The Tall Man (26 page)

T
HE PROSECUTION’S FIRST
group of witnesses were the Palm Island residents who had seen Cameron Doomadgee being arrested and taken into custody. Peter Davis wanted to prove that Cameron had not done much “to deserve being arrested” and that Hurley strong-arming him into the van was “the spark” that ignited the fatal events. But in the trial’s opening days, these witnesses, who had all previously testified at the inquest, did not do the prosecution’s case any favours.

Penny Sibley, who claimed Hurley had punched Cameron outside the police station, was gravely ill with a weak heart and diabetes. The prosecution lawyers collected her from hospital and made sure she had the right medication while she waited to testify. As she gave evidence she shook as if in a storm, her whole body shivering. In each hand she held a white washcloth to wipe away sweat or tears. On her wrist was a plastic hospital ID band. Looking down, she told the court, very softly, that she’d been standing outside the police station when she saw Cameron, drunk and swearing, hit Senior Sergeant Hurley. Hurley, she said, then gave him a quick hard jab to the ribs. She told the jury she had started crying, worried for Cameron. She sounded vague, hesitant.

Next to appear was Doomadgee’s friend Gerald Kidner, who had been walking with Cameron the morning he was arrested. In his oversize grey down jacket and dirty high-top sneakers, Kidner looked as if he’d just stepped in from the Perfume Gardens opposite the courthouse, where blackfellas sat in the pagoda among the tropical plants, drinking and hassling for money. Kidner was overwhelmed and sat very still in the witness box, speaking in short sentences as if unable to make longer connections. He told the court he and Cameron were drinking together at his house, with Verna, his partner. The three of them set off down Dee Street, where Cameron “keep singing the song, ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ … Chris pull up and locked him up then.”

Steve Zillman asked Gerald about the day before the death. Did he remember going to the mainland in a dinghy to get cheap cask wine and beer with Verna, Cameron Doomadgee and Patrick Nugent? Gerald said he’d been too drunk to remember. But he did recall waking the next morning—the morning Cameron died—and seeing his friend watching a kung fu movie,
Enter the Dragon
.

Zillman: “And Cameron was then drinking from a cask?”

Kidner: “Yeah.”

Zillman: “That was moselle?”

Kidner: “Yeah.”

Zillman: “And he also had some goom, didn’t he?”

Kidner: “Yeah, methylated spirits.”

Zillman: “That’s right. Just for the record,
g-o-o-m
, goom?”

Kidner: “Yeah.”

Zillman: “Metho and water?”

Kidner: “Yeah.”

Zillman: “And you had a bit of a drink yourself too, didn’t you?”

Kidner: “Yeah, there was only a bit was in it.”

Gerald’s partner, Verna Snyder, took the stand next, wearing shorts and a filthy jacket of balloon material that hid her emaciated frame. She had been walking with the men when Cameron was arrested. At the inquest in February 2005, she had broken down in the middle of her testimony and the coroner had allowed her to stand down. Now she spoke with her hand over her mouth, covering her face as if she’d just been hit. She, too, was shaking from what might have been DTs. When Zillman got to her, it was hopeless. Asked how much Cameron had drunk, she shook, thinking she was the one on trial: “No. I don’t drink. Never!”

Then came Gladys Nugent, big and shy, with a double chin, her hair tied back. As one of the victims of Roy Bramwell’s assault, she had the misfortune of being the reason Chris Hurley was in Dee Street in the first place. Gladys told Peter Davis that Hurley had taken her to Bramwell’s house to get her medication. While he was there, her nephew Patrick started abusing him and was locked up. Then Cameron came past. She didn’t see him do anything but he was locked up too. Both men were now dead.

Steve Zillman rose. His melodious voice issued from a tight mouth, which he pursed when asking certain questions. “How much did you drink, Ms Nugent?”

Gladys Nugent: “I drank all night.”

Zillman: “You drank—well, you started at about eleven, half past eleven in the morning on the Thursday. Do you agree with that?”

Nugent: “Yeah.”

Zillman: “And you drank …?”

Nugent: “All night.”

Zillman: “… Through the rest of the morning, all through the afternoon, and all through into the night?”

Nugent: “Yeah.”

She sat perfectly still. Zillman stood with his hands on his hips, a small gut protruding from his thin frame. He seemed to eke her hopeless story out of her, extracting it with relish. Having been in the back seat of the police van when Doomadgee was arrested, she did not see the actual arrest, admitting, “I don’t remember anything much.” Zillman, with what looked very like a leer, still suggested she was unreliable.

Zillman: “Tell me, were you affected by the alcohol that you’d had? You’d had a fair bit if you’d started drinking at 11:30 in the morning the day before?”

Nugent: “Well, when I got outside, it was a hard hit and I started sobering up a bit.”

Zillman: “When you got hit?”

Nugent: “Yeah, I got hit. I got knocked down, kicked …”

Zillman: “Mmm?”

Nugent: “Hit by chair.”

Zillman: “Kicked and what, sorry?”

Nugent: “Hit with a chair.”

Zillman: “With a chair?”

Nugent: “Yeah.”

Zillman: “Yes, that sobered you up a bit?”

Nugent: “Yeah.”

Gladys didn’t flinch as he went at her. She answered without emotion, looking back at him. She’d been beaten before and would be again. Hunched slightly in her faded clothes, rolls of fat on her back, Gladys Nugent stood for everything white Australia doesn’t want to know about black Australia. She was alcoholic, diabetic, and she had heart trouble. She told the court about drinking all day and night, being bashed, binging on methylated spirits; about her partner, Roy, being in jail; about her nephew Patrick sniffing petrol and hanging himself. She had a kind of plain, obstinate dignity. And fleetingly it was not clear who was more abject here—Gladys or the lawyer paid to hector her.

Chris Hurley, statuesque in his good suit, looked like a banker watching a play about lives in some far-flung ghetto. But at the end of the first day, as he was whisked into a waiting car, a barefoot black drunk stood on the side of the road yelling, “You’re a killer! You’re a killer! Who let the dogs out?”

That evening I ran into Aunty Betty sitting at a bus stop with her pillow and a plastic bag of clothes. I had last seen her fishing for catfish by the river outside Doomadgee. She was now travelling to a funeral. Borrowing a pen, she drew a picture for me on her hand to explain how Hurley had definitely not fallen on Cameron. She stared at her skin, satisfied this proved the matter conclusively.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
—and on every one of the seven mornings of the trial—Aboriginal activist, nurse and lecturer Gracelyn Smallwood, whose grandfather and father had been sent to Palm Island, organized a small demonstration on the footpath outside the courthouse. Witty, feisty, and one of nineteen children, Smallwood had done her homework on a typewriter her brothers pulled off a rubbish heap. It had no ribbon: she would type indentations onto a sheet of paper and then fill them in with a pencil. When she began her nursing training in northern Queensland, black workers in the state’s health department had to tie string around their coffee cups so their white colleagues did not drink from them by mistake. In 2000 Gracelyn intervened when she saw police hassling an Aboriginal youth. She was arrested and taken to a watch house, where she was strip-searched, had police dogs set on her, and was made to defecate in front of four officers. When the police saw her identification, showing her to be a professor, they asked whose wallet she’d stolen.

Outside the courthouse, Gracelyn wore a T-shirt emblazoned stop black deaths in custody. Surrounded by a scraggly group of twenty or so supporters, she made a spirited speech appealing to mothers—white and black—for their help. Then three Aboriginal dancers in body paint and with feathers in their hair danced calling on the Ancestral Spirits for backing.

The Doomadgee family stood holding hands with Gracelyn and the other supporters. Among them was a South African woman in full traditional dress: bright orange robes, a stiff, bright orange hat, ropes of beads. She held hands with Claudelle Doomadgee, who looked like she’d dressed from a Salvation Army bin, wearing a huge checked coat over a floral dress over track pants, completed by a beanie in Aboriginal colours.

We were all now sorted into our respective castes—blackfella, copper, lawyer, journalist. A murmur went around the watching media pack that the South African woman, a friend of Gracelyn’s, was a distant relation of Steve Biko.

“Who’s Steve Biko?” a blonde newsreader asked me. She was the girlfriend of one of the cops at the riot.

After the demonstration Elizabeth told me: “They trying to make out Cameron a short man.” She seemed offended by the suggestion that her brother was felled by Hurley’s height.

Lloyd Doomadgee suggested he could stand up in the courtroom and show everyone how tall he was. He reckoned he was the same height as his brother, and Lloyd was over six foot—taller still in his black Akubra hat. “They’d get a surprise,” he said. He’d brought along his young children, who couldn’t stop staring at Townsville’s buildings, all of eight storeys high; after Doomadgee, these were skyscrapers.

In the courtroom, on day two of the trial, the prosecution called the pathologist who conducted Cameron’s first autopsy, Dr Guy Lampe. Lampe had been a pathologist since 2001. Tanned, with his dark hair parted at the side, he wore a grey suit, light blue shirt, navy tie. His manner, earnest and oddly genial, was the same as it had been two years earlier when he testified at the inquest. Suddenly, eyes crinkling, he would burst into awkward mirth. He might have been discussing his favourite restaurant, rather than what he’d found on November 23, 2004, when he cut Cameron open.

This man with a black eye had died not of a head injury, but from massive internal injuries, Dr Lampe testified. “His liver was ruptured and there was a hole in the portal vein that supplies blood to the liver, and that had led to a considerable amount of bleeding into his stomach cavity.” Lampe explained that without enough blood circulating to his vital organs, Cameron would quickly have died. His blood-alcohol level was at least five times the legal driving limit, but, Lampe revealed, his liver was not cirrhotic. It was no more vulnerable to injury than anyone else’s.

Dr Lampe, along with the two doctors Davis called after him, claimed that Cameron must have been close to flat on his back, pressed hard against the police station floor. The fatal force was applied to his front. Since his liver had all but cleaved in two, it must have been pushed down violently against his spine. The injury required some kind of projection and a “squeezing mechanism”. Hurley’s knee, being round and smooth, wouldn’t leave external markings and was therefore a likely candidate.

Dr Lampe noted that he didn’t encounter such injuries very often:

In fact the times that we see it, it’s usually involved with high speed motor vehicle trauma, motorbike accidents, some aircraft injuries … You know, high speed trauma, or falls from heights, or people having sporting injuries—so falls from horses, injuries coming down ski slopes and hitting trees, things like that.

But the pathologist had never seen a liver split “this big with a rupture of a portal vein”. Usually, he said, a portal-vein wound would be caused by a stab or gunshot.

Lampe said he had no way of distinguishing whether Cameron’s injuries were the result of an assault or of a fall in which Hurley’s knee happened to land in his prisoner’s abdomen. But this didn’t stop him broadcasting his view in court. He had concurred with the police at the time of the autopsy (while unaware of the assault allegations against Hurley) that the injuries were caused by a fall, an opinion he now repeated: it was, he said, “his best guess” that the fatal injuries had been sustained in a fall, during which, “I suspect … one of Senior Sergeant Hurley’s knees has contacted Mr Doomadgee’s abdomen.” Cameron’s black eye and bruised jaw could have been due to them “sort of banging onto things”.

In an adjournment, Valmae told me she was feeling sharp pains herself, listening to the doctor. “Every time he speak like getting wind knocked out of me. Just broke down outside. Them talking about his insides.” Tracy Twaddle, next to her, was silent. She had forced herself to make it to the courthouse. Valmae asked me to wait for them at the end of each day to explain what was happening.

It had been the announcement of Dr Lampe’s initial findings on November 26, 2004, that started the Palm Island riot. The state coroner had then called in Dr David Ranson, an English pathologist based in Melbourne, to review those findings. Bearded, bespectacled Ranson was the next witness. He had an extra fourteen years’ experience on Lampe, in Australia and overseas. He had a law degree; he had various diplomas and fellowships. When he reeled off these qualifications in court in his clipped, serious voice, I noticed the police chaplain and the police psychologist both laughing.

“Ever heard of FIGJAM?” the chaplain asked me later, explaining what they had found so funny. He was referring to the acronym for “Fuck I’m good, just ask me.”

Dr Ranson told the court about the further bruising he’d discovered on Cameron during the second autopsy on November 30, 2004, which Dr Lampe had also attended. (Earlier in court, Lampe had admitted he hadn’t comprehensively searched for bruising in the first autopsy: “I was a bit pressed for time.”) Ranson found bruises on Cameron’s right eye and eyelid, his forehead, the back of his head, the upper part of his back, along the right side of his jaw, and on his right and left hands. This pathologist was not prepared to speculate as to how any of the injuries were sustained. They could theoretically have been caused by a deliberate assault or a complicated fall. Ranson would, however, agree with Lampe that “forceful pressure” had squeezed the liver, “pushing it up against the front of the spine so it was nearly split in two”. On one medical scale, liver injuries are graded one to six. Ranson believed this injury to be “at least a five and it could be higher.” There were no external markings on Doomadgee’s stomach, and for this reason Ranson favoured Hurley’s knee as the cause of the damage.