blacktracker

plural blacktrackers · alternative black tracker · alternative black-tracker

1. AustraliahistoricalAn Aboriginal person employed by police to track down fugitives or lost people, especially in the bush.First known use 19th c.

   [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.

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

   1 more example

   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.

   1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, Penguin, published 2009, page 236