The Tall Man (13 page)

At first Roy had told police that although he hadn’t seen where Hurley’s punches landed, he assumed it was Cameron’s face. Now he wanted to say they must have been to Cameron’s ribs, where the fatal injuries were. He tried to convince Martin and the audience that in his first statement to Darren Robinson the day after Cameron’s death, he was too frightened to say what he’d seen. He now looked at this statement and declared, “Every word what I said in that statement I didn’t say.”

The whole community had heard Roy’s story and now they were watching. But under legal examination the story was slipping away. He could feel it. The lawyers could feel it. Those sitting watching could feel it. Roy was changing his testimony in order to—heroically, he thought—show that Hurley had caused Cameron’s injuries. But in fact he was undermining the case.

Roy now said he’d stood up in his chair to see beyond the filing cabinet. He described Hurley’s position: “Well, he had his knees on Cameron.”

Terry Martin: “He had his knees on what?”

Roy Bramwell: “On Cameron.”

Roy’s frustration was palpable. He needed to do something to convince the coroner. Unbidden, he stood up and rested his knee on the ground, as he alleged Hurley had done, and punched towards the rib area.

Terry Martin: “And that’s both knees on him?”

Roy Bramwell: “Oh, just one.”

Terry Martin: “And where was the other knee?”

Roy Bramwell: “It was on the side … one on him and the other one just like on the ground.”

For a moment everything went silent. Suddenly I could see it all clearly: a big tall man’s knee pressed on the chest of someone pinned against a concrete floor. The knee pushing down.

I
N COURT THE
next morning, Boe was the first lawyer on his feet. He wanted to make an application for Aboriginal witnesses to be given more assistance, then he added, “I should place on the record, Your Honour, that Your Honour visited my quarters last night.”

It was true. The previous night, in the motel, there had come a hard rapping on the door. “I have a warrant,” a man’s voice boomed. Paula, Boe and I stopped in our tracks. It was Michael Barnes, in shorts and a T-shirt.

He and Boe greeted each other warmly. Boe invited him in and encouraged him to have a beer. The coroner looked pleased to have company. We all spoke of how depressing the day had been. (So this is how lawyers talk when they get together, I thought.) But at some point Boe must have had reservations about all this conviviality. It wasn’t appropriate to be fraternizing. If the police in the barracks next door had seen this, it could have jeopardised the inquest.

Next, Peter Callaghan stood up in court and announced: “It is our submission you cannot continue to preside in this proceeding.” The night before, he’d finally got to see a number of Hurley’s complaint files, which had just arrived from Brisbane. In all of them, Coroner Michael Barnes—in his former job—had personally signed off in Hurley’s favour.

This was bad enough for Barnes, but in a short adjournment Boe made it very much worse. He told Steve Zillman about Barnes’s visit the night before. When the court resumed, Zillman and the police commissioner’s lawyers joined the call for the coroner to stand down.

Steve Zillman: “I’m informed that you initially banged on the door of the quarters. That Mr Boe came to the door. That you informed him that you had a warrant … That a beer was offered to you and accepted by you and drunk.”

The coroner looked wretched. He looked like a man who’d come to work and found his head in a noose. Humiliated, Barnes had no choice but to stand down. It was March 1, 2005. It would be August before the inquest reconvened.

It says something about Andrew Boe that he was prepared to put the principle first. How much easier it would have been to remain on cosy terms with everyone. And it was going to cost him: it was going to make the inquest longer, and for him, especially—working pro bono—more expensive.

The inquest had collapsed. While the lawyers packed their wheelie bags with documents, the Palm Islanders asked one another what had happened. They were unsurprised by the hearing’s dissolution. White law was like that. And yet there was a feeling on the island that something just might happen. With all this momentum, there was a chance.

At that moment, as if on cue, the Aboriginal activist Murrandoo Yanner arrived from his home in the Gulf country. The name Murrandoo means “whirlwind”, and it’s one he lives up to. A charismatic princeling, he walked into the hall of comatose reporters like a rock star. Murrandoo was the leader of a Ganggalida clan; Cameron’s maternal grandmother, Lena Diamond, and stepgrandmother, Lizzy Daylight, were both Ganggalida women. The Doomadgee sisters, his distant cousins, clung to him as cameras flashed all around.

Murrandoo, thirty-four, was a hero to some, to others a thug. Since Cameron’s death he had been advocating old-style payback, claiming resistance was honourable. “Deck that policeman hurting your brother, burn that station hiding a murderer. Stop bashing wives and start bashing racist coppers.” It was a clunky reformulation of Malcolm X’s “The time for you and me to allow ourselves to be brutalized non-violently has passed.” Had Hurley been subjected to Aboriginal law, he might have been speared in the leg in retribution—or something worse, perhaps—and everyone else spared much pain, anguish, time, and money.

• • •

M
URRANDOO HAD COME
to Palm Island to support the Doomadgee family and to lead a smoking ceremony—a kind of Aboriginal exorcism—outside the newly erected police station. It had been seventy years since anyone had seen such a ceremony on Palm Island; the missionaries had discouraged the practice. “The whole purpose of the smoking ceremony,” Yanner told me, “is where people have suicided, or been murdered, or die in an accident, violently, and a lot of things were left undone, unsaid. They didn’t know they were going on to the next life, so their spirit’s extremely troubled. Then, it may linger.” The smoking ceremony could relieve the feeling of being haunted, and stop the dead from visiting the dreams of the living. “It allows the spirit to go on to the better life, the afterlife,
ging-gari
in our language. Heaven for us Ganggalida people.”

Early next morning, the sky was overcast and cockatoos screeched as Murrandoo covered the arms of Cameron’s friends and family with red ochre, symbolising blood, to bind them with the dead man’s spirit. The men in the group included Roy Bramwell, Patrick Nugent and Eric Doomadgee. They took off their shirts. Then everyone circled around a bucket of coals and burning eucalyptus branches, before retracing Eric’s father’s last steps.

The group stood outside the glorified aluminum shed that was the new station. Tony Koch, some builders, the police officers currently posted to the island, the region’s Police superintendent, Andrew Boe and I stood watching. Koch, who was close to Murrandoo, worried for his friend: a picture of him had been found on a rifle target used for practice by the SERT squad, the team that had arrested the rioters.

Murrandoo carried the bucket of coals inside the station; the assembly following as if magnetised. “The smoke purifies, cleanses, and it’s a rebirth,” he told me later that morning. “It’s a genesis in that as the wood and timber is burning away, eroding, dying, a new thing is released, far purer, far lighter, far more able to move freely, almost as free as the wind smoke is.”

People named after meteorological phenomena were traditionally believed to have the power to produce them. But Murrandoo struck me as caught in his own whirlwind. As leader of the ceremony, he was in an excruciating position. He was grieving with the Doomadgee family, but he also held in high regard the man they believed had killed Cameron. Murrandoo Yanner counted Chris Hurley as a friend. He knew him better than anyone on the island.

In 1998, when Hurley was thirty-two, he had been promoted to sergeant and posted to Burketown in the Gulf country. There he and Murrandoo became close. The policeman often visited the Aboriginal leader and his wife for dinner, and was much loved by their four sons. In December 2004, Murrandoo had spoken of their friendship in an interview with Tony Koch, titled “Yanner’s Bitter Dilemma”:

“I have a real pain in my heart,” Yanner told
The Weekend Australian
. “I am a proud Aboriginal man and I will never deviate from standing beside my people, no matter what the circumstances. But Hurley was the most decent copper I have ever known and he was definitely no racist … We got drunk together dozens of times and he used to come to my place and eat meals with my family. He was the only copper who ever got into my house without a gun or a search warrant in his hand. I trusted him. He used to give his own time to take Murri [Queensland Aboriginal] kids from Burketown on camps to places like Lawn Hill Gorge. Once he took my oldest boy. I wouldn’t usually let any copper touch my dog, but I trusted this bloke with my son.”

Yanner has vivid memories of a conversation with Hurley in which the policeman told of the day he recognised and decided to confront his own inherent racism.

At the time Hurley was stationed in the Torres Strait and was out searching at night for a fisherman who was lost. “Hurley said he was swearing and cursing about the black so-and-so but after a while he looked at the stars and listened to himself and said, ‘I am a racist.’ That was the turning point for him. It changed him. They eventually found the Islander lad who was lost and later Hurley’s sister came to that same island where the bloke came from and they treated her like a princess.”

Murrandoo handed Carol Doomadgee, as Cameron’s eldest sister, a cloth soaked in red ochre. The building now had to be raddled with an unbroken red line circling the walls, to symbolise that it had been cleansed. The ochre was not to be washed off. Carol wiped the cloth in a continuous line along the pristine aluminum of the police station, and of course it looked like blood.

^fn1
The Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) was established in 1989 to investigate claims against the Queensland Police Service in the wake of the Fitzgerald inquiry into corruption. The CJC was replaced with the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) in 2001.

THE STORIES OF
Chris Hurley and Cameron Doomadgee both led to the Gulf of Carpentaria. I decided to follow them there. It was a part of Australia I knew only by legend. The Gulf country is the Wild West in another guise, a lingering frontier replete with free-ranging cattle, rodeos, cowboys and people of no fixed address. The arid plains shimmer in the heat and at night travellers on the primitive back roads are said to be mesmerised by Min Min lights uncannily hovering before them. Murrandoo Yanner’s hometown of Burketown, on the Gulf waters, was where Hurley lived from 1998 to 2002. Sixty miles from Burketown is Doomadgee—the Aboriginal settlement Cameron’s family came from, and where Hurley also sometimes worked. There had to be clues in both places. But if I turned up alone, would anyone speak to me?

Elizabeth and Valmae wanted to come along to visit their family. Elizabeth’s eldest daughter had been living in Doomadgee for ten years, and Elizabeth wanted to see her grandchildren before they got too “rusty”. Valmae was thinking of moving her family back to Doomadgee because, she said, the Bible shows one catastrophe usually heralds another: she worried Palm Island might be hit by a tsunami.

I met the sisters in Townsville. They were carrying their possessions in plastic bags. I bought them each a travel bag and we flew to Mount Isa—over the mining town’s smokestacks—then boarded a smaller plane that stopped like a bus at different Gulf towns, including Doomadgee. The other passengers, about fifteen of them, were government workers and locals. Two young Aboriginal women were flying home from hospital holding their newborn babies.

A private detective sat in the vinyl seat behind me. He was taking the flight to Cairns, the last stop. He’d been on a plane like this when it nosedived after striking a kangaroo on the runway. In the old days, he said, men stood along the Mount Isa airstrip firing shotguns to frighten them away; now there was a PA system to replicate the sound of rifles. When we reached five thousand feet, we heard, over the hum of the engine and propellers, an alarmlike whirring. The copilot emerged from the cockpit, his face shiny with sweat, to listen. He joked to the detective it was most likely a vibrator going off in the baggage hold, then he leaned close to my face. “It’s probably an
adult’s
toy.”

From the air, serpentine river trails were marked in green, and the land itself glowed raw red-purple. It was elemental, literally. The periodic table, inlaid under its surface—Cu, Pb, Zn, Au, Ag, Ni, U—was expressed in vast dusty mines stretching out beneath us. Elizabeth looked out of the plane window. “Don’t be surprised if you see a dinosaur bone,” she said.

The earth was also marked by countless crisscrossing song lines or Dreaming tracks, laid during the creation period, when Ancestral Spirits formed the land. “While creating this topography, they were morphing constantly from animal to human and back to animal again,” “rather like the Greek gods,” explains the writer Robyn Davidson. In the old days, when the Gulf Aborigines travelled, they remembered the layout of the land from song cycles about the Dreaming ancestors. This was akin to knowing
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
by heart and then using that knowledge to make the land intelligible. Parts of the songs explained the natural features left by the spirits, and travellers followed these song lines like power lines that gave them their own spiritual charge. An Aboriginal man trying to explain this phenomenon in terms a European might understand told W. E. H. Stanner: “Old Man, you listen! Something is there; we do not know what;
something …
like engine, like power, plenty of power; it does hard-work; it pushes.”