Mr Port was the final link in the 150-year partnership between Queensland police and Indigenous trackers, whose unique investigative bush skills were invaluable in a time before helicopters, mobile phones and GPS.

While working in the Cape York Peninsula, Mr Port had been involved in countless searches for runaway criminals, lost travellers and helped police with drug busts.

With 32,000 square kilometres making up Coen’s police district, an intimate knowledge of tropical coastal wetlands, dry eucalypt areas and savannah country is needed to be a successful tracker.

“You follow their footprints through the bush,” Mr Port, 71, said of his tracking methods.

“You have to use your brains and think.”

As a man of few words, Mr Port is quick to play down his achievements.

But colleagues, including Queensland’s Police Commissioner Ian Stewart, speak of him in glowing terms.

Mr Port’s most famous “track” was in 1997, when he helped locate two Kiwi stowaway sisters and a Malaysian seaman who jumped overboard from a shipping vessel.

Sarah and Joanne Ingham and Ja’afar bin Mohamed Zan swam through crocodile-infested waters near Cairns, reached the shore and evaded authorities for weeks.

They eventually made their way to Coen before running into the bush when police spotted them.

Mr Port and another former tracker, Tommy George, followed footprints from their sandals and the trio were found near the Coen River the next day.

It’s a story Cape York locals still talk about today.

“The first thing they asked for when we came up to them was a smoke,” Mr Port told reporters at the time. “They looked scared and not very happy.”

During another famous case in the 1980s, Mr Port and tracker George Musgrave scoured rough terrain to follow a stolen car for 22 kilometres before locating the crook and a drug crop.

In his final track, Mr Port was tasked with finding a man who bolted into the bush from the Coen courthouse after being sentenced in 2011. Three hours later, the man was back in the lock-up.

Sergeant in charge of Coen Police Station, Matt Moloney, said things wouldn’t be the same without Mr Port around.

“Coen police have always had an unofficial motto: You can run, but you really just can’t hide,” he said on Thursday afternoon.

“This is the end of an era. This is the day that the last tracker working in any law enforcement jurisdiction finishes duties.”

Sergeant Moloney insists that Mr Port’s skills haven’t been superseded by technology, saying his “special observational powers” have come in handy at crime and vehicle crash scenes.

Mr Port’s entire police career has been spent in Coen, the town of his birth, where the Lama Lama elder is also a member of the local State Emergency Service and fire brigade.

He learned how to track from his father while working as a stockman, locating cattle and horses that strayed from camp.

And it appears almost certain that Mr Port won’t be replaced, given Tommy George was the last tracker to retire before him and that occurred in 1999.

Police trackers have worked with the Queensland Police Service for 150 years but numbers have slowly reduced in the last 100 years.

In 1900, Queensland had 127 Indigenous police trackers. Fifty years later, there were only 30.

Low pay rates were blamed for the dwindling numbers, with Aboriginal stockmen in the far north earning about five times more than trackers in the 1950s.

The tracker’s job wasn’t just to scour the outback. They were regularly tasked with sorting out local crime involving indigenous people and served as role models in their communities.

But there were also menial, less glamorous “domestic” responsibilities such as mowing lawns and cleaning up.

At times, their skill of reading the bush landscape was considered mythical by lesser men.

With Ned Kelly and his gang running rampant in 1879, six native trackers from Queensland were sent to help Victorian police catch the outlaws.

According to a police journal held by the Queensland Police Museum, Kelly had “a morbid fear and hatred” of the trackers.

Following the famous Glenrowan siege, their commanding officer Stanhope O’Connor said the group had “distinguished themselves above and beyond the call of duty”.

“To each proud man there was a sense of achievement in being involved in the capture of the infamous Ned Kelly,” the journal said.

Mr Port says he will still put his hand up if Coen Police ever need help in a search.

But with the final tracker officially retired, Sergeant Moloney said the bush art seemed inevitably lost and he felt “very sad”.

“For me it’s not just because we’re going to lose his skill, it’s not just because we’re losing a man of character who I think very highly of,” Sergeant Moloney said.

“He’s my friend and I’m not going to see him every day at work, so it’s not going to be same.”