The Tall Man (17 page)

The next day TJ picked me up to go fishing with his wife, Sasha, and their three children. In a town where there was nothing much else to do, fishing was the highest form of hospitality. TJ was lean, handsome, athletic, and a heavy drinker. “I was born to drink beer, everyone in the Gulf is,” he said. Beer transcended race. As he pointed out, the only place open after five o’clock was the pub. To buy furniture or clothes or a book was an eight-hour drive to Mount Isa, but “they made it very convenient to grog-face in the Gulf.” “Grog-face means to be alcoholic, as “money-face” means to gamble, and “tucker-face” means to overeat. TJ was unemployed but was about to start working at Century Mine, Australia’s largest zinc mine, 150 kilometres south of Burketown. Murrandoo had mounted a campaign against its development in the mid-1990s for environmental and spiritual reasons. But TJ didn’t want to go on just surviving.

We sat at a river bend surrounded by white-trunked eucalypts and paperbarks. White waterlilies floated on the water. Sasha, a quiet, flawless Doomadgee girl, didn’t want the kids getting too close because of crocodiles, or too far back because of snakes.

TJ strung a series of fishing lines in the water. They were baited with bright lime-green-and-yellow frogs he stored in a coffee tin. He moved lithely, stepping quickly on a network of eucalypts’ boughs to avoid the water, adjusting and checking each line as if playing some complicated song. He caught a large catfish and rebaited the line with a northern dwarf tree frog,
Litoria bicolour
, the type you see on tourist brochures. TJ’s toddler son liked playing with the frogs, holding them by their slender legs until they escaped. He chased after them, crying, and was given others to play with.

“Wherever blacks are to be met with, the little boys indulge in aping the arts of war as practised by their elders,” wrote W. E. Roth in 1906. In Burketown, Roth saw boys with toy spears, and in other places miniature woomeras, or spear throwers, and shields. “Natives regard the man according as he can hold his own in fighting and hunting.”

I wanted to steer the conversation to Hurley but TJ was giving me a lesson in Gulf etiquette. In traditional hunter-gatherer communities, there are no Hurleys to go to; in broken hunter-gatherer communities, like Burketown, the Hurleys are obstacles to be manoeuvered around—for the men, anyway.

“Like just say I have argument with someone at the pub,” said TJ. “You’ve got that mentality that to ring policeman, you’re a frightened cunt, you’re a yellow-bellied, lily-livered cunt and you can’t deal with your own problem, you have to go and get
bulliman
. For a blackfella to get a policeman on another blackfella is just a downright dirty thing,” he explained. “If someone fucks around with your pride or dignity it’s up to you to sort it out yourself. If someone stole my car I’d just wait till I found him, then I’d break his fucking legs.”

Being on bad terms with the law was a Yanner family tradition. TJ remembered collecting his piggybank money to bail his father out of jail. His father was ‘a tough old cunt’ and he would fight police if he thought they were bullying blackfellas.

Later, I met the simmering Vernon Yanner, taller than his brothers, a sleek mover with the same gruff charm. Vernon openly despised the police. He claimed when he was last arrested he’d been given a beating by the coppers while he was handcuffed.

“Some lads out here accomplished fighters,” he told me. “Half been to prison for four, five years, fighting every fucking week in prison, then they get out. In the pub, thirty, forty fights over a year, over two years, and no cunt’s knocked them on the arse. Not nasty men, but just fucking brilliant pugilists.” I got the feeling Vernon was talking about himself. “If someone’s getting cheeky, they may be asked to step out into the street. People around here are brought up that way.” This was in part a reaction to the mission days, when “girls had to lift their dresses over their heads so the old missionary could see if they had pants on.” (On Palm Island, too, I heard that young women in the dormitory had to line up and lift their dresses to prove they were wearing clean underpants.) “People got tied up like a dog with a chain in the hot heat,” Vernon went on, “because of hunting and giving too much feed to his sisters locked up in the mission. The older generation been beaten down and the younger generation brought up different … they’re saying, ‘I’d like to see the cunts do that to us.’ So everyone’s got a bit of aggression in them. Everyone’s got to be able to fight, it’s just a natural thing.”

TJ Yanner didn’t like police much, but he thought a lot of Chris Hurley. The word he used was “charisma”. “Because Hurley was charismatic it never gave you an inch to throw him out of the circle. He wasn’t too hard to like. He didn’t walk past without saying g’day, even if he didn’t like you. If he didn’t like you, there was all the more reason to come past you and say g’day, and find out what you were doing. He was fun. He’d get up and dance, and make a clown of himself, and come up with some jokes. He could make you laugh, that cunt.”

Or make you cry. When one girlfriend left him, Hurley told the Yanners’ mother, he’d found a message scratched in his saucepan—
Fuck You!

Sasha, TJ’s wife, said he was a womanizer. He liked white women and black women. In Murrandoo’s words, “He’d screw anything that wasn’t nailed down.” At least one wife in the town had considered leaving her husband for him. Murrandoo said there was a rumour that the woman’s husband offered “ten, twenty thousand for anyone stupid enough to knock him off “.

“He was drunk there one time at the hall,” Sasha said. “He was on the dance floor, he lift me up and swinging me around.” He did the same at another dance and the girl hit her head on the concrete. He was “too bloody exuberant”, the man who saw this told me. “Big people don’t get it, they don’t understand their own strength.”

Chris Hurley was a man of large appetites. He was the life of the party. He was loud, raucous, opinionated—and with a lot of people, after fifteen minutes or so, the act wore thin. The girl working the cash register at the Burketown service station told me: “I thought he was a sleaze.” In 1995, in the Cape York community of Kowanyama, and in 1998, in Surfers Paradise, he’d been the subject of formal complaints of sexual harassment from female police officers. The Crime and Misconduct Commission declared both complaints unsubstantiated.

Now, by the river, TJ’s children climbed a gum’s diagonal bough, riding it. One child fell flat onto her back. She was shocked and her face crumpled into tears, and I rushed to pick her up. Shortly afterwards TJ’s toddler son plonked down on a chair that folded in on him and he too fell and wept. Again, almost without thinking, I rushed to steady him. TJ told me it was better to leave them. He wanted his children to be able to look after themselves, to be able to fight. His wife could give a man a black eye if she needed to. TJ had concluded it was better to be nasty in this world. Otherwise people made you their bitch. He quoted a Slim Dusty song:

It’s a hard, hard country

It’s a hard, hard land

And to live in it you gotta be

A hard, hard man.

TJ sat drinking, not catching many fish. He planned to swap the catfish for turtle with a relative. He complained about a man who had come fishing with money in his pocket, so no one had caught anything. I had a credit card in mine and wondered if it was my fault.

C
OPS
, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
wrote, “contain explosive contradictions within themselves. Supposed to be law-enforcers, they tend to conceive of themselves as the law … They are attached umbilically to the concept of honesty, they are profoundly corrupt. They possess more physical courage than the average man, they are unconscionable bullies.”

Those contradictions find expression in all manner of ways. One white woman in her fifties told me that the first time she met Hurley in the Burketown Pub, he told her to sit on his knee, even though, as she put it, she was old enough to be his mother. When she declined he told her he was in charge of police and she’d have to do as he said.

If Hurley tended to conceive of himself as the law, it was partly because in Burketown he
was
the law. The white law, at least. And in Burketown, summary justice—cops doling out on-the-spot punishment with their fists—was not far removed from the Yanners’ philosophy of payback.

As Murrandoo Yanner told the
Australian
journalist Tony Koch in his December 2004 interview: “Had he not been a policeman, him and me would have been identical in many ways … Like him, I will take on the black or white who talks shit to me. He was a thug and a mug. I am the same.” Yanner continued, “He liked to give blokes a touch up if they got out of line … He only had one fault—he couldn’t keep his hands to himself …”

If a man hits his wife in a place as isolated as Burketown, given the way the legal system works, it takes too long and costs too much to get him locked up. Then the man’s released on bail, or the wife doesn’t want to press charges. He hits her again. According to one school of thought, it’s better to just give him a “touch-up”. Teach him a lesson.

For Murrandoo, the Dirty Harry syndrome had a lot going for it. “[Hurley] was a good copper, but we have a twisted view of what a good copper is,” Murrandoo told me. “A lot of people would rather have a fight with a copper, even if they’re breaking the law. If you half win, or don’t come off too bad, you’d rather that than a bunch of trumped-up charges where you got no chance in the legal system—a white jury in Mount Isa, this and that.”

Murrandoo remembered seeing a young man with a bruised face who alleged he’d been assaulted by Hurley. “I went down the next day, banged on the police station door, and Hurley was pretty busted up, so this young fella had given him a bit of a hiding too.” The sergeant had been driving past and seen the young man kicking his brother in the head. “His own brother!” Yanner said, disgusted. “Hurley got out to arrest him, so he give Hurley a touch-up. So Hurley give him a touch-up.”

In September 2001, Vernon Yanner and Hurley also had “a big knuckle-up” when Hurley, after a session at the pub, decided to confiscate Vernon’s new motorcycle. Vernon told me:

He was driving off on it so I threw my boot at him, crash-tackled him off my bike, ended up wrestling there in the gutter. He had my head underwater for a while, trying to drown me. Then I had his head under the water for a while, trying to drown him. I had his head underwater when the boys pulled me off him … We won’t stop until one of us weren’t kicking.

Murrandoo said to me after we had the fight, “Go and apologise to Hurley then you won’t be charged. He wants you to apologise to him.”

And I said, “Fuck him.”

And he said, “Well, fuck him, but still he’ll charge you with this and that. You don’t have to like it, just go and apologise and you won’t be charged.”

I went up and apologised to him at the police station: “Sorry about that.”

He just went off: “You little smart cunt! You should fucking take a leaf out of your brother’s book, you cunt! I should just fucking take you to jail now!”

And I said, “Get fucked, you cunt! I’ll see you in court.”

“So you don’t want me to drop charges?”

“No, not if you’re going to speak to me like this. You can go fuck yourself.”

And I walked out. I didn’t like him full stop.

Hurley charged Vernon, but later, in light of the circumstances, the charges were dropped.

In the old days they would have said Hurley had gone native. Perhaps the authority he wielded and the town and the heat brought it out. The heat in the tropics attacks like a swarm of insects. It crawls over the skin. People wait for the storm, for the lightning to streak across the sky. Add booze and loathing and guns to the claustrophobia, add the habit of violence among men who don’t put much premium on psychology but stand at the bar and compare the size of the snakes they’ve found in their gardens, and it does feel like a fever.

Or maybe Hurley was already wired that way, was just—as Murrandoo Yanner said—a thug and a mug.

After three years in Burketown, Hurley settled down with a barmaid called Narelle. She was more than a decade younger than him, a big-boned, blonde girl. “She was an all right person,” Vernon said, “pretty quiet, hadn’t got too many bad sides even though she was with him.” But how do you settle down in a place like Burketown?

This town was full of old war veterans and crocodile hunters and missionaries who believed supermarket bar codes were the work of the devil. The gun-loving publican’s blonde wife wore only evening clothes. And there was Murrandoo Yanner, the gentlemen outlaw. Narelle’s boss, the publican, did not get on with the Yanners. As the animosity grew, he installed barbed-wire fences, security cameras and guard dogs. Some patrons reckoned he put something in an air-vent to get them out around closing time. They left coughing and spluttering. The publican complained to Hurley’s superiors that the sergeant was too close to the Yanners. Murrandoo claims that Hurley was warned by the police hierarchy to pull back, that he came to him troubled about what he should do.

The year 2001 was a crucial one for Hurley. There was talk among other police in the Gulf region about the sergeant’s seeming lack of control, over both the Burketown locals and himself. He had applied for a promotion to senior sergeant of the nearby Aboriginal community of Mornington Island (population 1,200), seventy miles northwest of Burketown. When he missed out, the Yanners said, he was acutely disappointed. For a man with a plan like his, the rejection was a major setback.

As Murrandoo saw it, rather than blaming the police hierarchy who had slighted him, Hurley seemed to blame the community—in other words, Murrandoo and his brothers. This was also how a local white cattle station owner saw it: “He’d come with the best of intentions; he tried to help and became compromised by the Yanners.”

Hurley withdrew. He didn’t go to the school to work with kids as much. He chose not to socialize at the pub. He had put up with all of them for three years and it had not paid off. Heeding the warnings of his superiors, the sergeant pulled back from the Yanners and soon had his eye on the prize again. One day a visitor to Burketown got trapped in a culvert. Murrandoo’s uncle Johnny Yanner went to Hurley and told him if they did not act, the man would drown. Hurley didn’t wait for the rescue team to arrive; he drilled into the culvert and they saved the man. For this, in 2002 he received a Police Commissioner’s Certificate in recognition of his “intelligence, promptitude, resourcefulness and dedication to duty far exceeding what might reasonably be expected from a member of the police service in the execution of his duty”. Hurley’s career was back on track.