Scan barcode
A review by archytas
Tracker by Alexis Wright
5.0
Every so often a book comes along which makes me wish I had more stars than five: the kind of reading experience that leaves you different. The frustrating thing is, I'm not sure how to articulate what it is about Tracker that is so good. I want to describe it as intensely intellectual: but that risks giving the impression that the sentences are hard to understand, when the opposite is true. Wright's narrators speak in the various patterns of Australia, mixing bombast and laconic humour. At times it is urgent, sometimes wry, often you can hear the gales of laughter that are not on the page.
I had gone into this with some trepidation after someone described it as challenging. Wright's Carpentaria rates as my go-to pick for best Australian fiction when asked that silly question, but the Swan Book was more than I could grasp. I now assume the person who said this was challenging hadn't read either of those because it is certainly far more accessible. But as the book goes on, it pulls you into a world which asks you to concentrate, to think about parts of Australia usually treated as marginalia, to recenter a worldview quite different to the narrative of Native Title that occurs in the metropolitan newspapers. I found that an immensely rich experience, but it requires you create space for it, not a common requirement from biographies. The knack is to let yourself go where Wright wants to take you, and let her have the headspace to get there.
There is, to state the obvious, nothing conventional about this biography. Not only because it is told by a multitude, but because it ignores the things most people want to know about other people: Tracker's family remain hidden in shadow, and the book is scarce on anecdotes about recreation or hobbies. This is a book about a leader, someone who wanted to change things, and before you've realised it, it has become a book about the country he wanted to change.
Wright does expect the audience to engage. Proper nouns are only occasionally explained in simply footnotes, scattered sparsely so as not to break the direct connection between reader and narrator. Events are cast and recast, looked at through different prisms, not only of opinion, but context and emphasis. Wright arranges sometimes for flow, sometimes to challenge. A sequence towards the end of the book of varying views of Tracker's dis/alignment with Noel Pearson is hilarious in its diversity; appropriately finishing with a dramatic mic drop. But the aim is never to imply that there aren't things to understand, the aim is to bring some kind of understanding. As we loop up and around Tracker's life work: the economic planning; the struggle for land rights and sustainable communities; the dizzying range of relationships and schemes, the breadth of this one man's work becomes clear, as does the communities he was located within. Laced through the whole is Tracker's relationship to country, culture and family, and the impact of his forced removal as a child on who he becomes.
Some of the book was personally hard to read. The clash between Aboriginal landowners and the Green movement, crystallized around the uneasy coalition to combat the Jabiluka mine, threw a different light on my own activity in the 90s. Seeing this with different eyes, eyes that revealed rather more racist stupidity or stupid racism than it is comfortable to acknowledge, left me arguing with myself in the shower for days. The book doesn't preach, or tell you what to think: the variety of perspectives makes sure of that, but it suggests hard questions, to which none single answer will stand alone. It is a book of truths, and almost certainly a few lies, and suggests understanding comes from total embrace, rather than a careful sift.
It is, however, a ferocious argument for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty processes, and an end to patronising policies issued - by all political parties - about Indigenous people without respecting the already existing articulated policies from the Kalkringai declaration, and now the Uluru Statement from the Heart. I defy anyone to read this and remain dismissive of leadership of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as opposed to a lack of trust and control from non-Indigenous institutions of power. For a funny, celebratory, full of love tribute, this packs a punch in showing a life held far too hostage for the resources owed to and needed by large swathes of our country, which would undoubtedly be in safe(r) hands.
I had gone into this with some trepidation after someone described it as challenging. Wright's Carpentaria rates as my go-to pick for best Australian fiction when asked that silly question, but the Swan Book was more than I could grasp. I now assume the person who said this was challenging hadn't read either of those because it is certainly far more accessible. But as the book goes on, it pulls you into a world which asks you to concentrate, to think about parts of Australia usually treated as marginalia, to recenter a worldview quite different to the narrative of Native Title that occurs in the metropolitan newspapers. I found that an immensely rich experience, but it requires you create space for it, not a common requirement from biographies. The knack is to let yourself go where Wright wants to take you, and let her have the headspace to get there.
There is, to state the obvious, nothing conventional about this biography. Not only because it is told by a multitude, but because it ignores the things most people want to know about other people: Tracker's family remain hidden in shadow, and the book is scarce on anecdotes about recreation or hobbies. This is a book about a leader, someone who wanted to change things, and before you've realised it, it has become a book about the country he wanted to change.
Wright does expect the audience to engage. Proper nouns are only occasionally explained in simply footnotes, scattered sparsely so as not to break the direct connection between reader and narrator. Events are cast and recast, looked at through different prisms, not only of opinion, but context and emphasis. Wright arranges sometimes for flow, sometimes to challenge. A sequence towards the end of the book of varying views of Tracker's dis/alignment with Noel Pearson is hilarious in its diversity; appropriately finishing with a dramatic mic drop. But the aim is never to imply that there aren't things to understand, the aim is to bring some kind of understanding. As we loop up and around Tracker's life work: the economic planning; the struggle for land rights and sustainable communities; the dizzying range of relationships and schemes, the breadth of this one man's work becomes clear, as does the communities he was located within. Laced through the whole is Tracker's relationship to country, culture and family, and the impact of his forced removal as a child on who he becomes.
Some of the book was personally hard to read. The clash between Aboriginal landowners and the Green movement, crystallized around the uneasy coalition to combat the Jabiluka mine, threw a different light on my own activity in the 90s. Seeing this with different eyes, eyes that revealed rather more racist stupidity or stupid racism than it is comfortable to acknowledge, left me arguing with myself in the shower for days. The book doesn't preach, or tell you what to think: the variety of perspectives makes sure of that, but it suggests hard questions, to which none single answer will stand alone. It is a book of truths, and almost certainly a few lies, and suggests understanding comes from total embrace, rather than a careful sift.
It is, however, a ferocious argument for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty processes, and an end to patronising policies issued - by all political parties - about Indigenous people without respecting the already existing articulated policies from the Kalkringai declaration, and now the Uluru Statement from the Heart. I defy anyone to read this and remain dismissive of leadership of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as opposed to a lack of trust and control from non-Indigenous institutions of power. For a funny, celebratory, full of love tribute, this packs a punch in showing a life held far too hostage for the resources owed to and needed by large swathes of our country, which would undoubtedly be in safe(r) hands.