Ross Ainsworth
Tracker was always a big-picture man and there were not many people who had the vision that he had, and because he was dealing in an area where all the money would need to come from the ILC, or through the decision-making of the CLC, or the NLC, since those places either do not have funds, or have a board of people who do not have vision, or much adventure, or much experience, a lot of the time his ideas just did not get taken up. One of the great things about Tracker was that he did not get too despondent about it, he just went onto the next one.
I think there was no one theme, except that his ideas were often so big that they were too big, too broad, too expansive for most people to get their head around, and they were usually quite complicated, and needed a lot of people to get on board. Most people just are not interested in having to work that hard. They do not have the vision and the drive. They are sitting in their comfortable offices and the last thing they want is a massive project with lots of risks and dangers involved, and lots of management to do, and the risk of having it fall over. I think the biggest disappointment has probably been the ILC. Tracker had some huge ideas about what to do with the land purchasing, not so much land purchasing because there was already a lot of land purchased, but the management of the existing land. The ILC was largely to blame because they seemed very reluctant to do any sort of land management. Because all of these things need to be commercial, at least partially commercial, and most of the people in these Aboriginal bureaucracies are not commercial.
The enjoyment of land rights involved doing things differently. You cannot run a cattle station and then have the community there doing their own thing. It has all got to be one show. That was achieved on Mistake Creek because everyone understood their role and their responsibility on the farm, and we were quite successful in getting money to build houses and a school there. People could see results from playing the game. They did not have to steal killers because they were able to get them cheap through the store. They did not have to steal fuel because they were getting recompense from the company.
There is such a disconnect because it is an unusual situation where a group of three hundred to a thousand people technically own a cattle station, when they actually do not own anything. Nobody can get anything out of it unless the thing is structured to give something back to those people. These are the sort of things that the bureaucrats miss. Yes, the traditional owners own that land. Is it of any value to them? No. They have almost no rights unless it is structured properly. They can walk onto Wave Hill and go traditional hunting and have the ceremonies and all that, they can do that today, where they do not own the place.
But when they own the place, suddenly they go, Okay we want to be getting something now, this is our place, and the answer is, No you don’t, piss off. So they feel as though they got shafted, which they have, but it was not anyone’s intention, it was the actual outcome. What extra did they get from going through a land claim and all the bullshit, what now do they have that they did not have before? Zip. So unless you explain what they get now that they did not have before, and how they actually get something personally, physically out of it, they just feel shafted and react accordingly, as I would.
If I suddenly inherited Brunette Downs and went down there and said, Righto boys, I’m here, what’s next? Where do I get my meat? Where’s my house? Where’s my Toyota? Which house here is mine? Where am I going to stay? what are they going to say? They’re going to say, No, no, no, piss off. Yes, you are a shareholder, but you get nothing so get lost. I would not be happy. Tracker tried to address those things, and it needed the resources of something like the ILC with the capacity to put funding to physically manage the place, and to manage the interaction between the owners and the farm. That is the big management thing – that is the one that counts. It just never happened. The ILC and the Aboriginal Trust Fund and all that, they always had some pathetic bureaucratic reason why you may be able to buy the land in the first place, but then you could not access funds to get on with business once you did.
I thought that Tracker should have been stark raving mad considering all the bullshit that he had had to go through but he just got on with it, went to the next project and hopefully made it work and did not get too despondent about it. He was a very mentally resilient character.
The one clear overarching thing was that he was trying to achieve a better result for Aboriginal people without any particular group in mind. He honestly had that goal all the way along. No matter how or what we were talking about, it was not for him to get power, it was not for him to get money, it was not for someone else, it was always for the mob: How can we get whatever we were trying to achieve – primarily it was land or funding – how do we get that land for the mob, and then move on from there.
Once we got that, how do we not make them feel shafted once they get it? Unfortunately, from what I could tell, after we successfully arranged for the purchase of Carlton Hill they had a lot of internal strife about who owned what, and why they couldn’t deal with different family groups who were squabbling about this, that and the other and so it was. I do not know who the winners and losers were, but that was the situation. The bureaucrats took over, and they in their wisdom made certain decisions, and then the mob ended up worse off. They ended up knowing they had their land back, but actually what did they get? One group gets more than the other group, someone has not got their house, where is my Toyota, all that sort of stuff. If you do not handle it well and everyone feels as though they have been screwed, they react accordingly, and that is when you end up with the shit fight that we have seen so often.
Owen Cole
The other thing that I do not think anyone really gave him credit for was with mining on Aboriginal land. He came along and said there was no Indigenous employment, there was no Indigenous enterprise development, no opportunities for it, and he basically said to the mining companies, unless you are prepared to do this, we are not going to renew your agreement, and he made all those employment opportunities possible, because he put the pressure on the mining companies. So they actually put it into the agreement where they said it was not at their discretion, it was like, you will. It was not useful to our best endeavours to do this, it was, you will do this, and he just kept the pressure on those big mining companies to do something.
This created a model across Australia. And later on Tracker and myself went over and worked with Carpentaria Land Council where he negotiated their mining agreements, where he was his usual aggressive self, and they got some great agreements out of it. His argument really was to give people the right to get involved in economic development, and if you are a player and can sit at the table, then you can influence what takes place. And that is exactly what he did. He would sit down at the table of Century mine and with those types of people, and he would talk to them as if they were equal. You are talking about managing directors and the like, and a lot of the Carpentaria Land Council had not had that sort of experience until he came along. He showed them that you could be an equal when you are talking about that sort of stuff. He was willing to take on anyone.
Tracker Tilmouth
There are some arguments in there, already sitting down under native title, about the exploitation of native title rights and interests from an Aboriginal perspective. Not taking the letter of the law that the land councils and the representative bodies [of native title holders] are holding onto. The letter of the law means we have a right to negotiate, or we have a right to be consulted and that these are all the rights you have. If you read it that way you might as well go home. If you expand it out, what does it actually mean in relation to a social dividend being delivered? How does that work? Who do the benefits accrue to? Until you have that worked out, the process you have now gives very slim pickings. That is the trouble with the land councils, they stuck directly to the letter of the law and they ended up with terrible agreements.
The MacArthur River Mines Agreements are a fucking nightmare because of the way they have been written. The Bootu Creek Mine Agreement is shithouse. These agreements do not deliver anything to the community, there is no enforcement of the agreements. They were written by lawyers. They excluded a whole range of stuff that should have been part of it. They have excluded environmental rehabilitation. The destruction of sacred sites.
They do not know how to take advantage of the opportunities. The Bootu Creek mine is going to close in three to four years, and it has been open for ten years and there has been no benefit. There is financial benefit but there is no social benefit. You want financial benefit, go to the pub and watch the drunks in Tennant Creek. You can have a green can [of beer]. Beef and beer for a diet.
There is a huge amount of power in those areas. Financial power, legal power and these people [Aboriginal landowners] really do not know what they have got. They do not understand the process, but we have got people advising them. We have got the blind leading the blind. That is what we have got. That is the argument, how do I enjoy my land rights? How do I enjoy my native title? You don’t. Why can’t you? Because it is subject to so many rules and regulations. There is a term that they use in economics, minimal use of the utility. Utility means enjoyment or use of in an economic framework. So you have got bugger-all utility.
You have to think about these things on a huge scale, because it is huge. It is as broad and as large as this landscape. You have different groups and different areas, different timeframes, different aspirations. And they will say, Look for an economic model, and there isn’t one. It is as individual as each group. Someone in the Carpentaria [Land Council region] will think differently to someone at Borroloola, or Borroloola will think differently to someone in Tennant Creek. Tennant Creek will think differently to someone at Pigeon Hole, and on and on you go. Docker River will be thinking entirely differently.
You have to be able to say, Righto! What do you think about it? It comes back to the basic processes of enjoyment. Are you really thinking about it because you want me to think about it? Are you telling me what you think you need me to know? Are you saying it just so I can piss off and get out of your hair? That is the question up front. And that is the power of communication. If you do not speak the language, or you do not understand the cultural basis, then it is very difficult to ascertain whether they are telling you what you want to hear, or telling you so you can you piss off, and leave me alone.
And that is the trouble with a lot of the leadership in the land councils. Hardly any of them have ever lived on a community for any length of time, or lived out bush. I think I was the only director of the Central Land Council that was a community advisor, and probably the only director that spoke the language, or can speak language. You have to have that relationship. If you do not have that then it is very difficult to understand if this is a real communication, or it’s Tracker you’re fucking humbugging me, piss off.
I present information or a proposition in very simple ideas. You know those maps with fences? You have a hole in the fence. You put it in cattleman’s terms, because you are talking to blokes with big hats and big boots. If you are talking about a windmill and a bore, they get you, they know what you are talking about. The Land Rights Act is like a drafting pen, and why have a gate to use when we have so many holes in the fence? The trouble is we left the gates open and we still have the gates open. So you get every lunatic known to man, every idea known to man, out there practising on us.
And I change my approach. I say, I am finding great difficulty in understanding the Aboriginal position in relation to economic development, so I go to the other side to have a look from the other side of the fence, to look at resource assessment from the whitefella perspective. And you are looking at a high-risk venture. You are looking at a multi-million dollar project and at programs that are based on basic commodities. Forget about iron ore. Forget about base metals. This is the gate. Everything comes through the gate. This is how you build it. This is the way I think. For every twenty people, I think I get one person who is able to pick it up, or bits of it, but people find their own way anyway. Water finds its own level, so you have people finding out things and saying this is what I want to do and what I want to be in, not one size fits all. There is a mixture. Every agreement that has happened is a reflection on the community at that point in time.
I find that dealing with business people is pretty straightforward. There is one thing that gets them every time and that is their greed. You can lay a trap, put money anywhere you like, and it is called access and equity. If you have access to a mining resource or a business person, then it is easy, quite easy, to do an agreement. The deal is to do a deal. You are either successful in doing the deal or you are not. It is a matter of trading off. And those rules are not set by you, they are set by the market, by commercial [interests]. Whether it’s commodities, whether it’s building houses, whether it’s mining, whatever it is, resource development, those things are set by the market. We like to think it is a free market but it isn’t: that is access to the resources.
If you do not have access to the resources to exploit your position or push the opportunity, then you go nowhere. This is the problem we have got. We do not have enough people, Aboriginal people, exposed to commercial activity. We were lucky in the Centre because we have David Ross – I call him the capo dei capi [the boss of the bosses] – who has built and held the Land Council together, and Owen Cole, and a few other people that were there early in the piece. This was a homegrown process. You go to other areas and you do not have that. You go to Melbourne, you go to Sydney, and there is nothing like it.
We have a lot of Aboriginal people walking around in suits, well-clothed and very articulate and everything else, but they contribute nothing to the economy. There is no return on the investment. We think there is a return on the investment, but I think it is a return on the rate of assimilation rather than investment. How quick can we become white? That is the problem. We forget where we came from. It was good the other day when [Noel] Pearson reminded us of where we came from: Only those who have known discrimination truly know its evil. Only those who have never experienced prejudice can discount the importance of the Racial Discrimination Act.81 That is what you need, time and time again, you need someone to ring the bells and say we know what racial discrimination is, the malice, the positive and negative of it. And it was good of him to do it. That is why I have a lot of respect for the bloke. I have always had respect for him. I may not agree with him all the time but I have immense respect for him. He says what he says, he does what he does. Not many people get up and say what they think.
I have had a couple of requests from the oil and gas people because oil and gas is our leverage. We cannot afford the argument of fracking and non-fracking. The blacks cannot afford that. This is our leverage point on the treaty because all the new oil and gas finds are going to be where the treaty is. So we need wellhead values. We need production values. We need these things because they are going to be traded off on access and that is going to be our leverage point against federal governments of any ilk. But we are being taken out before we have even started talking about treaty, we have been taken out by the greens. The greens are coming for us. They are coming for us. To take us out of the debate for the blacks on fracking. No you won’t. No way in the fucking world will you. We do not want to lose yet again another protest to a mob of greens that are wanting us to be without treaty, without land, without water, without anything.
They want to control it and that is the debate. So I said to [Martin] Ferguson, Righto! I’m willing to go to war on behalf of the petroleum industry. You give me all the contracts, all the employment contracts on the maintenance programs for all the oil and gas fields. You are the head of APA [Australia’s largest natural gas infrastructure business], boss of British Gas, and on the board of AGL and they are the three biggest companies that I need. They can buy me ten drilling rigs and I will set up an Aboriginal contracting company. So I would say to the local blacks, Well! there is a job there for you, if you want to stop these blokes getting a job, join us.
And with blokes like [Murrandoo] Yanner sitting on the board to talk to them, he would be saying this has nothing to do with gas, it has to do with your land rights. It is a leverage point for your land rights. If you want to hand out the Kiran jewels off you go [to the world’s largest manufacturer of diamonds]: Please whitefella, be kind to me when you whip me. The energy system, the energy debate is a good debate to be in because we need a treaty. We need a treaty so that we can say stop if you do not behave yourself. We can stop your access if you do not behave yourself.
We can do that through the Native Title Act on property rights and it is easy to do. You want to be fucked around, I can fuck you around. I can make sure your boats are not loaded. You want to fuck around, let’s fuck around. You want to sit down and do business, let’s do business.
That is the leverage point I am at. This is where we have got to be, to position ourselves from a financial and economic point of view, backed by a legal argument, a legal precedent, and the legal precedent is already there. We have been told by leading legal minds that time immemorial is there in Mabo and Wik. You do not need to go back to the High Court. All you need to do is read it out loud and the mining industry shits itself. It has been sitting there but nobody wants to pick it up. Yanner will pick it up tomorrow [if he wants to]. What we have got to do is build the economics of it.
Murrandoo Yanner
Recently with this gas mob, Tracker came along and helped us with the agreement. We have a nice agreement and part of the agreement was: If you bastards want this to flow properly and effectively, and none of you even understand what we have just negotiated, I told them, you’ll have to keep this bloke on for the next year or two to make sure the stuff flows smoothly and you mob understand, because you are opposite poles to us. Even though Tracks is with us, he can talk your lingo and can show you corporately how you can easily implement this or that, it’s not a worry, it’s not going to cost you anymore et cetera. And then they dumped him.
Thinking they could, they even said to me, Oh! We would rather deal with you direct. And I said, Yeah! But hey! You’re fucking wasting your time because I’ll only go back to him anyway after you’ve been to me . But I could not tell them, and they went from buttering him up, Thanks Tracks, ringing him constantly with things, to nothing. He tried ringing them a few times and they were all avoiding him and not answering his calls, and a few things happened. One day I pulled up the drills out here [in the Gulf], drill rigs, and I just said, Fuck it, stop them. There was an environmental problem, and it also had a bit to do with this stuff. They were not following their agreement.
And suddenly in the middle of the night they were ringing Tracks, dead stop, boom, boom. Boom, boom, and Tracks said, What are you doing Yanner, what’s going on? First he tried to ring me, but when I stopped the drill rigs I had been on the hop for two or three days around the place, and I just came back and went to sleep. I had just come back driving ten or twelve hours from Cairns or something. And so, Yanner, the world’s gone mad, because the drill rig costs, out there with fifteen blokes working on it, sixty to a hundred grand a day. And it had stopped.
If I say, I am getting out of this, that throws their budget out and investors might walk. So they were shitting themselves, and I have gone to sleep and am out like a log. So Tracker rang Marnie [Carpentaria Land Council legal advisor], and he and Marnie start texting from Western Australia to Alice Springs or Darwin, and Marnie says, I can’t get the bugger, he’s asleep, and she said, No good trying to wake him up. Tracks texted her back saying, My good and graceful Allah is resting. I don’t think he hears normal prayers. We might be lucky for midday at the best.
But I get up at three in the morning and call Tracker back, and he had been ringing me all day, and he said, What are you doing to them drills? I said, Well! I stopped the bastards. He said, Alright! Well! They have been onto me now. I said, Well! That must be a good novelty, those bastards were dodging you. We’ll teach them for doing that to you. I meant it too, Teach them a bit of respect, disrespecting you like that.
Well! I told them that in the first place, Don’t do that because you don’t even understand. I think they had not figured Tracker out after the joking and the things he did. They thought he was a bit of a joker but, You do not understand that this bloke, anything you tell us or want to do with us will only come back to him anyway. He is the main man with us on this level. Tracks said, Well! Don’t do that. We might have to leave them for another day, brother. I said, Leave them for you, because that will teach them to mess you around. Because, I said, Don’t you remember you were telling me a week ago these bastards were disrespecting your role? So this is as much for you, you know, to teach them. He was like, Alright, alright. I told him, Comrade, you’ve bloody got me burning flags and calling sovereignty, don’t go soft on me now.
He just laughed, and sent me back a couple of laugh texts. Then when it was all fixed and they were eating out of his hand, he rang and said, Start her up. So I ring the bloody CEO, or sent him a text at five in the morning. The rig had only been down and out of action about fourteen hours, and I said, Okay, you can start the drill rig now, and I went back to sleep. He texted back, Oh! Thanks. That was funny. Now we have got them over to the Territory to meet with them. We are setting up a big joint venture with the company and they are playing ball now. I think they realised who or what Tracker was, and not to be taken lightly or cheaply. But they tried the typical old divide and conquer, all that stuff, and tried buttering me up, you don’t need him type of thing. But I did bloody need him and they could get stuffed.
I loved the bloody lad, I really did. Next to my dad, he was like a father figure to me and a brother, a teacher, and mentor. I could cry sometimes when I think about him. He was a good man.
81. Referring to Noel Pearson’s eulogy at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam, Sydney Town Hall, 5 November 2014.