Alexis Wright knew there was no way she could capture a personality as significant as that of Indigenous activist Leigh Bruce “Tracker” Tilmouth in a conventional biography, so she didn’t try.
Instead, over the course of six years, before his death in 2015 and afterwards, Wright compiled a mosaic of interviews, anecdotes and testimony from those who knew the man, and brought it all together in a volume of close to 600 pages.
That book, simply titled Tracker, has just won the sixth annual Stella prize for writing by Australian women, worth $50,000.
The judging panel, chaired by co-owner of Avid Reader bookshop Fiona Stager, called Tracker, published by Giramondo, an “extraordinary, majestic book” that was “almost operatic in scale”.
Wright, a Waanyi woman, who won the Miles Franklin Literary award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria, told Guardian Australia that she hadn’t been expecting Tracker to win awards, but that being recognised by the Stella prize was “a great honour” because it would help bring the story of “a huge personality ... an important person in the Aboriginal world” to a wider readership.
Tracker Tilmouth was an Arrente man known for his relentless advocacy for Indigenous people. “He’d walk through doors that other people would never dare to walk through just so he could present an Aboriginal position and get people on side,” said Wright.
A member of the Stolen Generations, throughout his life Tracker assisted Indigenous communities around Australia with issues like land rights, negotiations with mining companies, economic development, environmental protection and more.
“He thought outside the box and he had huge ideas on how to construct an Aboriginal economy for what he called the enjoyment of land rights,” said Wright.
“He said he took up a space that a lot of other people didn’t want to, or didn’t know how to ... He would say he could be a chameleon and he could be whatever you wanted him to be. He could help people; he could be a virus you could never get rid of. So how do you do a biography of a person like that?”
Tracker is written in what Wright calls “consensus storytelling” – a style inspired by collective decision-making processes in Aboriginal communities – in which interviews with the man himself are interspersed with the voices of people who knew and worked with him.
“That also follows, to me, a traditional way of our traditional stories and our lore stories,” Wright said. “People have different responsibilities for the story, for keeping the story straight, and for knowing the story and safeguarding the story. Because stories are really important in the Aboriginal world.”
First awarded in 2013, the Stella prize is open to both fiction and nonfiction long-form works and seeks to reward “excellent, engaging and original” work by Australian women writers.
This year’s Stella shortlist was selected from an entry pool of over 170 books, and included: The Enlightenment of Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar (Wild Dingo Press); Terra Nullius by Claire G Coleman (Hachette Australia); The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser (Allen and Unwin); An Uncertain Grace by Krissy Kneen (Text); and The Fish Girl by Mirandi Riwoe (Seizure).
Authors of the six shortlisted works each received $3,000 and a three-week writing retreat.
Tracker is Wright’s fifth book; her previous works include the novels Plains of Promise, The Swan Book and Carpentaria, and the nonfiction work Grog War.
