Inside story on life gone wrong
Paul Toohey; 26/7/08; Paul Toohey is a senior writer on The Australian and author of the most recent Quarterly Essay, Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention.
The Tall Man; Chloe Hooper; Penguin
The north has chosen to reveal itself to Chloe Hooper, even though the primary players in her tale were unavailable. One was Palm Islander Cameron Doomadgee, dead in the ground. The other was police officer Chris Hurley, who appears to have taken the view that co-operating with Hooper — or anyone else — would not serve him well.Well might Hurley take that view. He was the recipient of a predictable miracle when an all-white jury last year acquitted him of Doomadgee’s manslaughter. He’s back in the police force; he’s innocent. What’s there to add? Hurley, who stands 2m tall, is the subject of the title, as are the elongated creature spirits of the north, who move in the night sky and steal the breath of the living.
There is another spirit more localised to Queensland, the Quinkan, long-limbed and malevolent. They do their evil, then fold back into cracks in the sandstone. Hooper is not subtle about her motifs, saying Hurley was “like an evasive spirit, hiding in the legal cracks”.
The Australian; No Internet Text
She gets close to Doomadgee’s family and writes about them with such candour — describing alcoholism, illness, illiteracy, hopelessness, bad parenting — that you wonder if they would welcome her back after reading this. But then you doubt if they could read this. Hooper’s book is powerful because she hasn’t written it for them, just as she has not written it for the Queensland police force. Neither black nor white are shielded.
Yet no amount of objectivity can disguise whose side Hooper is on. She’s in the Doomadgee camp and, though she doesn’t say so, believes Hurley should have been found guilty of killing Doomadgee. And why not? All the information anyone needed was there in the September 2006 findings of Queensland deputy state coroner Christine Clements, who said she believed Hurley lied in his account of what happened to
Doomadgee. In fast shorthand: on November 19, 2004, Hurley threw Doomadgee in the back of a police wagon after Doomadgee — who’d been drinking metho, among other things — slagged off at Hurley’s Aboriginal police aide offsider, Lloyd Bengaroo, for siding with white coppers in arresting blacks. On arrival at the police station, Doomadgee whacked Hurley in the face. They both fell down and, according to Clements, Hurley started hitting Doomadgee “a number of times” in the body.
There was a witness, albeit a drunken man who had been hauled in after a nasty domestic violence episode. He caught a glimpse of Hurley’s arm pile-driving into Doomadgee. Doomadgee’s liver was smashed so badly that it split in two on either side of his spine: not a survivable condition. Doomadgee also had a black eye that witnesses knew he did not have before meeting Hurley.
Hurley always maintained he didn’t strike Doomadgee even once and that he did not react in anger after being hit by Doomadgee. He must be quite a guy. Most coppers would have would have punched back and with some justification. It’s just a question of whether that retaliation
becomes totally uncontrolled. In Hurley’s version, it is a complete mystery how Doomadgee received his injuries.
Hooper also finds Doomadgee elusive. It is not that she casts him as malevolent, like the spirits, but finds little to say of his personal background apart from the fact that he liked fishing, was a father and a husband, and a hardcore drinker known to mix metho with water.
When it comes to the usual white benchmarks — schooling, health — people such as Doomadgee are hard to track once they are gone. It is as if they were never there.
The story is sustained around Hurley. During stints in Aboriginal towns, he’d won the respect of (some) Aborigines, including famed Burketown agitator Murrandoo Yanner. Working closely with Yanner, Hurley was prepared to drop charges against Aborigines for the sake of the wider peace. He got pissed with locals; he was a pants man. Hooper thinks he took the hard bush postings as a way to get rapid promotion, yet he also seemed to have tolerance for Aborigines. Somewhere along the way, it seemed the worst thing that could happen to a copper happened to Hurley: it became about us and them.
Hooper suggests he became like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, supreme ruler of the kind of small outback cop shops he chose to frequent. Maybe he was never a truly good bush cop, but he was an effective one. Yet, despite his best efforts, blacks continued to misbehave.
Did Hurley’s tolerance give way to frustration? It is well worth going through Hooper’s recounting of just how powerful the events on Palm Island really were. Six days after Doomadgee’s death, a pathologist’s initial report was read via microphone to Palm Islanders: despite the ruptured liver, four broken ribs and blackened eye, it was suggested that he had died from an accidental fall.
It would be pushing it to reinvent Doomadgee as a martyr and Hooper does not attempt to do so. But he certainly became the rallying point for decades of pent-up anger.
Hundreds of Palm Islanders raged and burned, and 22 Palm Island cops — their numbers had been reinforced, up from seven, after Doomadgee’s death — were given ultimatums to leave the island within a hour. Most of them, before the helicopters finally arrived, seriously considered accepting it.
On an island a long way north of Brisbane, the police were about to cede control of a part of Australia to blacks for the first time in 200 years. Not that any of them thought in such terms; most felt certain they were to die that day, and most were prepared to shoot their Glocks into the crowd. Hooper relates the riot very well, with no sense of barracking for the uprising but equal dedication to the anger of the mob and the fear of the cops, not to mention the bravery of senior officers who walked into the mob in an attempt to placate them.
Mercifully, this book does not set out to prick the white conscience. That happens anyway, simply by allowing the events to unravel. And what reasonable conscience — apart from that of the Queensland police union, which ran wildly offensive pre-trial campaigns on Hurley’s behalf — would not have been offended by the decision of Queensland director of public prosecutions Leanne Clare to totally overlook Clements’s strong recommendations that Hurley be charged and to decide — based on nothing — that Doomadgee’s death was “a terrible accident”?
A review team was appointed that, eventually, saw Hurley brought to trial in Townsville.
And that’s where Doomadgee was buried once and for all: by whites who refused to find a copper guilty. Because, when the shit goes down, it’s a copper you’ll want knocking on your door, not a blackfella.
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Death in CustodyAdd new tag, Human Rights