The Tall Man (15 page)

Hurley might have told Murrandoo Yanner he was a reformed racist, but a woman who knew Hurley well during his time in Burketown doesn’t think he was drawn to the communities by a resounding desire to help Indigenous people. Once he was there, he went out of his way to mentor Aboriginal kids, although she says Hurley’s manner could be paternalistic, as in “‘I like ‘em on a case-by-case basis, but they need someone to look after them.” “He was the daddy.”

Do the things that draw a missionary to savage places also lure a cop? Does the cop get the same rush from lawlessness that missionaries get from the godless? Wild places prove who you are, slough off every comfort of a nice house on a nice street with a nice God-fearing family. Maybe some cops use the blue uniform the way the missionary does the crucifix.

And does that cop then face the same dilemma as the missionary? What if the sin is contagious? What if, I wondered again, fighting a war against savagery, you become savage yourself?

I stood in this Anzac Day assembly and wondered if it made more sense in the 1940s, when they sang “God Save the King” and war and the empire were recent memories. Now the boombox played “Advance Australia Fair” and everyone solemnly mouthed the words. The white staff went forward to bow and lay various wreaths upon the shrine. Everyone in these places, they say, knows everyone else’s business. They say there are a lot of “pressure-cooker relationships” and “incestuous affairs”, and in the buildup before the monsoons they often overheat. The rains bring relief but they also mean there is no escape. People don’t stay long. Most of these staff had never heard of Chris Hurley.

There were Australian and New Zealand flags on top of the memorial, alongside the Torres Strait and Aboriginal flags, but they kept slipping off and the CEO had to weigh them down with rocks. He talked about remembering those who had fought for our country’s freedom, those who had gone before us. Some sort of banging started in a nearby house. It wasn’t
their
country set free, or
their
fallen memorialised. The CEO thanked the elders for letting us commemorate the day on this land. Then the group dispersed, the white staff to go to a barbecue at the Police Social Club, the Gee Spot. lest we, I noticed, had been scratched off the memorial. Now it just read
FORGET
.

T
HERE WERE NO
Tall Man stories in Doomadgee. Here there were short men—
gurdidawa
. They were all around us, I was told at Blue Water, on the outskirts of the township, where I was fishing with Elizabeth Doomadgee and her relatives. We’d left Valmae sleeping through the heat of the day and had driven to a bend on the Nicholson River that was Cameron’s maternal grandfather’s country—the country of Jack Diamond, known as Old Catfish, who came in spirit form to talk to Cameron’s mother, Doris, when she was banished to Palm Island. Now Elizabeth and her older brother Lloyd sat on the riverbank. Lloyd had moved back to his parents’ country from Palm Island, and lived here with his wife, Penny, and his kids, to whom he was trying to teach the old ways. Fishing with them was his Aunty Betty.

Aunty Betty, Arthur Doomadgee’s younger sister, sat pulling baby catfish from the water. She had high, sculpted cheekbones, frizzy salt-and-pepper hair seemingly in a natural bouffant, and missing front teeth. She was a grande dame like her mother, Lizzy Daylight, sitting barefoot by the river in a cotton dress. On her hook the fish made squealing noises until she hit them on the head with a rock.

Before us the water, lined with tea-tree barks, was an intense jade green. A Catfish Dreaming track ran from the Northern Territory through Blue Water, and this was the section of the song line for which the family were custodians. The river also had a Bujimala (Rainbow Serpent) Dreaming, but at this bend at least it was not as potent. It was there that day, though. Aunty Betty showed me how the green water had the slightest red sheen, a sign that Bujimala—her mother’s totem—was nearby. A sudden strong breeze arose, then stopped. “It’s the serpent,” she explained. “Rainbow can smell family.” It could smell her and Elizabeth, who sat next to her aunt, enjoying hearing about the old days.

At Blue Water you must never swear or hit children, or the
gurdidawa
will punish you. The short men are believed to be mischievous creatures. They can act malevolently, especially towards strangers, making them lose their way. They can punish or reward by controlling the bounty of food. If you don’t leave them an offering of food, Aunty Betty said, “they won’t support you. They be greedy and horrid things.” But the thing that most offends the
gurdidawa
is people hitting kids. “If you hit kids out here, you’ll never see another part of yourself,” she warned. In other words, you’d go blind, with “bunged-up eyes”.

Victoria, Lloyd’s five-year-old daughter, stood in comet-print underpants, spinning her line effortlessly into the water. She caught a small catfish, then twirled it round and round in the air, its head rhythmically smashing against the ground. Her parents shouted at her not to get too close to the water in case there were crocodiles. Lloyd’s ten-year-old son, Cyril was sitting by himself playing with three cars—a police van, a police sedan, and a fire truck—as if marshaling his own riot response. He was hesitant to talk to me.

Elizabeth once admitted that her parents had taught her not to like white people. Naïvely, I was surprised. “They treated our old people like dogs,” she turned to me and said.

In 1911 the Northern Territory’s government-appointed chief protector of Aborigines came across a cave near Doomadgee containing forty to fifty skeletons of adults and children. His local guide told him they had all been struck by a form of lightning—bullets, the European assumed. David Trigger, who first travelled to Doomadgee in 1978, has written that Aboriginal oral accounts of Wild Time

describe vicious killings of Aboriginal men, women and children by both Whites and members of the Queensland Mounted Native Police Force … smashing children against trees and rocks “so their brains came out” and after shootings, cutting up bodies, burning bodies and hanging up parts of corpses in trees where other Aborigines would later find them.

“I heard your grandfather was born in Wild Time and a white-fella shot him,” I said to Aunty Betty.

She was surprised. “What, you read it in the paper?”

“I read it in the land claim.”

In October 1978, the Waanyi and Garawa tribes lodged a claim to gain ownership of their traditional lands in the Nicholson River area. The 1983 government report, detailing the claim’s success, quotes evidence given by Lizzy Daylight: “My father bin born in the wild time. White men bin scatter em, chase em. They ran away, they might get shot … my father bin shot in the shoulder.”

A hundred years earlier, in 1883, a young Englishwoman at Lorne Hill Station in nearby Waanyi country noted in her diary that the station manager had “40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed around the walls collected during raids after losses of many cattle speared by the blacks”. She also described seeing a woman who’d just been captured: “They brought a new black gin with them; she cannot speak a word of English. Mr Shadforth [the manager] put a rope round the girl’s neck and dragged her along on foot. He was riding. This seems to be the usual manner.” The Aboriginal woman, who spoke only her traditional languages, was left chained to a tree outside the station, “not to be loosed until they think she is tamed”.

Aunty Betty kept fishing. She told me her grandfather, whose name was also Murrandoo, ran over from the Northern Territory border to his mother’s country in the Gulf. “He was running away because whitefellas take the old girls for their sweethearts.” One time Murrandoo ended up in a lagoon, with the troopers shooting on the banks. He is said to have survived underwater by breathing through a lily stalk.

Another relative told me that when Lizzy Daylight was a teenager she was shot at by men on a punitive mission. She fell to the ground, pretending to be dead, while the others around her fled or were shot. Lizzy survived. She was the youngest wife of King Peter—“King” being a title bestowed on tribal elders by Europeans.

To escape the violence of the frontier, Aboriginal men and women in the Gulf country began working on the vast cattle stations that from the late nineteenth century overlaid and cut across their Dreaming tracks. Station managers, unlike missionaries, usually allowed the practice of traditional ceremonies. Blackfellas refer to their ritual activity as “business”, deliberately and cannily flagging its central importance. Aunty Betty told me her mother had been “a big business woman”. Lizzy Daylight was in possession of sacred songs connected to the spiritual forces of the Rainbow Serpent, the Ancestral Spirit with the power to control the weather.

Lizzy and her brother Willy, who died in the early 1990s, were “the ones who sang the serpent so he won’t get angry. They sing his head so he can feel heavy,” Aunty Betty said. They sang the serpent’s chin and his jaw, they sang his eyes to make him blind, they sang his tongue because “his tongue out—that’s the whirlwind. They sang his back so he won’t move. And they sang the tail so the wind won’t get too strong. The head is dangerous and the tail.” Their thrashing created cyclones.

People with particular Dreamings are believed to take on the physical characteristics of their totem. Just as the serpent needed to stay in water, Lizzy Daylight would wrap her feet in wet rags at night to keep her skin moist. She also had a depression in her scalp she called a “serpent hole”. “If she pull one hair, all irons [the roof] would be off the house, the whole place would be all upside down,” Aunty Betty said. Once, she was checking her mother’s hair for
boobies
—lice—when she forgot herself and cracked a louse egg in the serpent hole. “Next thing we hear
Mmmmmmmmmmmm!
Down the waterfall. Rainbow was singing. I killed an egg in her head in the hole. She just got up and she sang and the wind was stopped. She stopped it. She had the song for it.”

Sitting at Blue Water, Aunty Betty was frustrated at not catching fat fish, only “bony, poor one”. The baby catfish made squeaking sounds like plastic squeeze toys, while nearby on the bank lay the pale, scaleless body of a big fork-tailed catfish, its three pairs of fleshy barbels like whiskers around its mouth—her nephew Lloyd’s catch. Aunty Betty told me that because she had not followed the correct protocol while visiting this country—the country of Jack Diamond, her brother’s father-in-law—she’d offended this longdead relative, “so he only gave me little, tiny, little skinny fish”. According to her Law, she should have rubbed her hands and underarms with mud, a custom described as “giving smell” to the Rainbow Serpent. Aunty Betty also said she should have asked the
gurdidawa
, the short men, for the fish properly, “in language”, in Ganggalida.

“When you go for fishing you call that fish
yaguli
. We
ngamanda
for
yaguli, wugunggi yajuli
, we
ngamanda windiyaya yaguli
, and they give us plenty, when we ask ‘em, they give us that thing. We tell them,
yilagadi ngida ngalaja yaguli
, it means ‘go and get wood to cook your fish.’” Aunty Betty was asking the short men for permission to catch the fish and to gather the wood to cook it.

In the mid-afternoon heat, the green water was perfectly still and it felt cooler just to sit nearby. Dragonflies spun past us, and all around were birds, dozens of them, making strange, complex melodies—high, low, joyous, mournful, whole song cycles. It was totally, incredibly vital. Here all nature is believed to be sentient—every rock, every leaf, every bird, every fish has some spirit, and may in fact be closely related to you. Plants and animals are your kin. To me, too, Blue Water seemed somehow alive with an extra dimension.

Cameron was still a mystery to me. It was unnerving. I had approached Hurley through his lawyer to try to hear his side of the story. The senior sergeant refused to speak with anyone, but nonetheless he was becoming familiar. I could learn a lot from talking to people who knew him, and there were points of reference. In many ways it was easier to connect my world to Hurley’s than to Cameron’s.

It was galling to find myself thinking about Cameron’s death but not about who he was. His sisters had involved me in their family but it was a world of children, of providing and worrying and holding things together. It was not Cameron’s world. The men’s sphere was separate. The Doomadgee men were not inclined to talk to me. They were friendly enough but seemed embarrassed if I spoke to them. (“White woman!” one of Valmae’s nephews yelled to her when he answered my calls from Melbourne.) Cameron was two generations from Wild Time and he was one generation—or less, as his older siblings had been raised in the dormitory—from the stolen generations. He’d been sent to a Townsville youth detention centre as a teenager for some minor break-ins, but his friend Lance Poynter told me Cameron had then stayed “on the straight and narrow”.

Sitting with Cameron’s family on their ancestral land, I felt closer to imagining what made him happy. In these communities Aboriginal male culture has kept the traditional element of hunting and fishing that Cameron loved, and added drinking. Fishing is a balm, a respite. Cameron had set out to borrow a boat the morning he died, but in the last hour of his life all his worlds folded in. With Hurley he was back suddenly in Wild Time.

Aunty Betty believed, as did Elizabeth, that Cameron knew some secret about Hurley. “He must have had something on him. ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’—that’s just a song. It’s on a record, eh? But he must have had something on him. That policeman had a reason. Because he was here. He was [at] Burketown. But there’s no need to go all the way to Palm just to kill a boy for no reason,” Aunty Betty went on. “For no reason at all! He must have played up in his mind. He must have played up in his mind and he was thinking,
That Doomadgee!
He’s a Doomadgee mob! … But there’s no need to take him in there and bash him in the jail and he singing out, ‘Help me! Help me!’ And now the little fella lying in his grave and the man still out walking about.”