Tall Man, The Death of Doomadgee - by Chloe Hoooper

by Alison McCulloch

from The New York Times

Amid the tropical islands dotting the Great Barrier Reef off Australia lies one that goes unmentioned in vacation brochures. Called Palm Island, it boasts golden beaches and blue waters surrounding an interior of lush green. It was, a government official declared in 1916, “the ideal place for a delightful holiday.” Instead, it became a prison for Aborigines where, for some 50 years, the state of Queensland sent those it sought to punish — “ ‘troublesome characters,’ ‘larrikins,’ ‘wanderers’ or ‘communists.’ ”

In November 2004, the 36-year-old stepson of one of those “troublesome characters” was found dead in a police cell on the island. He had four broken ribs; bruising on his hands, back and face; and a liver that had been “almost cleaved in two.” His name was Cameron Doomadgee, and in her new book, “Tall Man,” Chloe Hooper sets out to tell his story. 

It is not an easy one to tell. From the time he was found unresponsive in that concrete cell, Doomadgee came to bear the unbearable weight of black Australia’s grievances against white. In turn, the policeman accused in the case would be tried not just for this sin, but for all. The facts would prove elusive, swimming in and out of focus, filtered through the murk of prejudice, anger, despair, and gallons and gallons of booze. Witnesses changed their stories (one committed suicide, as did Doomadgee’s son) and positions hardened as politicians, lobby groups and the national news media joined the parade.

Hooper followed the case and its main characters for two and a half years, and she does their complexity a remarkable justice. She became involved a few months after Doomadgee’s death, when a lawyer representing the island’s Aboriginal community said he needed a writer. Hooper’s first book, “A Child’s Book of True Crime,” was a novel — arguably a curious grounding for a work like this one. Or perhaps it set the stage perfectly, with its clever and penetrating account of a gruesome murder. Yet Hooper surely could not have foreseen the tempest into which she was stepping with the Doomadgee case. “I had never heard of Palm Island,” she writes, and “like most middle-class suburbanites, I grew up without ever seeing an Aborigine, except on the news.” 

About 2,500 people live on Palm Island, many of them, like Doomadgee, descendants of those banished from the mainland. Doomadgee’s stepfather was sent to Palm in leg irons in the mid-1950s “after knocking out all the teeth of a missionary who’d flogged his uncle to near death.” Officially a mission, this “tropical gulag” was one of around 20 set up in Queensland to “protect the natives from the violence of the frontier” and bring “light to the darkness” of their lives. Now, the missionaries are gone and the communities they left behind have become “impoverished ghettos of alcoholism, petrol sniffing, brutality, arrests and early deaths.”

Senior Sgt. Chris Hurley, the officer who locked up Doomadgee, seemed attracted to these brutal settlements. “Do the things that draw a missionary to savage places also lure a cop?” Hooper wonders. “Does the cop get the same rush from lawlessness that missionaries get from the godless?” While Hooper was embraced by the Doomadgee family, she had no access to Hurley — a limitation she tries to overcome by visiting places he worked and talking to people he knew. She meets Murrandoo Yanner, an Aboriginal activist from the tiny northwest Queensland settlement of Burketown, where Hurley was posted for four years. “All kids in town, he spent a lot of time with them,” Yanner said of Hurley. “On his weekends off, rather than chase the nurses and go drinking, he’d actually go along with the school trip, throw some kids in his car.” Which is not to say Hurley was averse to chasing nurses and drinking — women Hooper spoke with described him as a sleaze. But on one thing, Yanner is adamant: “He was definitely no racist.”

The morning Doomadgee was arrested, Hurley was in the middle of yet another domestic violence case. Three sisters had been beaten, and Hurley was escorting one of them home to pick up her insulin. As he and a fellow officer waited outside in their van, Doomadgee staggered past. It was around 10 in the morning, and Doomadgee was, Hooper writes, “on a full-scale bender of beer, cask wine and ‘goom’ — methylated spirits mixed with water.” What happened next is in dispute. Hurley said Doomadgee swore at him, and though this was a cop “who had endured every insult in existence,” he did not let it go, arresting Doomadgee for creating a public nuisance. Inside an hour, Doomadgee was dead.

A week later, local residents gathered to hear the pathologist’s findings from Erykah Kyle, the mayor. “Erykah asks everyone to stand for a moment’s silence,” Hooper writes. “Hundreds of people bow their heads. She tells them the pathologist believes Cameron’s death was the result of an accidental fall and that he’d found no sign of police brutality.” Within 24 hours, the police station and Hurley’s house had been burned to the ground, and 21 islanders faced rioting charges. 

The justice system largely takes over from there, and is today still grinding on. Hurley ended up making history, becoming both the first police officer in Australia to be found responsible for a death in custody — though by a coroner, not a criminal court — and, later, the first to be charged in such a case. In June 2007, he was acquitted of assault and manslaughter charges, and last December the coroner’s finding of responsibility was set aside. The Doomadgee family has appealed and is suing for damages. 

Hooper travels to remote settlements and reaches into prehistory in her effort to penetrate this fractured story, learning of song lines, of Hairy Man and Tall Man spirits (Hurley, at 6-foot-7, evokes the latter). And though there is no resolution, she makes of it all an extraordinary whole. “I had wanted to know more about my country,” she says at the end of the book, “and now I did — now I knew more than I wanted to.”