Michael O’Connor
He was the sort of person where, if you were going somewhere and no one knew who you were, and you were with him, you would end up with ten or fifteen people around you pretty quickly. Or, they would want to know who you were in a room of a hundred, if you were tagging along with Tracker. He engaged with people very, very quickly. He had great social skills, I mean – unbelievable.
I went to the UN Climate Change Conference twice with him. He probably would not have known anybody there, but by day two he was dragging me around and introducing me to ministers of other countries, people he had met for the first time and won over. And one of the ways he did that, he told a whole range of stories which were often about his experiences growing up, different experiences, some of which seemed funny but also had very serious points to be made. You knew of him being a bit of a wild youth, getting into a bit of trouble, causing a bit of mischief. He talked about a range of things that were always of interest to me.
He talked about the early days in the Indigenous movement when he was involved as a young man, stories about Charlie Perkins and a whole range of Indigenous people who I have only heard about or read about. So you heard a lot of stories about what it was like then and the pressures they were under, and things they did. Of course I might have met one or two other people, but he was the first Indigenous person I ever met who had been on a kibbutz, and things like that.
Again he spoke with expertise and knowledge about arid farming, dry-land farming and all those sorts of things. He had views about what you could do in the Northern Territory. I saw him in different circumstances talking to people, but the one memory I have that really struck me was when he went to an Indigenous Business Conference and we both gave a discussion, a little talk about what forestry could do for Indigenous communities, and that included the issue of carbon, valuation and jobs, et cetera, and what I remember was the way in which all these young people, mostly young, Indigenous people, gravitated towards him. And they just listened to every word he had to say.
It was really amazing and he talked about how he got to know language and the time he spent with his Uncle and Aunty on the land, and I just sat there watching it. Sometimes when he was telling those stories about learning about his culture you could hear a pin drop amongst young Indigenous people who wished that they had had the opportunity to do that. That was a memory I think I will take to my grave, that really struck me.
His life experiences were amazing. I mean I do not know anybody with his breadth of different types of experiences, which I thought were pretty unique. Another time I remember him clearly was the day of the Apology [to the Stolen Generations]. I happened to be in Canberra more by accident than design that day. I reckon he rang me four or five times, and he refused to go. He refused to go. And he rang me and I know he rang a number of other people who were in Canberra at the time, and he was very, very agitated, I remember that.
I can only surmise the reason why he was agitated, but it was a really emotional day for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. I cannot remember if it was before or just after the day of the Apology but there had been a CFMEU conference, and for the first time since I had known him, he brought down a photo album. That was the first time he had shown me pictures of his siblings. He told me where they all got sent. I think it was a very tough day for him. Very, very tough day.
I do not know how you cope with that sort of experience. He was ringing because he knew I was there in Canberra, things were going on, and I think it was probably to ask me what was happening. He did not want to go but he wanted to know what was happening. He was clearly going through a pretty stressful time. And of course I think, and I might be wrong, I got the impression he was still shitty. There was this great celebration about the Apology but there was all this work still to be done that no one was paying attention to. He told me that on the day that the Apology occurred, the Northern Territory Government had restructured the councils [on Aboriginal communities] and really marginalised Indigenous voices in local government. That was one of the impacts of it. He was just going, Well! Isn’t that typical? So I think he was torn about the day.
There is no doubt there is a point to most of his stories. Basically a lot of his stories might be amusing and funny, but they were often funny stories about badly-designed government policies that would lead to ridiculous processes or outcomes, or the incompetence of people involved in Indigenous affairs. These might be amusing stories, but they would also be about his experience of being an Indigenous person growing up in this country. Because he was a storyteller, you wanted to listen to him. I do not think you realised how much knowledge he was actually imparting to you about his experience, and about experiences he had lived through.
Again, I do not think you can ask people to be patient when they have spent decades banging their head against a wall seeing some of the things that he had seen, that should not have occurred, or things that should occur that did not occur. I do not know how people cope with dealing with some of the issues he did, day in and day out, without completely dropping the bundle, or being so bitter about it, and the lack of progress. I mean with the housing program [in the Northern Territory under the Intervention], I was there when he told people that the housing program would be delayed, it would not happen, it was too slow. At the end of the day he just could not get people to do it. They were not interested. Just following things that have failed before, you have to think it is amazing the mindset where you keep repeating actions which have led to shit results. You think, How can that keep occurring? The housing stuff for instance, it took fourteen months or something before they built one house. Something ridiculous.
He had heaps of stories. I used to take his stories and tell them myself, not as well as he could, but I have had tables in stitches with some of the stories he had told me; the ones about his mate Bluey. I think Bluey is a crocodile farmer, and there was one about the guy going to get croc eggs with two young fellas. One has the paddle and one’s got the gun and the croc turns up and the guy drops the paddle and runs off, and the other one jumps on Bluey’s shoulders and shits himself. Shit was running down Bluey’s neck and he could not see the croc because the kid, the young fella’s got his hands over Bluey’s eyes, and he’s feeling the hot shit coming out. Oh! He just had people rolling around laughing so hard they had tears coming out of their eyes.
And then there was the one he told about when Bluey was being lowered by the helicopter on a rope and he was being lowered down into [a croc’s nest], and there was a big female croc there with her jaws wide open. Bluey got on the two-way radio but the helicopter pilot could not hear him, so he starts to swing. He is swinging himself to and fro trying to get through on the radio and he can’t. He pulls a gun, and he’s swinging and he ends up shooting the top of his foot off. Those stories.
The ones from when Tracker was very young and living in Darwin, when him and his mate were doing a bit of redistribution of wealth from house to house, and they go to this house – it had been cased – this is a good house to go to. They go and get in and they are creeping around the house. It is empty. And then eventually Tracker, he has the torch and he looks, and there are these photos on the table and he looks at the photos, he looks at his mate and he looks at the photos and he looks at his mate, and he goes, That’s you in the photo. It was his house. I just could not believe that one. I think it was the police force or something in Darwin where the car used to break down all the time and they used to come out and push it. The wagon with the copper, and they could have all run off but they didn’t. They had to push. There were some funny stories there.
Of course he had some good stories too about all the different pollies he knew. He got me a couple of beauties. We were at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, at the union caucus which was about a hundred and thirty people, and we had to all go around and introduce ourselves, and say who we were, and where we come from. Tracker got up before me. I did not know what to do. Now what did he say? He said, Yes, I’m Tracker Tilmouth. I’m from Australia and the whitefellas stole my country. He looked down at me and gave me a big wink. What was I supposed to say after that? Yeah! I stole it. It was stuff like that.
And then someone said to him – there were all these Yanks coming up, and because when we were over there the film Australia came out with Nicole Kidman, they said, have you seen the film Australia? He goes, Seen it, see the little kid? They go, Yeah, yeah. And he goes, That’s fucking me, except I was better looking. They did not know whether to believe him or not. It was quite funny. His funny side you would not believe. He was so witty.
We were in the union caucus and he started talking to the leader of the union, the international trade union, and he goes, What’s the Indigenous group doing? And I said, I don’t know. And I was saying I could not believe this because there was an Indigenous caucus as well at the UN Climate Change Conference. And they go, We don’t know. Hang on why don’t we have a discussion with the Indigenous group? We had a copy of their agendas and things and it was about land rights. Anyway we got the job, Tracker and I got the job to go scout them out and find out what was going on. Everybody had their little secretariat, their own little room, like the business people did, environmental groups and whatever, so there was this small room there for the Indigenous caucus. And so I went there with Tracker and we stuck our heads in and there was a guy, and if he was an inch, I reckoned he was about six foot ten. He was six foot ten, he was huge, fifteen or sixteen stone, six ten, from North America. He had the headband, the long hair, the jeans with belt buckles, the lot, right, and he was typing away at the smallest laptop I have ever seen in my life. Tracker sticks his head in and goes, Hey big chief, little laptop, how ya going? And Tracker looks at me and goes, Don’t you try that. I could not believe it.
It was funny, big chief, little laptop. I will take that to my grave, that one. But it was truly amazing how he cut through a whole range of stuff there. He could do the UN process pretty well. He knew how things operated. He could read the play because he had been involved with a lot of the UN processes to do with land rights and the rights of Indigenous people. So he was going full on and he was basically saying, I know how it works, this is what will happen here, this is what is going on here, this is how they will play the game here. He just knew it. He was like an antenna.
Nathan Miller
I do not think the way I knew Tracker that storytelling was the issue. I think everyone saw Tracker in different situations and different ways but I did not see him from a storytelling point of view. I saw him from a vision point of view. I saw him from an objectives point of view, enthusiasm point of view, and ideas. Those are the four things that I actually saw more than the others. His strategy would be communication, humour and just making you follow him, or at least walk beside him if not following him, whether you liked it or not. I had asked Tracker, What do you want me to say? He said to me, You could always say I’m a gentleman. I said to him, I’m not going to lie, and I don’t associate myself with gentlemen. I think that was one of his main qualities, he was a gentleman and he had a soft heart, and a good heart, but the coat he was wearing was not that of a gentleman, just one fastened like a traveller.
I reckon if I can give it a title, Tracker was a traveller of ideas. He was very good with identifying and seeing opportunities. Some were realistic, and some of them were not. The problem was, he did not take the unrealistic ones away, he used them all. And the thing was, he would use a shotgun, shoot out ten ideas, and maybe if one would catch that would have been enough. You understand what I am saying? He was taking all the opportunities, realistic or not realistic, hoping that the unrealistic maybe would become realistic in one way or another, and with him saying, I will try them all and if I get one of them I am okay.
I also think one of the things that helped him, was a lot of white Australians like to be associated with Aboriginals because it makes them feel good. He had well-educated white people, especially within the circles that he was messing around with, who could speak with him and feel comfortable with him from an educational point of view and make themselves feel good because, I have got an Aboriginal friend.
I think it is true. I did not research it but the fact is that a lot of white people understand that Aboriginals have been done wrong in this country and want to feel good somehow. By having an Aboriginal friend they feel good, but on the other hand, let’s say the majority of Aboriginals living in the country or even in the poor suburbs of the big cities, they are not the Aboriginal people that white people usually associate with. But the minute they have an educated Aboriginal who can speak with anyone else, it makes them feel very good. I think so, I do not know. That is my observation. I might be wrong. I think Tracker utilised this. For him it was another vehicle. On the other hand people eventually forgot the idea that he was an Aboriginal and just enjoyed him as a person. He managed to do it. I think with Tracker, although he was working for the Aboriginal people, they associated with him at the end of the day, divorced themselves from the fact that he was Aboriginal and just looked at him as another mate. At least I did. I did not care if he was Aboriginal or not. Every circle he walked into he enriched it. I worked with and met him a lot, but Lindsay [my wife] met him once, and the day she met him she fell in love with him. I am serious. I do not know why and I am not asking.
His stories and sayings were like so many grains, where you are unable to pick up a grain or even remember it. You take a patch of land, it is millions of grains, you cannot pick up the grains, but you remember the land. If you look at a painting, you can go very close and you see a lot of little strokes but you will not remember them, and when you walk back you will see the full picture, which all of the strokes brought together to form the picture. So, little sayings! I cannot remember, but at the end of the day his character came out of these sayings. I can identify the character but I cannot identify the little sayings. Everything with me is art and easy for me to explain like that.
I liked being associated with Tracker. I liked to talk with him. I liked to phone him. I liked just to talk nonsense with him. I liked him as a friend. Because at the end of the day I know a lot of people. I have travelled the world, I have lived in at least three countries in my life, and I can tell you I have never met another person like Tracker. Not as a personality. With all the good and bad, I am not trying to say that Tracker was a perfect person, he was the epitome of good friendship, and a good person to be in contact with. I do not know if he held grudges or not, I did not know him from that point of view. With me, my relationship with him was always digging each other, he would laugh at me, or tease me, or whatever, and I would do the same to him.
For instance he would phone me and come up with some ideas or whatever it was, and I would say to him, Tracker, next time you phone me ask yourself, am I going to talk crap or not, and then make a decision if you want to phone me. And he did not get upset about it. He would expect me to say it. And the same would be vice versa. How many people can you say something like that to? He would not even listen to what I said. He would just brush it off. I could say, Tracker, you know you’re talking nonsense so why are you talking about it? He just switched to another idea very quickly.
He was a casual person, and he liked people. He looked at people as resources. He would use people but not in a bad way, you understand. He would use them for objectives but at the end of the day they are good objectives. So if he used me, it was not that I did not know he was using me. I knew, but I knew what he was using me for and I was happy to be used for it. Even if he thought he was actually tricking me. I hope he liked me. I definitely liked him.
The success of Tracker’s stories was that he managed to make me a groupie. Groupie is a bit of a strong word but I had a lot of time for Tracker. But the stories, what I laugh at all the time, was the way he would call me out of the blue and say nothing, just phone me out of the blue, then all of sudden bombard me and expect me to raise fifty million dollars – like within three days, when I do not have fifty dollars in my pocket. He would say, We’ve got that, that, that, we need – we will put in the infrastructure – and you, et cetera – twenty million dollars. He was funny, he was really funny.