You’re Supposed to Kill It Before You Cook It
Alexis Wright
Do you remember that time when I was doing the Take Power book, and do you remember Mr Cook?82 You used to call him New York, New York. He was a big boss, wasn’t he? I did a session with him at a Land Council meeting, and it was recorded in Warlpiri. The recording took forty minutes and then he said, Take that tape out, and he had another tape, his own, and he wanted me to put it in the tape recorder and he said exactly the same thing again, and it took forty minutes. He kept the second tape. He did not want me to send a copy or anything, he wanted to do it there and then. His story was all about where people belonged. He said, I might leave this on the table somewhere so people can pick it up and listen to it. It was all about telling some people to get back to their own country.
That is it. Anyway we will see what happens.
Tracker Tilmouth and Peter Hansen
Tracker: Peter, this is what I did, I got them [people contributing to this book] to say what they want. I got people who I knew had an opinion on what I did, or what I did not do, to say what they thought, to involve themselves as well. Their agency in my development if you like. And when I come back later we will say, Righto! This is what I have learnt off these people. There are good things, there are bad things. There will be people speaking like [Bob] Beadman and people like that. Beadman taught me how to read tea leaves in a cup when he came to talk to me about politics or Aboriginal development because he was in Aboriginal affairs for the last forty-odd years and nothing has worked, and he is still wondering why nothing has worked.
Peter: The people we went to school with on Croker Island were educated. That was the end of the 1950s and probably the 1960s, and they knew exactly what they had achieved. They could go to meetings and when they talked, you would know they were educated. They were taught by Europeans, but today we have still got people saying, We must educate Aboriginals. What happened between 1960 and 2013? That is some fifty years ago. We had everything in place in the 1950s and 1960s to educate Aboriginals, why are we still trying to get something in place in 2013? What a load of hogwash.
Tracker: Yes, we had people from the community who were at the top of our class. We had a bloke called the Reverend James Yunupingu who used to come and give us Bible class. James Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the reverend. And then another reverend called Gatjil Djerrkura. They were both reverends. Galarrwuy was taught by the church.
Peter: Another one is the Reverend Dr Djiniyini Gondarra OAM. When you see him on NITV, doesn’t he give it to them! We want people like him, like Mansell – we want leaders, outside the fat cats. We do not want the fat cats to tell our story. They are not telling our story, they are telling their story so they can get more money and get fatter.
Doug Turner
Rubber lips to base. He called people different categories, different Aboriginal people from different areas, like mud monkeys or rock apes. Mud monkeys are the South Australians, and the rock apes are the Northern Territorian mobs, Mount Gillen and all that sort of stuff. You mob are all rock apes up there anyway. Yeah! Well! You’re all mud monkeys down there. And he would call me either, I am not one hundred per cent sure whether I was base, or had rubber lips, because you see some blackfellas looked worse than others you know, and this was just the way that they looked, big nose, big lips, big foreheads. We would stir each other up like that. I said, Yeah! Well! If I’m rubber lips you must be base. Because base is more than rubber lips, bigger than bloody rubber lips. Yes, B-A-S-E, base, like this is base calling rubber lips. I said, if I am rubber lips you are bloody rubber lips yourself, because base is the foundation of rubber lips basically. Stupid things like that.
Yes, well, telling stories, that is who we are as people basically. We can tell a story from some people say thirty, some people say forty, some people say sixty, some people say eighty, some people say two hundred thousand years. This is what makes us, it is our nature, telling stories. Some of us have got a lot of stories to tell and some of us have a little bit of stories to tell.
Tracker knew his culture. There are a lot of Aboriginals with no culture and they should go back to culture, because culture is their foundation and for them to go back to culture that keeps them in touch with reality and who they are as a person basically. When they do it reinforces their desire for identity and their connection with country and with their culture, not so much with their people, but with their culture.
We shared our culture when we followed the songlines, and you did them ceremonies, and you did them dances on the songlines as you went across country. So we walked everywhere. This was how our population grew in different locations in the country because it is a big open vast land, and Aboriginal populations grew in that area and in that area, and there were more groups, say from the group that left my community, and walked to another part of Australia and practised culture there. That is how the story of tjukurpa up that way is similar to the tjukurpa in my country. We took that story, that tjukurpa from my mob and they practised it up there in say Queensland, or somewhere. We walked this country. This is why that rainbow snake travelled all over Australia. This is how come our culture is obviously similar to a lot of other Aboriginal and Indigenous groups around Australia, around the world.
If people go back to culture it gives them strength and it does affect the way that they tell our stories, because society is at such a fast pace these days, they should have time out to go back to culture, culture is not going and sitting on country, culture is learning about what the story was from this area. Where are the ceremonial sites? Where are the marked trees? Learning about where our fish traps are. Where are the paintings and all that stuff? Where was the mob that just walked in to do ceremonies? Which way did they come? That is going back to culture in a contemporary way. Unless you want to go and follow culture and you sit down with the old fellas in the bush and go the full hog, but even that would give them energy and inspiration. It is having that connection because that is what it does for me. I feel younger when I go back to culture.
I am sixty with many heart attacks, and the triple bypass that I have had, but when I go back to culture, I feel my energy comes back and I can do a lot more. I can run a little bit faster, I can dance a bit more, and I am not suffering with the heart issues after this. But when I go and sit down in the city I am a bit more sluggish, and I slow down a lot. When I am in the bush and culture I get up in the morning and I have got more energy, I just want to walk and do more things.
Yes, because Mamu Kuda, that bloke up there – the God they talk about, he was the one who gave us our culture and all the things in our culture to look after on this planet and the law – tjukurpa, and our stories. It was only that man that gave us these gifts and he gave us these gifts on this planet so that we can look after this planet, and we practise those things in our culture. Where do we go? We practise by looking about country and looking after that spirit in that place. We got that gift from that bloke upstairs. So when we go back to that cultural side of things then we can be blessed with little gifts, and those little gifts are to heal somebody with your hands. That is who I am.
They also give you another gift where you can not only heal that person with your hands, you can see the sickness in that person and how far that sickness has gone, and if it’s in its early stages, say to that person look we can take that sickness out of you and clean you before that sickness gets the best of you. We can do that today. That is what our culture is about.
Vincent Forrester
The art of oratory is being able to tell a great story, and I suppose it comes from the droving days or when people had no radio, no TV, and your skill at being able to paint a picture by word had to be convincing. We have got to try to get that back, but we do have it in a way through you writing this bloody book, wow, that is a great storytelling method. The oratory of it, spinning a yarn, I love the way that Archie Roach does his songs, it is great storytelling coming through music. But to be able to tell a yarn, that is a different skill, the oratory of being able to talk, and be able to push your thoughts into place to achieve the climax of the story. I was taught that strategy by those old blokes.
I told them one day [as the Northern Territory chairman of the former National Aboriginal Conference], I’ve got to talk to the Prime Minister every couple of months, what do you mob want? They reckoned everything. I went away and thought about this word called everything, and it took me a long time to think about it, about three or four weeks, and I still could not work it out. I got them old blokes together again, and I reckoned, Tjilpa Juta [many old men], that word everything, that’s a big word, where I got to start? They said, Oh! We go to the museum. So we went to the museum, Tracker had done all this secret-sacred stuff, and that was where they wanted to start with all the sacred objects, all the atyerrenge, or tjuringa, with the Dutch museum, that was the first thing they wanted to do. And so that word, everything – Oh! Yes. That was starting from your spirituality. That taught me a lot, in that one strategy those old men had in their mind. They were right because we did go and chase those objects, and while we were chasing the objects, we saw a lot of bad things in that museum too, we saw all the bones of Aboriginal people and the TI [Torres Strait Islander] mob mummified, and all that kind of thing there. So we put the word out from there, that they have a lot of stuffed people in there. Then that started our human remains issues.
But this spirituality that the old people were talking about, we still have not achieved that because of the colonialist system that is in place, and assimilation and whatever you call it. Teaching language at school, maintaining that side of things is not happening. We see a lot of the mistakes being made by our leadership. They are literate in white man way, but they are illiterate in their own way. That is a big problem that we have with some of the current Aboriginal leadership. They say we know, but wiya malpa [no friend], they do not know. They can not hear them old men words in their mind, or the song they sang that night for that story, right? That is another world.
That world is in your thought, in your mind, in your aura. That one! I am not touching you but I can feel you, that sort of stuff and the spirituality of all that, which is all healing, I believe. It is called healing because some of the stories I got from those old men, about when white man was shooting blackfella, how they overcome that and how they overcome their struggles, and passed their struggles on to me. Those old men told the truth because if they said that somebody was shot by the policeman here, you can guarantee it because you can go and see the remains of those people where they were burnt and that sort of stuff. That history is a hidden history that a colonial society would not admit to, but hang on a minute, there was a fucking big war and if you go back and look at the archives of some of the land councils, you will see it. They mentored me through that in my life, in the cultural aspects.
Blackfella got good comedy, blackfella he got a good sense of humour and we have only survived in this world because we can laugh, and we can laugh at ourselves too. Look at Tracker. We can laugh at ourselves but there is some sort of poison that comes out too by telling that story. In some cultures around the world they call it a method of cultural action teaching, teaching by telling yarns about that bully man policeman that has been chasing you, that type of thing. Passing on in humorous ways. I like that style. That’s what makes us strong I think.
When I was with Tracker in Geneva he shocked me: Tracker, you can’t speak to fucking white people like that you black bastard. You will get into trouble. No, you watch, he said, and no worries, he was so outrageous that they loved him. Whereas if it was you or I, they would probably call for the coppers, and they would say, Hey! Look! Lock this mad bastard up. He got away with it because of his confidence. Just confidence. He could push boundaries as though a horse would not bite him, or kick him, or the bull would not horn him.
I believe storytelling is a learnt and handed-down skill: the yarn-spinning and storytelling. I have seen masters at work in their oratory, in structuring their stories and the moral of the story, but in a bushman’s way. A lot of city people would not understand what I am saying. There are these fantastic one-liners. Blackfella have got the one-liners. You just had to look at Tracker, at how he used his humour and one-liners. We can be pretty mean sometimes. In the bushman’s wit, or blackfella wit, we had to have this humour to overcome adversity, but that humour, wit and storytelling has come down through generations, generations and generations through corroboree, inma, ceremony and so on. It is all there, where of course you have your theatre, your live acts, and performers within that. There is art, but also, it can be found just sitting around the campfire and telling those stories, and this is a blackfella trait.
There are traditional storytelling elements in the way we have been taught from childhood. For instance, how the Aboriginal economy works. When I was a little boy, I got my first kangaroo when I was about six years old. I took that kangaroo back to the camp and I gave it to my grandfather. First kangaroo. Oh! He made a big fuss that his grandson brought him a kangaroo. I can remember him getting the leaves and putting them down. I can remember the big fuss being made about it. He made a big fire this old man and gutted that kangaroo, really proud of that kangaroo, and he saved all the stuff, cut the tail off, cut the guts and rolled it up in a ball, after the coals burnt down he put it in the fire, the entrails next to the guts, and he cooked that kangaroo. Then he bought it out and started sharing it up. He cut it sitting on the ground, and he cut it in the back, and when he cut this kangaroo it fell to pieces. He gave it to everybody in the camp, a piece of that kangaroo, and everybody got a share of that kangaroo, and that was what taught me what an economy should be about. Their yarn was their way of explaining how to use the land, the animals, and the rules that apply, and it is a good way to tell the story. It is the foundations of what I use.
Geoff Clark
I remember when Tracker and Jakamarra Nelson and I went over to Geneva, and on our way over there we would go through Singapore, and as you walk around Singapore, you walk past these stalls and these blokes come out and try and get you to come in and eat a meal. They would be screaming out, and singing out, and the old Tracks started screaming out, singing back in language at him. This bloke was having a real conversation with him, and we were thinking what the hell is he saying. I do not know what Tracker was saying, but it was hilarious.
People were following us down the street trying to engage, and Tracker being the clown that he was and Jakamarra Nelson, he was very dark and a real traditional-looking fellow, it was quite an occasion I had with Tracker. Anyway, they must have known that Tracker was taking the mickey out of them because I think he ended up getting some salmonella poisoning or something. He got extremely sick, and I know that because me and Jakamarra and Tracker were sharing the same room, and Jakamarra was rubbing him down the traditional way, trying to pull the poison out of Tracker and singing and singing his language. Tracker was lying on the bed, and he was sort of delirious. We got him to the hospital and they gave him penicillin, and he was loaded up with penicillin but during that entire trip Tracker was still very sick. But it did not stop his sense of humour when we got to Geneva.
Me and the old Jakamarra, we would get on the piss at the Pickwick. It is sort of like an English pub, and we would get there and Jakamarra would be painting on the street. So Tracker would take him down all his paints then we would get a taxi down to the mall there and sit around. Jakamarra would be selling paintings for thousands of dollars, people were just absolutely fascinated and he would be singing the language, and playing the clap sticks. Every time Tracker would go and put the hat out, Jakamarra would be singing and I would be playing on the clap sticks, and selling his paintings and telling jokes to people. Tracker would be taking the mickey out of them most of the time even though he was still very sick.
Yes, it was just one circus, every day was a different day. It was like a travelling circus. We would be making jokes and Jakamarra was in a strange town, getting up and down escalators and believing that escalators were going to gobble him up. I think he actually made a painting which Tracker presented to the UN. There is another painting, it might have got auctioned off or something, and I think Paul Coe bought that painting. That was an historic painting. At that stage we were doing some pretty historical stuff on the declaration of indigenous peoples’ rights, it was on one of those sessions.
A painting might have been presented to the chair lady. The Indians were doing a smoking ceremony, and Jakamarra did the painting. He certainly had clapsticks and stuff, and we introduced culture to the UN delegation. Since that time it became very popular that Indigenous peoples would bring their own culture, and they would come dressed, and have ceremonies and forming circles, and smoking ceremonies. It was probably a landmark occasion for Indigenous people globally, and those meetings started to get up to six, seven, eight hundred, or a thousand Indigenous people from around the world. Then people would start bringing their food. Inuit were bringing their whales, the whale meat and seal meat. We ate everything from apes in the jungles from South Africa, to whales in the Arctic, to kangaroo from Australia. It was quite a memorial sort of event. Tracker was always the clown of course. He would be holding court. There would be hundreds of Indigenous people sitting around and listening to Tracker’s jokes. So a very popular man, and very intelligent in terms of the politics at the time and what we were trying to present.
Jacqui Katona
Tracker was always telling stories. It is hard to separate it as a technique, or to say this set of storytelling achieved these things. It is being able to tell it in a way that is relevant and resourceful for other people, so that other people can make use of it as well. He was very good at this. I do not want to say cultivating or training. It is like placing knowledge in the hands of people that could use it. I have seen him do that with people who have not had an opportunity to get an education. He would draw out the intelligence that those people have which other people would write off and dismiss. He saw them as being valuable, and contributors to something more positive.
And he always took everybody’s input very seriously, and he always called for people’s input. He would not let people stand to one side and be passive, he wanted everybody to be active in the process. That was gutsy for someone who had been an organisational leader because you can tend to rely on advisors, and seek some safety in a well-crafted, sophisticated statement, but he was not about that, he was about enlivening people whose lives were directly impacted by that sort of change.
He understood a lot about communicating effectively with people. He was an observer of people I believe, from a very young age. He was the type of person who had developed his perception very young and understood human engagement, whereas when you are growing up you are a bit oblivious to human engagement and why someone might be talking to you about a particular issue. But I think Tracker – I think this has got a lot to do with him being removed and institutionalised – had to try to rationalise or make sense of what happened to him and his brothers. He had to have a heightened awareness about the forces around them, and I think that tuned him in for the rest of his life like that. He found a way to actually harness what had happened to him and used it resourcefully.
Humour makes our lives a bit more liveable under the circumstances that most people find themselves in as Aboriginal people in this country, at being disenfranchised and marginalised from the broader society and made to feel like outcasts and illegitimate by those with an illegitimate place. Of course seeking legitimacy requires a great strength internally to assert our visibility in Australia, and the terms on which we want that visibility to take place. So humour is a way of taking the harshness away from the job that we have ahead of us, it plays an extremely important role, not only in terms of helping us think things through, and talking through and building relationships, but it probably protects our health as much as anything else.
Tracker used humour as a tool to try to get things achieved. There were so many times that Tracker made people laugh and shocked them. The story I like the best is the one about the voting booth. I am sure it was in Alice Springs where the CLP insisted on photographing individual voters at the booth and he could see this going on. He was furious because people were being intimidated of course to vote a certain way. He undid his belt and dropped his pants while they were taking the photos and gave them a brown eye. We just roared laughing when we heard that, but there was a very particular outcome that he was seeking, in a situation where we were outnumbered, and outgunned.
He was always saying things that shocked me. There is nothing that stands out, it is mostly everything was shocking. He had a cavalier attitude to most things, even his own illness. If he needed to go for a test – it was to get a torch shone up his arse to see if he had a heart beat. He was a burnt dim sim from radiation therapy. He had a way of characterising different people that he knew as well in a very comical way. He was calling me Attila the Hen there for a while. He was irreverent. He used humour all the time, and everybody would wait for him to see what he was going to say first. We used to call it Trackeresque, because there was a bit of a riddle to lots of things that he would talk about, as well as a lot of humour, but it kept people thinking about things too.
I think the concerns of Aboriginal people are most appropriate to storytelling, the painful issues, issues that cause people great anxiety, issues that relate to our powerlessness, or our inexperience, or our desire to move away from the status quo. And we use storytelling a lot. It is the most constructive way of communication amongst Aboriginal people because you do not discuss issues in isolation, you discuss issues as part of a continuum, not just with a focus, but an understanding of context as well which gives you a bigger picture.
Our storytelling definitely has a distinctive character. It is more effective for communication between Aboriginal people. I do not hear a lot of Aboriginal leaders using it as Tracker did. A lot of Aboriginal leaders do the non-Aboriginal political speak, to try to capture the media’s attention, or to communicate in the media. But I have seen it at Aboriginal protests in 1985, and the protests of 1988, where large groups of Aboriginal people had gotten together and storytelling was at the fore, and there was a requirement that every Aboriginal person be recognised for their right to contribute to the discussions no matter whether it was part of the central idea, or it was peripheral to what was being discussed. There was a respect that was extended to every Aboriginal person attending. It was very supportive and reaffirming to have that ability because we do not have it anywhere else. But storytelling is one of the most important cultural obligations and responsibilities that we have.
It does not happen as much now, because people do not get together much these days. There is more of an emphasis on the individual and the sovereignty of the individual, not the sovereignty of the group and the issue of communal rights. People have acquiesced to native title for example, to schedule their rights and believe that that may be the extent of it, rather than looking at ways to expand on it. I do not know if that is because of the competing economic needs that people have, or their view of how culture changes. I think it is very important for people to have access to storytelling as a fundamental means of communication. It is not linear.
Story in one of its forms is narrative, and the narrative that white Australia accepts now is the narrative of a few Aboriginal people, because the narrative of more than a few seems to be unsettling, or not easily understood. In a lot of ways the scientific framework in which people understand issues rules out anything but a linear representation of issues. So context is ruled out, history is ruled out, an identity is ruled out, and it is becoming less widely known that there is a different world view that we ascribe to. Everybody thinks we are essentially the same as white people, we are just a bit darker and those that can speak English and go to school and get a job have got just as good a chance as any other Australian in succeeding. They do not even acknowledge anymore that our aims may be different, and maybe there are cultural imperatives that we want to meet. Those cultural imperatives are regarded as nothing.
Owen Cole
I can remember at the [Central Australia Aboriginal] Cattlemen’s Association [conference at Uluru in the 1990s] where Tracker was talking about setting up this Association and how we would all feed into it, and set up an abattoir to send our cattle through, and how to split up the proceeds. It was pretty complicated. Tracker was trying to explain it and not having that much success and so he gets Harry Nelson, and Harry came along and he used the analogy of when you go out hunting: That what we do is we all collectively do it and then we all sit down and we split it up – Dah! Dah! Dah! All of a sudden, from a really complex sort of economic allocation issue, they were all nodding their heads because Harry explained what was really a traditional concept, and mind you, Harry could talk six languages as well so that helped. Tracker would always use cultural concepts to tell stories about how to explain really complex things and if the need arose, he would bring in people like Harry just to get the job done.
I cannot recall him not using stories to be quite honest. So if he was talking about [land] acquisition, say when we purchased Alcoota Station, he would go out there and tell the traditional owners the history of the place, and how you people are all sitting in your community on the fringes of the pastoral property, and none of youse are sitting at the table, and it is time for you to change that. To do that, you have got to get involved. That was quite interesting because his family came from out there, and one of his family was a bit of a right-winger if you can believe it, and not really that keen on seeing Aboriginal ownership of their traditional land, and Tracker had to turn that around and he would use a story by saying, Look! Do you people really want to be sitting on the fringes of your own land and being told you can’t do this and you can’t do that, or else you can take it over. He convinced the community that it was the right thing to do. It cost them a lot of money to purchase it, but it happened in the end.
He did get people to stand up and take notice of him, that was for sure. But he did not give a stuff, Tracker. I mean, I went and saw him when there were some negotiations, and they had set up camp in the suburbs of Canberra. They were going to negotiate with the Mining Council of Australia, and Tracker just goes to them, This bloke Owen, he knows something about economics, none of you people do, and he’s coming along. This was a select group or delegation going up there, and no one dared argue with Tracker. Half of them did not know who in the bloody world I was. So we rocked up at this meeting, it was in Parliament House, and we were sitting across from the chairman of Rio and all that sort of thing, and talking about mining opportunities. That was when Tracker was pushing the point that we have got to get involved in our rights, in mining, and other economic opportunities. But he just broke all the rules. He did not give a shit about the protocol, the politically correct way of doing things. He just did what he thought at the time was the best thing.
I can remember quite a few occasions where he has got up and thrown his one-liners and turned the whole meeting upside down. Rossy used him like a live hand grenade. He was the more quiet and circumspect type of bloke, and he would send Tracker to throw a few hand grenades around the place, and then common sense would prevail after that, but Tracker would go in and whack a few people. Sometimes you wondered whether there was any rationale to the way he did things. I am sure there was, but he always wanted to shake people and get them out of their lethargic mood, and get them thinking far-out-there type of stuff.
I think in just about every project involving Tracker he used storytelling to explain the link to a contemporary issue with something that was relevant to remote community people in particular. His approach to life and the way he did things was completely different to anyone else’s. There were no limits with that bloke. When you were dealing with traditional people, Tracker had the ability to sit down and talk on a level so that they could understand complex economic terms. He had the ability to sit down and relate totally with people, where some of them did not have high educational standards, and if he could not do it, he had the tools to get someone who could. He would bring in the right people to talk about it and explain it. He was a different character and we were much better off having him around and realised it. He was audacious, and when you have been pushed back and downtrodden for so long you feel a little bit intimidated, but he was always out there and in your face, and here I am. I think people like him really taught other Aboriginal people to get up and stand up for their rights and say, Right! We want to do this, and we are not going to be intimidated by you. He was never intimidated by anything. He did not know the meaning of the word. He did not give a stuff who you were, the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition, he would talk straight to you.
Quite often David Ross and myself talked about Tracker, his approach and his totally unconstrained thinking. And of course his ability to put it across, it did not matter whether people liked it or not, he was always pushing, and pushing, and pushing. He always called me in whenever there was any sort of economic issue that was a little bit complex, and it is all good having economic grounding, but you need people who are ground-shakers and deal-makers and that was what he was. A bloke who could come up with the innovative ideas that nobody has even started on. I would just come in and help him really with the mechanics of it. He was an ideas person and he needed someone to do the groundwork and that was where I would come in. I am not anywhere near as creative as Tracker. I would not even start to consider myself that way.
We worked well, when it was Rossy, Tracker and myself. We were all different personalities and with different types of skills, but we got a few things done, bent every rule, not broken it, but we would like to think we bent it, modified it and that got the job done. That was what we liked to think, and down the track when sitting down and reflecting on the stuff we have done, planned land acquisition, economic development, a lot of it was real pioneering stuff.
David Ross
There were all sorts of other things that took place. I do not remember the year where we were in a Thai restaurant in Canberra. There was a big mob of people who must have been involved in native title and ongoing discussions, and that must have been around 1994 or 1995, in this restaurant in Kingston in Canberra. All sitting there having a beer, quite a few people in the place, a big table, a big mob of us, people from everywhere. The next thing you hear this cat crying, everybody could hear this cat screeching and quick as a flash Tracker yelled out, You’re supposed to kill it before you cook it. Oh! Fuck, I just cried laughing. Geez, he was as quick as a flash, quick as a flash, You’re supposed to kill it before you cook it. There were people eating. What could they do? He was funny. God it was funny. There were all these people who were not sure whether they should keep eating, or whether they were eating cat or chicken. Oh! God! Look it was one of the funniest things, true.
A few years back we were walking down the street in Canberra – Patrick Dodson, Peter Yu, Mickey Dodson, Tracker, and there might have been a few others. Me and Patrick were walking behind and he said to me, Does this bloke ever sleep? I said, Why? He said, Well! He’s got all these witty things. He said, He’s got this wit and he’s always got something as quick as a flash. He said, Does he dream these things up all night or what? Cause it’s just bang, bang, bang. This was Patrick’s way of trying to come to terms with Tracker’s wit. I said, The bastard has been like that ever since I’ve known him and I’ve known him a long time.
There was a downside to it. The sad part about it, Track came up with a lot of good ideas and good discussion, and then he would go and crack a joke at the end of it and everyone would remember the joke, and forget about everything else. I had tried to tell him over the years that when you have done all this work leave it at that. Make the jokes before or something but not while you are doing it, or you are going to lose people.
He had the knack of picking up quickly what people could relate to and what their background might be, and where they have come from, whether it was people from the bush who might have worked in the pastoral industry, or part of the Stolen Generation and how they grew up, or others, toffee-nosed people, so that they could understand the message he was trying to put across to them. Sometimes he could do this with two or three different groups of people all at the one meeting.
The other thing that was extraordinary about Tracker was that he had a photographic memory for things. I have tested him a number of times without telling him. I would give him stuff, Here have a look at this, and he would turn around and throw it all back at you. I had watched him do it many times. I watched Tracker sitting and reading and looking at stuff, being crammed full of whatever he needed to be crammed full of, and then he would go and deal with ministers and whoever else. He had that photographic ability or memory, to be crammed full of stuff and then regurgitate it and go bang, bang, bang. Most Aboriginal people I know have short-term memories, they have not got that greater long-term memory. This bloke’s ability was to just throw it back at you. Be careful what you say to him, he was going to turn around and throw it all back at you.
I have been dragged by him, Come on, you better come in here and meet these people.
What for, it’s nothing to do with me.
Jesus.
Anyone. Anywhere. I heard all the aftermath of his travels, all the stories. His version and other people’s versions. We travelled around this country quite a bit, extraordinary things, drove around out bush.
82. Alexis Wright (ed.), Take Power Like This Old Man Here: An Anthology of Writings Celebrating Twenty Years of Land Rights in Central Australia, 1977–1997 (Jukurrpa Books, Alice Springs, 1998).