blacktracker

English

Alternative forms

• black tracker, black-tracker

Etymology

From black +‎ tracker. Compare blackfellow.

Noun

blacktracker (plural blacktrackers)

1. (Australia, now historical) An Aboriginal person employed by police to track down fugitives or lost people, especially in the bush. [from 19th c.]
   • 1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, Penguin, published 2009, page 236:

     At dawn the next day he was away to the Mountain, and with a black-tracker at his heels, explored as much of that wilderness of gully and chasm as nature permitted to him.

   • 2023, Richard Flanagan, Question 7, Knopf, page 230:

     [N]o one is exempt from the guilt: for we as Aboriginal people were our own blacktracker hunting down Musquito who had in turn hunted down others.