The Tall Man
Authors: Chloe Hooper
Contents
About the Book
When Cameron Doomadgee, a 36-year-old member of the Aboriginal community of Palm Island, was arrested for swearing at a white police officer, he was dead within forty-five minutes of being locked up. The police claimed he’d tripped on a step, but the pathologist likened his injuries to those received in a plane crash. The main suspect was the handsome, charismatic Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, an experienced cop with decorations for his work.
In following Hurley’s trail to some of the wildest and most remote parts of Australia, Chloe Hooper explores Aboriginal myths and history and uncovers buried secrets of white mischief. Atmospheric, gritty and original,
The Tall Man
takes readers to the heart of a struggle for power, revenge and justice.
About the Author
Chloe Hooper was born in 1973. Her highly praised first novel,
A Child’s Book of True Crime
(2002), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Her
Observer
article about the Doomadgee case,
‘Island of Lost Souls’
, was shortlisted for the Amnesty International Media Awards. She is also the author of
The Engagement
and
The Tall Man
, which won seven major literary awards in Australia.
A Child’s Book of True Crime
For Justin and Nicholas
ON AUSTRALIA’S REMOTE
Cape York Peninsula there are spirits with long, thin arms and long, thin legs that move unseen in the night to do evil. By day they slide back into the country’s sandstone cliffs, living in the cracks. On rock faces, in gullies and gorges and caves, their stretched-out bodies are painted in red ochre with allseeing white eyes.
To find them I flew and drove to the tiny town of Laura, in Far North Queensland, and followed a guide along narrow walking tracks thousands of years old, up a steep escarpment.At the top, the guide yelled out a greeting to the spirits. Otherwise, he said, they would come and cut out our kidney fat.
It had been years since anyone had visited this place. Recent rains had left the saplings vivid green, and the ferns that grew from rocks made hanging gardens. This was a wet-season camp, a network of boulders and caves whose walls and ceilings were covered in layers of paintings maybe fifteen thousand years old: kangaroos, crocodiles, emus, dingoes, yams and their twisting roots, weapons, beehives with swarms of bees, stars; all the things of the cosmos drawn so they might multiply and release the bounty of the land.
Along one cliff wall, the orange and brown hues of the sandstone morphed into more recent figures: paintings of two white men lying down. They wore red half-moon caps and blue shirts, and were naked below their waists, their skin a pale, creamy ochre. Both men had rifles. They were police. This site was used for sorcery,
purri purri
.
On a cave wall a kilometre or so away, the guide had shown me a scene painted in the late nineteenth century of a European wearing jodhpurs and boots. He was midair, vainly holding to the reins as he was thrown from his horse. A rifle flew from his hands. A naked woman lay on the ground. Perhaps the man had stolen her; it was common on the frontier. Whoever painted this wanted to kill the European, to “doom” him, as the self-taught ethnographer W. E. Roth termed it a century ago. A man could be doomed to be struck by lightning or crushed by a falling tree, though it would not be the lightning or the tree that killed him, but the curse. The Aborigines called it “singing” him.
Sorcery paintings became more prolific while northern Australia was being colonised. In 1872—nearly a hundred years after Captain Cook claimed the continent for Great Britain—gold was discovered in a valley near Laura. When local Aborigines speared the Europeans’ stock or pilfered their supplies, white settlers and then troopers—white and black—set out from the town in “dispersal” parties. The Aborigines tried to use
purri purri
against the whites’ rifles, magic objects that could produce thunder and lightning. They tried to sing the guns and to sing the gun’s “fruit” or “kernels”—the bullets—so they wouldn’t fire straight. But the place-names marking Cape York’s red dirt roads tell the story: Spear Creek, Rifle Creek, Double Barrel Creek, Revolver Creek. A photograph of the Laura Native Mounted Police from around 1880 shows five Aboriginal troopers in their uniforms with peaked caps and rifles, flanking their tall white commander. Some traditional Aborigines lived like fugitives in these hills until the 1920s, but influenza and armed troopers kept coming their way.
I stared at the blue-shirted men on the cave wall and thought that the motivation to paint them must have been strong. Blue pigment is very rare: someone had gone to great trouble to find and mix these paints. The smaller of the figures had two blue dots for eyes, the larger one brown-dot eyes and a cross that counted for a nose and mouth.
The second man was two metres tall and horizontal. Under his shirt he was reptilian. His skin had been crosshatched like a crocodile’s—every part of it, including his penis. Below him a great serpent, painted in red ochre, reached four metres along the cliff face. The snake’s tongue was striking the sole of the man’s bare foot. This snake was the instrument of doom. Inside its body were stencilled handprints, like signatories to an execution. “I curse your foot, I curse your leg, I curse your heart, your shoulder, your neck,” the guide said quietly. This was not a generic trooper. The people who painted him knew him. They knew his height. They knew the colour of his eyes.
On the slow walk back down, nothing stirred in the bush. I asked the guide if he knew Chris Hurley, a white policeman who had once worked in the near deserted town of Laura down below. Hurley was popular in the Aboriginal communities and frontier towns where he chose to serve. He’d been decorated for his bravery. And he was tall, I said, two metres tall like the figure on the cave wall.
For two years I had been following his story: one morning, two hundred miles away on Palm Island, he’d arrested an Aboriginal man for swearing at him. Forty minutes later, the man, Cameron Doomadgee, was dead on a cell floor with injuries usually seen in fatal car accidents. Hurley claimed his prisoner had tripped on a step.
The guide did not know him. Policemen don’t last long in these places. So many passed through, he said, that it was hard to remember one from another. But he knew the case. Everyone in Queensland knew the case. In a few months’ time, Senior Sergeant Christopher James Hurley was standing trial for manslaughter.
PALM ISLAND’S GRIMY
air terminal was decorated with a collection of the local fourth-graders’ projects on safe and unsafe behaviour. One, a rough drawing of a bottle with a cross through it, read: “Stop Drinking!” Another, “I feel safe when I’m not being hunted.” The island lies between the Great Barrier Reef and the coast of tropical Queensland in the far north-east of Australia. Queensland, a boom state, is rich with minerals, cattle, tourists and retirees—part Texas, part Florida, and twice as big as the two of them rolled together. The reef, with its luxury island resorts, is (as the state’s advertising slogan goes) “beautiful one day, perfect the next”. But no tourists come here to Palm Island. The Aboriginal mayor collected me and the two lawyers I’d travelled with and drove us into town along the narrow road fringing the water. Rocks jutted from the shore. On a boulder someone had spray-painted in purple
TALL MAN
.
In the township there was a jetty, a beer canteen, a hospital, a long-broken wooden clock tower, and one store. Outside the store a child sat in a rubbish bin while another cooled him with a fire hose. In the circle of shade under a tree, more children played a gambling game: some form of two-up, with bottle lids or seed pods landing in the dirt.
Two men who looked to be in their early thirties were stumbling around, leaning on each other.
“They’re brothers,” the mayor said. “They’re blind.”
“Obviously.” I assumed she meant blind drunk. One of the brothers then shook out a white cane and I saw that the men were connected with a piece of string, the man with the cane leading his brother by the wrist. “How did they go blind?”
“Nobody knows.”
Two white women—teachers, or nurses, or police—were walking briskly through the heat in shorts and T-shirts. They looked as awkward and out of place as I felt. “Who are they?” I asked the mayor.
“Strangers,” she answered.
One of the women smiled at me, curious perhaps, and briefly I was unsure whether to reciprocate. I felt incandescently white.
Travelling to Palm Island had been like a sequence in a dream: the pale green sea so luminous and the plane flying so close I could almost see the life in it—dugongs, giant turtles, whales. All around were moored small pristine islands. Then, on the horizon, like a dark green wave, came a larger island. As the plane turned to land, the wilderness unfolded. Mountains of forest met the palm-lined shore, which met mangrove swamps, the coral reef. Then the dream shifted.
