Tracker Tilmouth never wrote anything down. He could read something once, memorise it, and discuss it in great detail immediately. This paucity of written record is the starting point for Tracker, a hefty biography by Alexis Wright, one of Australia’s most prominent novelists, drawing on the practice of Aboriginal oral storytelling.
Tracker Tilmouth was an activist: a tireless advocate for the legal and economic advancement of Aboriginal people. As he saw it, activism was the only way to combat the assimilationist and welfare-based policies of successive Australian governments – a position that put him at odds with many. Yet he was also a man of singular drive and charisma who could tailor his message to any listener, whether he was phoning the prime minister in the middle of the night or taking over business meetings with mining companies. Before his death in 2015, he was primarily involved in the Central Land Council and other Aboriginal-focused organisations in the Northern Territory and Queensland. He was a constant and tireless advocate for Aboriginal people at the highest levels, with an ambitious and far-reaching vision.
Tracker is Alexis Wright’s first work of nonfiction since 1997’s Grog War, her investigation of how the Indigenous community of Tennant Creek dealt with the effects of alcohol, and it focuses on similar themes of Aboriginal self-determination and community-based responses to issues that stem from entrenched inequality. It also represents a significant departure from the writing that made her Miles Franklin award-winning novel Carpentaria (2006) so successful, and positioned Wright as the foremost writer of the Australian landscape. Tracker is completely different in form: absent is Wright’s mastery of evocative language; in its place is a story told in the words of others.
The book is comprised entirely of first-person testimony – interviews conducted by Wright with her questions omitted – and each short section has its own speaker and focus. Wright’s voice is apparent in the production and arrangement of the stories, and nowhere else. A demonstration of the power of oral and collective storytelling, its structure is reminiscent of Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future by Svetlana Alexievich, another collection of anecdotes pivoting around a central topic, though Wright’s subject is a person rather than an event.
A member of the stolen generations, removed from his Indigenous family and culture by the Australian government at the age of three, Tracker was motivated in his activism by this near-loss of connection to his roots, saying that most government programs relating to Indigenous people amounted to “enforced education, therefore enforced assimilation, therefore enforced language loss”. After leaving the Croker Island mission on which he was raised, he learned several Aboriginal languages, including Luritja. This facilitated his engagement with a range of communities as part of his work with the Northern Land Council, and later, his mediation between traditional owners and mining companies. His commitment to Aboriginal advancement was grounded in a business framework; he saw financial independence as the foundation needed to preserve traditional culture.
Events and anecdotes from Tracker’s life are revisited in Wright’s book from multiple perspectives, including Tracker’s own, with each story building on the core narrative. Tracker is uniformly described by this chorus of voices – including anti-Jabiluka mine activist Jacqui Katona, head of the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Geoff Clark, and Queensland MP Bob Katter; all contributors were chosen by Tracker before he died – as a man of hugely ambitious ideas. His ideas for Aboriginal-owned and operated businesses included, variously, camel farms, alligator farms, turning the Northern Territory into a leading producer of fruit and vegetables, and kibbutz-style living. But he was not a man of details, and needed others to fill in the logistics of his “vision splendid”.
Wright’s interviews make it clear that Tracker’s ideas live on best in those who knew him personally rather than the written record, producing an inherent tension in her chosen form: the biography, here, becomes a way of transmitting a larger-than-life personality whose influence would otherwise not be recorded in written form. Tracker is a testament to the power of collective storytelling in both its content and composition. Wright builds, as much as anyone is able to in writing, a detailed portrait of a complex man, whose vision “to sculpt land, country and people into a brilliant future on a grand scale” is inevitably accompanied by an irrepressible humour and suspicion of authority. Tracker was once in contention to become a Labor senator; rumour-mongering coupled with irreverent incidents – like saying controversial conservative former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen should “fuck off back to his own country” – precluded him from joining the political establishment.
Tracker used metaphors to distil ideas, and this was the basis of his ability to immediately connect with people of any background – farmers, a range of Indigenous communities, politicians, and international corporations. During the negotiations to develop native title legislation in 1993, he “reckon[ed] three quarters of the Aboriginals in that room did not understand what was going on” until he said to them: “The government thinks we’re on a black stallion and when you look around the room, we’re riding a donkey.”
Another story, emblematic of Tracker’s approach to the relationship between business interests and Aboriginal self-determination, took place during a Tasmanian forestry deal strongly opposed by the Australian Greens. Tracker believed that the Greens wanted to protect the forest at the expense of the traditional owners but that the loggers were just out for profit. Fellow activist and lawyer Michael Mansell describes Tracker’s approach:
We Aboriginal leaders were cautious – would we take money from industry that was destroying forests that held the stories of our past and hope for our future? Course not, Tracker said, but if it’s gunna happen anyway, your people should get something out of it.
Key to his approach was a keen recognition that while Indigenous people in Australia are often spoken for or about, they are rarely listened to. “The argument is, we are excluded from the argument,” he said. Wright’s book makes space not just for the story of one man’s life, but for a primarily Indigenous cast of speakers to tell stories in their own words.
The weight of these stories demands the reader’s ongoing and active attention, and at 580 pages, this can be challenging. Good portions of the anecdotes are acronym-filled or legalistic, which can be alienating, yet it is worth persevering: they shift, without warning, to brilliant insight. Tracker requires a lot of effort, but does reward the reader for it.
Tracker is essentially an Indigenous community telling the story of itself through the story of one man. As Katona says: “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.” This idea of storytelling at scale is key to understanding Wright’s record of Tracker’s life, and in this, it’s hugely successful. It’s not just Tracker’s story, but a life interwoven with the story of the stolen generations, Aboriginal activism, Australian politics, and the culmination of tens of thousands of years of culture and connection to land.
• Tracker by Alexis Wright is out now through Giramondo
