Job Search Australia and that just comes under bloody bureaucracy so I do not want to go there, I would go on all day and get grumpy.
As it is at present, the community councils have been disbanded by the government under the Intervention, and there is a vacuum on the communities now. The shire is there, but the shire is run from Tennant Creek. It is all remote, it is a third tier of government, local government. There is no organisation on a community now where you drive in and say, Hello, I’m here to talk to this person about this business, there is nobody like that now. You have got to talk to the shire. That is how the world has changed in the Aboriginal sense. The shire just does the shire’s work, it is a local government. It has got nothing to do with the traditional owners. In the DAA days, you would walk straight in and talk to Bob Huey, or Bob Beadman, or John Angel, the minister’s delegates. You do not talk to them now – the minister’s delegates, you do not even know who they are.
We are right in a new area now. This is what we are trying to figure out, where do we go next? It is institutional architecture, the bureaucracy is all over the place, and there is nobody up there big enough to walk in and say, Righto! Five year development, twenty million dollars, put all the package together. There is nobody who can do that. There is a bit of government here, and a bit of government there, there is ABA over there, there is ILC, and it goes on. It is all about jobs, but they do not say how they are going to create them. But at least now, if the traditional owners take the lead, and the land councils, there will be a change in mind about engaging with private enterprise. And Tracker was the start of engaging with industry, bringing them on as partners.
Tracker always maintained his interest in Centrefarm. Whenever he would get a bright idea, he would phone them, and usually Vin [Lange, CEO] would have to write out something for him, and someone would have to make it work. He had an idea for low-security prisoners. Tracker wanted to have Pine Hill B set up as a low-security place. We tried to buy Territory Grapes which is a big grape farm, and we did nothing for three years so we have got some scar tissue there, but we have just signed off and bought the Territory Grape Farm with Kuda, the mob who get the royalties from the Granites mine. There is Kuda with fifty per cent, twenty-five per cent is investors and their own professional managers, and Centrefarm has twenty-five per cent.
Territory Grapes is on Pine Hill and there is accommodation for about a hundred. It is very run-down, but we have got it – ninety-nine per cent sure, but it could still fall over of course. This is where the royalty association could put in one and a half million just like that, without blinking. They have got assets of thirty or forty million. That is how it works and that is an outcome.
We have now got a strategic position in Ti Tree, which is the Anmatyerre area. The problem is that it does not belong to the Anmatyerre mob, but we can develop the other farm that they have under an ILUA [Indigenous Land Use Agreement], the farm area Pine Hill B – it is enough for them to do one hundred hectares which is a decent-sized farm. Because Pine Hill B is close to Territory Grapes, you can grow the stuff and take it to Territory Grapes and pack there, the accommodation is there, and all of that can be worked out. So that is Pine Hill B. Tracker’s idea was that we set up Pine Hill B for people who are on DUIs [driving under the influence] who would live and work there on home detention. You could send them there and you would have traditional landowners from the area looking after them.
Now it is a great idea but there are a few gritty areas that have to be worked through. Security. You have got to look after people, who either send themselves there or are sent there by the magistrate. In which case, the magistrate has got to know they are going to be looked after. If they escape you have to go and find them. It will happen, there is no doubt about it, and who is going to do that? Then if they are going to work on the farm, the fellow who walks through the gate has got to be worth twenty-five dollars an hour. And they will need some supervision on the farm, and that is an extra cost.
All of that has got to be worked out. Together with Tracker, we had been trying to get dollars to do a feasibility on it, get the hard numbers so that we can go to the Department of Corrections and they will know that this bloke’s in gaol, it is one hundred and eighty bucks a day that it is costing them, but if he was out there, maybe we could do it for one hundred and fifty bucks a day. That is what we have got to get sorted out.
Bob Beadman
We both talked often about schemes like melon farms at Ali Curung and how they utilised backpackers and how, before that, they utilised the mob from Ti Tree, whilst the Ali Curung mob just watched. We talked about how you might overcome that, and we talked about how you might bring the Ti Tree region into greater production. He saw some synergies between the new mine that is going to open near Aileron and the potential for horticulture, by expanding the orchards around Ti Tree and beyond. Apparently the land is there, the water is there, but it lacks power.
He saw an opportunity to piggyback on the power needs of Aileron, to create a grid system that would run power to horticulture schemes and leased land already in Aboriginal ownership, to bring it into production and create jobs. We often talked about the level of Aboriginal incarceration where you have a captured audience already, to use them in some way on employment and training in quasi-economic schemes that could use that labour on Aboriginal land to produce things that could be sold on the open market, and in doing so, you would equip people to be job-ready for when they get out of the prison system. I think the current government is picking up on some of that idea. We have hammered them with documentation from Centrefarm, and some stuff I have helped them write, and some of these schemes happening now on boot camps – youth boot camps – I do not know how much credit we can take, but we will take a bit. It is utilising a negative to try and turn it into a positive. Tracker thought through things like that very, very well.
He fundamentally understood that Aborigines are dirt rich but asset poor. That we have created a mindset through over-generosity of welfare benefits – this is perhaps more me talking than him – that has lowered expectations. There is a mindset out there now that you do not have to work, the government will keep you for life. And it has dumbed down aspirations and expectations. That, unfortunately, then has a terrible effect on demotivating kids from even attending school. They come out at the end of the school system, basically illiterate and not able to compete on the open market for jobs. So then history repeats itself. Tracker saw all of that.
And when he was director of the Central Land Council I remember the effort that he put into schemes to identify water points, or the fencing you would need to supplement natural cartography features, to create enhanced opportunities for cattle production, by using existing land and work force. But he was perhaps ahead of his time because he was not able to motivate the government agencies appropriately to get all that going and likewise, he was not able to motivate the local people who were too reliant on the free money to find a need to get themselves out of that lethargy and into production.
I remember he got himself in some strife once, it might have been Alcoota, in his Central Land Council days, it might have been exasperation about motivating people. I think he told them the next time he came out there he was going to cut a big green stick and get stuck into them. I think there might have been some hand-wringing do-gooder in the audience who was horrified at this pragmatism, and there was some ministerial correspondence firing around at the time.
There was another time, it might have been a combined meeting of ATSIC regional councils here in Darwin, and Tracker had laid down the law about something, and he was met with a hostile response. So in order to introduce a bit of levity to the occasion and get himself off the hook he said, Oh! Look! There’s Bob Beadman over there, blurting out to the crowd that I taught him everything he knows in order to get himself off the hook.
Allan Cooney
We worked together when I was the CEO or general manager, and Tracker was the chairman, during my time with Centrefarm which was about five and a half years. And we worked very closely together over that time. Those sorts of relationships between CEO and chairman generally go either way. They either become a difficult professional relationship, or they turn into a genuine long-term friendship. We became really good friends as much as we had a very strong professional relationship.
Tracker was a vast font of new ideas all the time. I got to the stage with Tracks that I had to filter his ideas because there were just so many of them. I had this rule of thumb that if he mentioned something to me six times I knew that it was probably something that I needed to focus on. Something that he only mentioned to me once I would say, Yeah! Mate that’s interesting but we’ve still got the business to do.
We did a lot of work around economic development in Central Australia, and a lot of it was based on some fundamental principles that Tracker had about the way Aboriginal economic development needs to be developed. A lot of it was by consensus, by actually speaking to the right people, not imposing an external view, but getting an understanding of what people’s real ambitions were and then applying those within the legal and commercial context that we had to work in.
One of the key ingredients of that and one of the things that probably sets Centrefarm apart from every other organisation in how it does its work, and certainly is a huge contributing factor to its success, is that we set up a structure that we ultimately called the Centrefarm Business Model, which was a culmination of a whole lot of things that came together at the time, and a whole lot of people’s thinking. From my point of view I stand on giants’ shoulders because I had Toly Sawenko, and Sam Miles, Tracker and David Ross. People like that who were actually doing a lot of thinking before I got near the place, and what I did was pull all those ideas together.
That business model in its purest sense was to create two separate entities, and those two separate entities deal with two different things. One dealt with Aboriginal law and custom and culture and it became an Aboriginal corporation, and the directors gave direction from there as they worked with the Aboriginal community. That Aboriginal corporation owned a commercial entity, which in the case of Ali Curung was called Ali Curung Horticulture Pty Ltd. And Ali Curung Horticulture did the business on that land. It was the agreement between the two organisations as to how they would work together that made Centrefarm a workable solution.
It was not lip service. We invested a hell of a lot in that relationship, but we do not make a lot of noise about this because we are operating in a commercial world, and people do not see some of the things we do, particularly when we are dealing with cultural issues as being commercially focused. We spend a hell of a lot of time and energy creating a song and dance Dream line, and create the environment for the Aboriginal community at Ali Curung to weave the new Dreaming story about the farm and its development and all that sort of thing into a cultural context that people can actually feel comfortable with.
One of the tools we used was painting. We painted our committee minutes on a large canvas. We would sit down with a canvas, have a meeting and as we did that, we would record the discussions on a canvas. This became a very large canvas, a painting that is now very complex, and is constantly worked on by people during the meetings, and it is the whole Dreaming story to that development.
It starts with western culture, and goes as far back as into Greek mythology. It starts at another level with Aboriginal culture and the Dreaming stories, particularly the Dreaming stories for Ali Curung. Both stories run parallel and then interlink, and the problems and difficulties and all that sort of thing are painted into the story. This is not walked past or ignored. They are now at the other end of that story, painting into the future and where that painting goes in the future. That painting is about two and a half metres wide by about eight or nine metres long now.
It is an important record. We made a conscious decision to do it like this, recording in Aboriginal language rather than keeping it as a black on white printed document that all legal forms take. I was at a meeting one day at Ali Curung and a lawyer stood up and held up a contract and said, This is your agreement, and everybody looked at it blankly. They had absolutely no idea what it was about. So next time I went to Ali Curung I took up some drawings and pictures and laid them out on the ground.
I never had any difficulty working with Tracker. Tracker would bustle in with an idea, we would examine it and talk about it. I would put it into some sort of context, and it would either sink or swim based on a few conversations. One of the things Tracker was pretty good at doing was letting something go if it was not going to work. Tracker and I had a great communication so we understood each other pretty well. He did not have that with everybody. We would look at an idea, turn it over in our minds, we would look at it from the perspective of a grand scheme, and then we would start to delve down into some of the practicalities of it. Other times we would take these ideas and walk around with them for a bit. Tracks and I travelled quite a lot, and we spent time in most of the capital cities of Australia trying to track down funding and support for things that we were doing, but he had an astonishing mind.
We probably got on well together because I have a similar way of viewing the world. I see it as endless possibilities and potential, and a lot of things do not work for reasons other than the fact that they are good ideas. You see a lot of this in Indigenous economic development. When I first started at Centrefarm the general attitude of everybody I came across, except for the board, was basically, This is never going to work. It is never going to happen. You are wasting your time here, mate. And to a degree that got my back up.
I was determined that I was not leaving until it did work. And we got over those hurdles, but a lot of them were manufactured in people’s minds, they were not actually real. They were just things people said could not be done. They said Ali Curung could not be done, and I constantly battled with the bureaucracy and certainly with the Department of Environment, where we had all the agreements and everything in place, and they just would not allow us to go ahead and do what was needed to be done to start the project.
So I got to the stage where I just rang the contractor one day and sent him up there with his bulldozer and told him to do what needed to be done, and I would handle the fallout. I got a red-faced bureaucrat threatening me with gaol and all sorts of things. I hung my head and tugged the forelock, begged forgiveness and said, Mate, I didn’t know, I thought it was all good, and away we went. They were hell-bent on stopping that project going forward. The only way to deal with it was to bulldoze them out of the way. Then as it turned out I had the support of the chief minister, and I had the support of the minister. I had the support of the heads of the department, but back in the middle-management area, particularly the Department of Environment, they did not want it to happen, and they were determined to stop it.
That was generally what we got, and Tracker and I did a hell of a lot of legwork and we banged on doors in Darwin, Alice Springs and Canberra time after time after time, and what I said to people was, Okay you think it’s a good idea, you think it won’t work, but we think it will, so try not to stand in our way while we make it work.
Some people got that and other people did not. The people that mattered did get it. I got really good support from the guy who was a topographer in the Northern Territory Primary Industries department. There were a couple of people there who really gave me good strong support to the point where they tipped a little bit of money into it, and gave us staff and all sorts of things. That was John Carroll and Matt Darcy and probably without them, it would not have worked. Tracker and I at least had them convinced that we were worth taking a punt on, that they were not going to lose from it and they could gain a lot, which ultimately they did. Unfortunately, Matt Darcy lost his job during that time and the guy that took over from him was very much a naysayer, but we had made enough ground by then not to be knocked off our perch so to speak.
I think there were a number of reasons for the negativity. There is a history of failed projects, and I spent a lot of time looking at those projects and trying to understand why they failed. One of the reasons we turned Centrefarm into a consulting group was because of that. We were not generating enough income to keep going by government grants, so we had to go and make money of our own.
One of the organisations we ended up working for was in Western Australia. They had a failed horticultural project there called Desert Gold and they were famous for the quality of their oranges. People in the old fruit markets in Perth – the older guys – still talk about how the best oranges in the world came from Wiluna. I looked at Wiluna and what happened. It had come down to a personality clash between two people, and that turned into a war that caused the whole project to fail. We set up a structure so that that could not occur again. There was clear division of responsibility and all of those sorts of things.
There was a history of failed projects, and one of the difficulties was to convince people that the way we were going about it was different to what had been done in the past. From the outside looking in it might seem like just another potentially fragile economic development project on the edge of where commercial projects can be developed. One of the things that really sticks in my mind is that, ultimately, the farm developed at Ali Curung was probably the most profitable farm in Australia, getting a sixty per cent return on the assets managed. Most farms in Australia get five per cent. It was a hugely profitable farm.
This guy had gone to the wall, and the only asset he had was the Ali Curung farm, and it was generating so much cash he was actually able to survive bankruptcy, so from a commercial point of view it was a very viable project. I was never in doubt of that. That is the sort of thing that underlined my determination to make it work, because I could see that the fundamental commercial aspects of it were fine, all we had to do was deal with the human complexities of it really, and that was the thing that took the difficulty.
The vision that Charlie Perkins had was an astonishing one and certainly Tracker benefited from that by sheer talent. He took Charlie’s vision and made it Tracker’s version. I think that is a wonderful legacy that Charlie passed on to those guys, and Tracker benefited greatly from it, but he was also a force of nature himself and made the visions his own, and grew them and increased them and turned them into something else. One of the things that people do not know or forget about Tracker is that he was probably the force behind Desert Knowledge which is a sizeable achievement in Alice Springs. It is now a forty million dollar installation with some of the world’s leading desert research. At the end of the day if you follow the story lines back, you will find the start of that story was Tracker, but people forget that. Centrefarm will probably be the same. He is well remembered and honoured in Centrefarm at the moment, but in twenty years time will he be remembered as the driving force, the visionary that gave me the inspiration to do the hard yards? Probably not. Those stories need to be told. He needs to be remembered for the fact that he was visionary enough to plant the idea and fashion me to do the hard yards. He did that for a lot of people, not just me, a lot of people.
80. Tracker would have been referring in particular to his good friend, Ron Castan AM QC (who died in October 1999), who could always be counted on to play a leading role in supporting Aboriginal people and their rights, and in some of the important legal cases mounted by Aboriginal people, including the Gove land rights case, the Mabo case and Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen.