Tracker

“How do you tell an impossible story, one that is almost too big to contain in a single book?” In Tracker, Alexis Wright tells the story of charismatic Aboriginal Australian leader Tracker Tilmouth, who died in Darwin in 2015 at the age of 62. Taken from his family as a child and brought up in a mission on Croker Island, Tracker worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles, including Director of the Central Land Council of the Northern Territory. Tracker was a visionary and a strategist renowned for his irreverent humour and his determination to tell things the way he saw them. Having known him for many years, Alexis Wright interviewed Tracker, along with family, friends, colleagues, and the politicians he influenced, weaving their stories together in a manner reminiscent of Nobel Prize–winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time. The book is as much a testament to the powerful role played by storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life as it is to the legacy of an extraordinary man.

About the Author :
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, an award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Polish, French, and Italian. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne between 2017–2022. Wright is the only author to win both the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker).

Review :
"I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Wright’s work: she is vital on the subject of land and people." "A magnificent work of collaborative storytelling." "A unique, majestic biography. It is one man’s story told by many voices, almost operatic in scale…the book sings with insight and Tracker’s unique humour." "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." "Tilmouth was a man who worked through conversation and yarn more than with paper and pen, and this is a book about the place of the story in Indigenous culture and politics as much as it is about Tracker himself." "[Wright] enacts the complex relationship between self and community that a Western biography could not…There is a cumulative power in the repetitions, backtrackings and digressions the formula necessitates: a sinuous, elegant accommodation of selves. It is a book as epical in form and ambition as the life it describes." "Tracker, a book performed by a folk ensemble rather than a solo virtuoso." "This magnificent 'collective' biography of Bruce Tilmouth, Tracker, unfolds like a long night by an open fire with a Chaucerian cast telling tall tales about an old, beloved friend—in triplicate"