“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.