Geordie Williamson

And that's really totally at variance to the way that what we imperfectly and incompletely understand of First Nations idea of selfhood is very much bound up in community and social relations.

So for Alexis to take on this duty of writing a biography of Tracker Tillmuth,

she had to find a workaround.

And I think she's done something absolutely splendid.

So she's gone to several dozen people, as I said, who knew Tracker or worked with him, who loved him or were infuriated by him.

The man could be really annoying because he was always on the go.

He always knew best.

He was always the one to walk into a meeting and take the megaphone and say, this is what

you should be doing.

And he'd say it to fellow Indigenous activists and politicians.

He'd say it to white pastoralists in the top end.

He'd tell everyone what to do.

And a lot of the time, they did what he said.

And that's why he became such a

But Alexis has taken all of these other stories that sort of overlap one another and she uses them to narrate Tracker's life in the round.

And it's a beautiful method, a mosaic method.

She calls it a sort of a collective oral biography.

And it does have the flavour of the yarn about it, that's for sure.

And what's the second book?

The second book I'm reading again with a kind of stunned admiration is by a fifth generation Australian, New South Wales based Merino farmer.