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A breathtaking, monumental work of collective memoir from the master Alexis Wright.
"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.
"I'm awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Wright's work: she is vital on the subject of land and people." ―The New York Times Book Review
"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." ―The Guardian (UK)
This information about Tracker was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Susan Gordon-Brown
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).
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