The Tall Man (10 page)

The sole policewoman at the scene wrote:

I had concerns I would not only be bashed but also raped if they overpowered us. The thought of this happening in front of my husband and colleagues was always on my mind and to this day, still haunts me. I told myself that they would have to rape a dead body as they wouldn’t take me alive, I was prepared to fight them to the end.

I imagined that my front teeth would be knocked out. It is a common occurrence for Aboriginal women to have lost their front teeth because of the violence they endure from their spouses. I honestly believed that at the very least, by the end of the day, I would be in the hospital with no front teeth. Either that or dead.

There was an officer who wanted “to make all the people involved in the riot feel the same helplessness that I had just endured. I wanted revenge.” “Right or wrong,” wrote another, “I have harboured unhealthy desires to seek revenge which often consume all my thoughts.” This was now a kind of war.

IN LATE FEBRUARY 2005
, the Sunday before the inquest began, Elizabeth took me to her church with her daughter Sylvia. It was a plain wooden building with white pews, arrangements of plastic flowers and broken windows. Two white-haired men played steel guitars while we twenty or so people swayed and sang:
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife, but He made something beautiful out of my life!
Everyone clapped for what God had made out of their lives. Then we sang:
Stand up, stand up for Jesus!
Children squirmed like church children everywhere. A little girl in white frills and bows played up and down the aisle. Babies were passed around the congregation and held as if they could bestow some blessing.

The preacher was late, and while we waited we sang, and one parishioner stood up and spoke in praise of the clear blue sky and brilliant sun. A man arrived with his German shepherd. He sat and the dog made small circles until it found a shady spot under his pew.

It was now three months after the riot, and the eighteen men who’d been arrested in the dawn raids were still banned from returning to their homes and families on Palm Island. They were on bail in Townsville under a 7
P.M.
–7
A.M.
curfew, reporting daily to police. They were not allowed contact with other alleged rioters and could not participate in any “event in relation to the death of Cameron Doomadgee”. The police lawyers had argued that if the men returned to Palm Island to attend Cameron’s funeral on December 11, they would use it “as an excuse to further damage property and attack police”. Typically the alleged rioters were staying on the couches of their relatives in Townsville. When, every couple of nights, the police came to check that the men were obeying the curfew, they came between 1
A.M.
and 4
A.M.
and woke the whole house.

Framed on the church wall was a small needlework warning:

How shall we escape

If we neglect so great salvation.

Flee from the wrath to come.

There were four churches on Palm Island; Elizabeth’s was Pentecostal, although we were singing a Lutheran hymn:
Stand up, stand up for Jesus! The strife will not be long. This day the din of battle; the next the victors’ song.
In the 1930s and 1940s Catholic and Anglican missionaries on Palm Island had engaged in bitter competition. Six miles from Palm lies Fantome Island, which until 1973 operated as an Aboriginal leper colony, with a “lock hospital” for those with VD. The two denominations fought over souls, and dying lepers were sometimes baptised more than once.

Christianity had washed easily into Aboriginal religions. People who believed in sorcery had no trouble with miracles or the devil. The transformations that their Ancestral Spirits performed were akin to transubstantiation. And those who had lost everything welcomed the promise that they would see God and inherit the earth.

Elizabeth shared her hymn sheet with me, pointing to a line if my singing slackened. She was happy to be here, inconspicuous in the back row. It gave her relief. “Without this, out there,” she said, gesturing to the community, to the world, “there’s nothing.”

W. E. H. Stanner described the Dreaming as offering a “poetic key to reality”, a mythic lens through which to interpret daily life. For Elizabeth that poetic key had become the Bible. She quoted lines of scripture at random, metaphors that carried her through. They would help her in the following week when she would see in court the man she believed had killed her brother.

In the middle of a hymn, the black preacher made her entrance—a big, stern woman with a long grey plait, and reading glasses on the end of her nose. Her dress hung from her bust like a tent. She sang the loudest, in a high-pitched, strident voice. “Tribulation times are coming!” she cried at the end of the hymn. “And they’re going to be very hard, brothers and sisters!”

She’d been browsing the Web, she said, and now saw the end of the world was nigh. “The returning Lord will come at an unexpected time, but a time with specific observable signs. There are signs all around us. There are murders, there are rapes, there are all kinds of things going on.” I assumed she was talking about Palm Island, but astonishingly she continued: “We are fortunate in this community because nothing has happened to us yet.”

The preacher gestured behind her, perhaps to the steep hills covered in boulders, and told us that, come the apocalypse, stones would rain down. “When he speaks, just at his voice even the rocks cry out and praise him as they smash. Little pebbles crack like his word tells us.” She asked us to ask ourselves: “Am I really clear of all my sins, am I really ready for when he comes, am I prepared?” Millions of people, including a lot of Christians who were not fully committed, were going to have a bad time at the apocalypse. “When he closes the door,” she boomed, “it will be shut to us like the door to the ark after he took Noah and his family in! And the rest of the world was lost! What have we got to say to that?”

From where I sat, the door seemed to have shut a long while ago. I had heard horror stories casually told. In the past six weeks, a man had stabbed and critically wounded his brother over a beer. A woman had bitten off another woman’s lip. A man had poured petrol over his partner and set her alight. The unemployment rate was 92 per cent. The young men here were at least three times more likely to commit suicide than young white men in Townsville. Half the men on Palm Island would die before the age of fifty. This place was a black hole into which people had fallen. Rocks may as well rain down.

We stood to sing:
Yes, Jesus loves me / Yes, Jesus loves me / Yes, Jesus loves me / The Bible tells me so …

Through the window I watched children tossing an inflatable plastic ball, patterned as a globe, bouncing it like capricious gods. Sitting next to her mother, Sylvia was feeding a bottle to a toddler, but she wanted to go out and join the other children. She deposited in my arms this plump baby with dark skin and uncannily bright blue eyes. She was the preacher’s granddaughter and she lay in my lap, sucking at the milk, the fingers of one hand wrapped in mine. Around us, exhausted-looking parishioners sat praying. There were twenty people in this church, trying to hold back the tide.

T
HE DAY BEFORE
, I’d met a policeman, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, fishing off the jetty. As soon as he caught anything, birds swooped down and took it. I asked him how he liked the island. He said he couldn’t believe there were three thousand people here and not even a barber shop. That was strange, and it was strange as well to be locked each night inside the police barracks. All the regular officers had been taken off the island after the riot: he was here on a three-month rotation.

While we were talking, little children approached him. “Can I have a jig, sir?”

He showed them how to use the nylon line with small hooks and coloured glass beads to attract fish.

The kids’ young mother was sitting on the other side of the jetty with her back to the water, staring at the policeman. Oblivious, he looked out to sea. When the children turned to her, excited at having used the jig, she mouthed at them: “He a copper.” She smiled as she did this.

The policeman sat jiggling his line. The sun was setting. The sky, swathed orange and lilac, was shockingly beautiful, but around us it grew dark. While the locals seemed friendly, he said, it frightened him that at any moment they could turn. He recommended I didn’t walk around at night alone. “They are a very violent people,” he said quietly.

Why would a police officer choose to work solely in these communities? In the old days, these were punitive postings, or places for coppers who needed to be hidden from sight. Chris Hurley had put his hand up for such assignments—because Hurley was ambitious. One acquaintance of his told me Hurley had a particular and clear vision of how he planned to progress, one he liked to talk about. Everything had been carefully calculated, tallied. Hurley knew that for a man tough enough to stick it, these communities were the fastest way up the ladder.

“I’m going the whole way,” he’d boasted to an old friend. Hurley was from a police family: his older brother was an officer, and this friend told me that Hurley’s uncle, also an officer, had earned the rank of inspector. Hurley wanted to get at least that far as well. As senior sergeant he needed just one more promotion. So he suffered the discomfort, and put the extra money paid to officers serving in remote communities into a property portfolio; already he had two waterfront apartments in the booming beach town of Burleigh Heads.

But ambition was only part of the explanation. Remote places can be addictive. A well-regarded inspector who served on Palm Island for six years told me how, early in his tenure, he’d been viciously beaten by the locals, but he decided not to be transferred and had subsequently won great respect. “I saw violence mainstream people can’t understand,” he said, violence from which there was no respite. Living on the island was “like living in a fishbowl. There’s no escape. Every bugger knows your business and if they don’t they make it up.” Still, he reckoned those were the best years of his life. Days on Palm, he explained, seemed more vivid, more intense. Somehow life was closer to the surface. And he felt he was making a difference.

There might also be a darker appeal. For someone who feels like an outsider in the mainstream, or undervalued, or unsuccessful, or overlooked, these can be good places, places every Mr Kurtz can go and stockpile ivory—or raw power. Police in these communities have enormous control over people’s lives. “I was like the king of the island,” the inspector recalled. I suggested that this was a temptation some officers succumbed to: the community became their fiefdom. “No,” he said, perhaps misunderstanding what I was getting at. “It was just that it was my place.”

What I didn’t ask the inspector was this: Can you step into this dysfunction and desperation and not be corrupted in some way? In a community of extreme violence, are you, too, forced to be violent? If you are despised, as the police are, might you not feel the need to be despicable sometimes? Could anyone not be overcome by “the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate?” Or had I read
Heart of Darkness
too many times?

I wondered if Chris Hurley had heard the story of Palm Island’s first superintendent, Robert Curry. Mr Curry, known as Boss or Uncle Boss, was an ex–army man who oversaw the settlement of the island throughout the 1920s. The Aboriginal inmates cleared the land and erected buildings, without even a horse or dray, and when eventually a dray came—with no horse—Uncle Boss ordered the men to haul it themselves. It was he who introduced European dancing, and the jazz band and garden competitions. He fired his gun at Christmas. He fired his gun on the beach at seagulls, and while boating, at passing whales.

A Conradian figure himself, Uncle Boss resented the interference of other white officials on the island. As one of them noted, “Mr Curry practically regarded this settlement as a child of his brain.” When rumours spread on the mainland that he was flogging young Aboriginal women, Curry suspected his rivals. But the allegations were true. Without these whippings, he told his superiors, his “authority … would have been weakened”. The violence was his way of maintaining control. He’d turned tyrannical in a place he described as akin to “living on the rim of a volcano”.

Curry hated the Palm Island doctor, and his enmity intensified when his wife died in childbirth. Drinking heavily in his grief, and dosed on novocaine for neuralgia, Curry donned a long red bathing suit, a bullet belt, and with a gun in each hand went on a rampage. First he dynamited his own house with his drugged children inside, then he went out to shoot the doctor and burn down the settlement buildings: to kill the child of his brain. As they burned, white officials gave a gun to a young Aboriginal man, Peter Prior, and deputised him to shoot Curry—and then they hid.

Prior was charged with murder and locked up for six months. The charges were then dropped, but for the rest of his life, Prior would dream of Robert Curry.

Tony Koch, a senior writer for the national newspaper the
Australian
, told me he interviewed Peter Prior when he was very old and both his legs had been amputated due to diabetes. Prior started crying because he was scared to die. God said, “Thou shalt not kill,” and he had.

Like Kurtz, Uncle Boss died in a land he had mistaken for his own.
This country made him die
, sang the old people on the mission.
This place he did not belong to. It was this that made him die
.

A
FTER OUR MORNING
in church, Elizabeth took Boe, Paula and me on a trip to find taro, a tuberous root vegetable that’s a tropical staple. This diversion was not just hospitality. Elizabeth and the lawyers were going into battle together; she wanted to keep them close to her before the inquest began.

Halfway up a mountain, Boe could coax the borrowed four-wheel drive no farther. “Think of Jesus,” Elizabeth urged him. But Boe was an atheist. He parked and lay under a tree while we three women set off through the old mission’s abandoned plantation. I was carrying a shovel, and Paula a pair of Elizabeth’s boots.