Bloody Australia

How the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody exposes the roots of a troubled society

Fiona Gruber
Times Literary Supplement
April 15

The fractured reality of indigenous Australia is built on theft, destruction and abuse: the theft of land and children, the destruction of identity, and a kaleidoscope of abuse of many kinds. Whereas the south-eastern part of the continent was settled early, white pastoralists only started pushing into Australia’s far north-east region in the 1860s. The people of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where Queensland and the Northern Territory meet, called this frontier period the Wild Time, when they were hunted and shot. The time after, when they were tamed and corralled, they called Mission Time. There was no more Dream Time. Hidden by rocky overhangs, Aboriginals painted these confrontations between men with guns and men with magic. These were often sorcery paintings, purri purri, intended to “doom” the enemy. Instead it was the Aboriginals who were doomed. They also painted images of an elongated malevolent spirit, the tall man. This spirit haunts Aboriginal myths under several guises, stealing men’s breath and ripping out their hearts.

In Chloe Hooper’s account of unfolding events in a forgotten corner of Australia, the tall man is also senior sergeant Chris Hurley. Six foot seven inches in his socks, aged thirty-six, Hurley was a policeman who by choice had spent most of his career in remote Aboriginal communities. On Palm Island, where Hurley worked for two years, the tall man spirit is often called Luma Luma, a giant and a traveller who can shape-shift at will. It is a story to frighten children with, except that on this beautiful tropical island off the coast of northern Queensland, the violent and degraded reality of everyday life is sufficiently terrifying to undermine the power of the spirit world.

On November 19, 2004, at 11.23 a.m., Cameron Doomadgee, a Palm Islander, was found dead in the local police cell. He had a black eye, broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein and a liver almost severed in half. An hour earlier, witnesses had seen him sauntering down the road with his hunting dog. Although drunk on goom, a mixture of methylated spirits and water, Doomadgee, also thirty-six, was a fit man who kept himself in good shape.

Passing the police van while another young Aboriginal man was being arrested, he had challenged the black police aide working alongside Hurley; “you black like me”, he had said to Lloyd Bengaroo. “Why can’t you help the blacks?”. “Keep walking or you’ll be arrested too”, Bengaroo was heard to say. As Doomadgee continued down the road “walking pretty good, staggering but not falling over”, he started singing the one-hit wonder by the Baha Men entitled “Who Let the Dogs Out?”. Hurley deemed this provocative and a few minutes later Doomadgee too was in the back of the van.

On arrival at the jail, Doomadgee punched Hurley on the jaw. As they entered the station, both men tripped on a step and fell into the foyer. Some accounts say that Hurley held his prisoner down and punched him several times, saying “Do you want more of these, Mr Doomadgee?”. Hurley would insist that the witness to this, who was also drunk, had only a partial view, and misinterpreted what was in fact his attempt to raise Doomadgee from the floor. Hurley was at a loss to say how the injuries had occurred; at first his statement insisted that he had fallen to one side of Doomadgee. When the nature of the injuries became apparent, he decided that he must have fallen on top of him.

The 1991 Royal Commission on Aboriginal deaths in custody, which examined ninety-nine deaths over a ten-year period, noted that “if non-Aboriginal people had died in custody at the same rate . . . there would have been nearly 9,000 deaths”. Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders make up 2.4 per cent of the population and 21 per cent of all prisoners. The Commission ruled out foul play in all cases. Rather, it was reported, the high rate of mortality was due to the over-representation of indigenous Australians, the lack of care in prison, and inmates’ already poor health.

The initial autopsy signalled accidental death. When the island’s mayor read out the findings to a gathered crowd, there was a riot, and the police station and Hurley’s house were torched. The resulting publicity led to the promise of an inquest, and Andrew Boe, a campaigning lawyer from Brisbane, volunteered to represent Doomadgee’s family and the community on a pro bono basis. Meeting him at a Melbourne dinner party, Hooper, up until this time a writer of fiction – her first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime (2002), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize – took up his suggestion of writing about the case.

The Tall Man: Death and life on Palm Island follows events from the surprising conclusions of the state coroner – findings that marked the first time a policeman had been found responsible for an Aboriginal death in custody – to the results of Hurley’s subsequent trial for manslaughter. Hooper, a “middle class suburbanite” from Melbourne, had never seen an Aboriginal except on the news, had never travelled into the country’s wilder corners. The marginalization of Aboriginals from everyday white society remains widespread. The policies, protests and polemics coming out of Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra are often met with derision by those who live in the frontier towns. The south is fine, as long as it doesn’t try to impose its culture on the north, as Hooper is told by a man in a pub in Burketown. The settlement on the gulf is named after the ill-fated explorer Robert O’Hara Burke, who died because he spurned aid offered by local tribesmen. Hurley had been a policeman here and had dispensed a rough justice with the aid of a well-known black activist, Murrandoo Yanner. Together they sorted out disputes without recourse to charge sheets or warrants. Hurley was popular, was not a racist, and was described by Yanner’s son as having charisma. He was also said to have an explosive temper. “He was a thug and a mug. I am the same”, Yanner told Hooper.

Hurley arrived on Palm Island at the end of 2002. For Chloe Hooper, it is “a place where history is so close to the surface, so omnipresent, it seems to run parallel to daily life”. In 1918 a mission was founded there, where “difficult” Aboriginals were sent to a life of prayer, meagre rations and iron discipline. In many cases “difficult” meant argumentative, pregnant or half-caste. On arrival, children were separated from their parents and placed in dormitories. They were imprisoned for swearing at their teachers, and disobedient girls had their heads shaved. Although fifty-seven language groups were represented (a source of inter-clan aggression), English had to be spoken and no traditional customs or ceremonies were allowed. The mission was a tropical gulag with bizarre social experiments that included compulsory European dancing. Those who refused to dance were questioned by police, those who failed to attend brass band practice could end up in jail. All actions that in white society marked out the privileges of adulthood, including marriage, travel or drawing wages from a bank account, needed the permission of the protector of Aborigines. Permission could not be assumed, as this achingly paternalistic and patronizing letter to a young bride shows:

Dear Lucy, Your letter gave me quite a shock, fancy you wanting to draw four pounds to buy a brooch, ring, bangle, work basket, tea set, etc, etc. I am quite sure Mrs. Henry would expend the money carefully for you, but I must tell you that no Aborigine can draw 4/5 of their wages unless they are sick and in hospital and require the money to buy comforts . . . . However, as it is Christmas I will let you have 1/5/ – out of your banking account to buy lollies with.

It was recorded at the time that there was almost military discipline in the segregation between white and black. An observer in the 1930s wrote that inmates “were treated as rather dull retarded children”.

The legacy of this time is a society with no roots, no ancestral land, no kin. The island is possessed by the stolen generation, who, because they never knew the affection and discipline of loving parents, find it hard to parent themselves. With 90 per cent unemployment, the place is a “limbo with alcohol”, each day like the last, where a significant proportion of its 2,000 Aboriginal inhabitants get blind drunk, the men beat the women savagely, and life expectancy is twenty to thirty years less than for whites.

Palm Island is a social experiment that was wrong from the start and has left a legacy of profound dysfunctionality. Amid the deprivation and powerlessness, Doomadgee’s sisters carried forward the quest for justice that sought to find pride and dignity in a world where little exist. They sought it in church and in conspiracy theories that their brother was killed because Hurley had known him before Palm Island and bore him a grudge. A grudge against their brother at least gave him some status. The truth seems to be that although Hurley knew the name of Doomadgee – he had been stationed near a town of the same name – he didn’t know Cameron personally. He was just another abusive drunk on another hot day. The Tall Man follows the story to the conclusion of Hurley’s trial, through every manipulation of the truth and every ill-judged witness statement. Hooper remains coolly even-handed throughout, but the book burns with a buttoned-down, clear-eyed thirst for justice.

Chloe Hooper
THE TALL MAN
Death and life on Palm Island
258pp. Cape. £16.99.
978 0 224 08466 6

Fiona Gruber is the founding hostess of Gert’s, a monthly salon in Melbourne. She is writing a book about Alice Cornwell, the goldmine owner and former proprietor of the Sunday Times.