The Tall Man (32 page)

The next morning, it was raining so hard drivers turned their headlights on. Sirens rang out of the wet, long and angry. The Rainbow Serpent was whipping its tail, flashing its tongue. The whole city was shrouded, while the newspaper billboards bore the story:

HURLEY
VERDICT:
“NOT
GUILTY”

And:

PALM ISLAND
OFFICER
CLEARED
OVER CELL
DEATH

I met Elizabeth. She was standing in the rain wearing light clothes and flip-flops, but she seemed unperturbed. “I have my head held high,” she told me, “because we got this far.” She was not in the least surprised by the verdict. In fact, she seemed sorry I’d had to learn a harsh reality. “I knew it was coming my way. Every time I go to the courthouse nothing but whites there. Didn’t feel right about it.” It was as if her turning up all week were as much a charade, albeit one driven by a wary politesse, as the jury’s brief deliberations. Everyone had been going through the motions. Elizabeth hadn’t bothered to come and hear the verdict, instead she’d listened to hymns on the radio. She rang me afterwards and told me she wasn’t giving up. She had kept strong for three years. “I’ll always be strong,” she said. “I want justice.” She called me her little white sister and held the phone up to the speakers so I could hear the hymn:
a wall of fire about me, I’ve nothing now to fear.

Her sister Claudelle had also stayed away for the verdict. I had been walking with Andrew Boe that night when we ran into her in the empty mall as she was looking for dumpers—the detritus of old cigarette butts with which to make a smoke. She clung to Boe, howling, “He was my baby, he was my baby brother!” Boe, holding her in the dark, was also deeply upset, angry, unconsoled by the moment in court. “How come we not win?” Claudelle cried. “How come we not win?” Claudelle’s seventeen-year-old son was named Cameron Francis, after her brother. She had breast-fed Eric when his mother left him. She was keening: “
My baby brother!
I loved him with all my heart. I loved him with all my heart.”

But Elizabeth stood in the rain saying, “The Bible tell us,
Let not your heart be troubled.
”

That same day, less than twenty-four hours after Hurley’s not-guilty verdict, Prime Minister John Howard announced his Northern Territory Intervention. The
Little Children Are Sacred
report had asked of government: “What will it take to make you, on behalf of the people of the Territory and Australia, realize the national shame and racial disorder existing in this lucky country and what will you do about it?”

Howard proposed a ban on all alcohol and pornography on Aboriginal land, an increased police presence, enforced school attendance, and the quarantining of welfare payments. Ignoring most of the report’s detailed recommendations urging community consultation, he also announced he would be sending in extra police and the army. Within days, news programmes were showing footage of army officers in jungle fatigues boarding planes that looked bound for Iraq, which landed in the Northern Territory. “It’s our Hurricane Katrina,” the prime minister said, as though it were all down to nature. An election was looming and he trailed in the polls.

A few hours later, the Police Union held a press conference. I did not go. The union was launching a series of five radio advertisements: high-rotation gloating. One compared Queensland to Zimbabwe. Another quoted Martin Luther King: “
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
. Thankfully, justice has finally prevailed, but the damage for one Queenslander and his family has been done.”

I didn’t have a ticket and the airlines said all their flights were full, but I packed and took a taxi to the airport. Even if I had to fly somewhere else and wait for a connection, I didn’t care, as long as I could leave. I had wanted to know more about my country and now I did—now I knew more than I wanted to. I waited for a ticket home and the guard who eventually scanned my bags saw Hurley’s photo on my newspaper and said, “I’ve got a lot of sympathy for him. I’ve worked security in jails. A lot of them should be shot. The jail’s just a motel between raping women.”

Hurley had become a kind of folk hero. It was as if he’d been not so much acquitted as forgiven. And in forgiving him, people forgave themselves. Within an hour of the verdict, the senior sergeant had been reinstated in the Queensland Police Service, but before resuming duties he would first take an extended South-East Asian vacation.

The last time I saw Chris Hurley was at the Queensland Police Union’s inaugural Pride in Policing Day march, on Sunday, August 9, 2007, seven and a half weeks after the verdict. This was the march the union had threatened before Hurley’s trial and they could now hold it with impunity. Police divisions were lined up under banners, preparing to walk through the streets of Brisbane to Parliament House. Officers had brought their children, some dressed in mini-police uniforms, as were their teddy bears. Bagpipes sounded—the Police Pipe and Drums. Onlookers waved Australian flags, white and blue pompoms, or handmade signs reading thank you! It was the parade scene from the children’s storybook about police.

I watched the police commissioner shake Hurley’s hand. Then the senior sergeant joined his division. Other cops came over to congratulate him. Hurley, like his supporters, was wearing a blue band with his serial number, 6747, around his wrist. He shook more hands. Then he talked to a man holding a little blonde girl. He leaned towards her, pretending to be a monster. “Grrrr!” he cried, holding his hands like clawed paws in front of his face. The girl laughed with delight. He tickled her. “Grrrr!” There he was, the Tall Man. But when I looked for him in the parade I couldn’t find him. It was as if he’d dissolved into a long stream of blue.

AT THE TIME
of writing, Senior Sergeant Hurley is involved in legal action to have the Queensland deputy coroner’s findings against him reviewed. Andrew Boe’s firm, Boe Lawyers, on behalf of the Doomadgee family and Tracy Twaddle, has launched civil action against the Queensland government and Senior Sergeant Hurley, claiming damages of nearly $1 million. Boe Lawyers has also instigated a personal injuries action for Barbara Pilot, the niece of Cameron Doomadgee who claims her foot was run over by Hurley.

Lex Wotton’s case has not yet gone to trial.

Queensland’s director of public prosecutions, Leanne Clare, who did not charge Hurley, has been appointed a District Court judge.

Hurley’s friend and investigator, Detective Senior Sergeant Kitching, has been promoted to inspector. The Crime and Misconduct Commission has recommended that Detective Sergeant Darren Robinson undertake “appropriate training in relation to cultural awareness and communicating with Indigenous witnesses”. It’s not known whether he has done so.

On February 13, 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to the Aboriginal stolen generations for the pain and suffering caused by removals sanctioned by successive governments.

For their unfailing support and assistance with this book I thank Andrew Boe, Elizabeth Doomadgee, Valmae Aplin, and other members of the Doomadgee family. I also thank Tony Koch, Tracy Twaddle, Paula Morreau, Erykah Kyle, David Trigger, Betty O’Lockland, the Yanner family, the Burketown pub, Peter Callaghan, Tony Moynihan, Nikola Lusk, Carly Nyst, Deniece Geia, Barry Moyle, the Palm Island Aboriginal Council, the Doomadgee Council, April Peter, Elaine Cairns, Mal Hansen, Col Dillon, Gracelyn Smallwood, Stefan Armbruster, Matt Kennedy, Michael McKenna, Peter Davis, Jonathan Horton, Steve Trezise, Michael Liddy, Barry Cundy, Father Tony O’Brien, John Bulsey, Yvette Lenoy, Lex Wotton, Agnes Wotton, Stewart Levitt, Frederick Cassis, Colin McDonald, the Clumpoint family, Edna Coolburra, Rosina Norman, Margaret Conway, Elizabeth Clay, Bethel Smallwood, the Quinkan and Regional Cultural Centre, and members of the Queensland Police Service, past and present, who spoke to me.

For their encouragement and patience I thank Ben Ball, Meredith Rose, Nan Graham, Dan Franklin, Andrew Wylie, Tracy Bohan, Sean Wilsey, Morry Schwartz, Sally Warhaft, David Winter,
The Monthly
.

Comments by witnesses in the text are quoted from the transcript of Inquest No. COR2857–04 into the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee, and from Indictment No. 4/2007, the Queen versus Christopher James Hurley, courtesy of the Queensland Supreme Court. The author also gratefully acknowledges the following sources.

PREFACE
Walter E. Roth,
Superstition, Magic and Medicine
(Government Printer, 1903), pp. 28–29. Henry Reynolds,
The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Responses to the Invasion of Australia
(Penguin, 1982), pp. 46–47. Reynolds writes, “The Aranda called bullets
mukataanna
or the fruits or kernels of muskets while the Kalkatunga coined an even more graphic term for rifle which meant literally hole maker.”

THE ISLAND
For historical information on Palm Island I am indebted to Joanne Watson, “Becoming Bwgcolman: Exile and Survival on Palm Island Reserve 1918 to the Present,” Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland, 1993, pp. 10–21, 112; Henry Reynolds,
North of Capricorn
(Allen & Unwin, 2003), pp. 159–63; Rosalind Kidd,
The Way We Civilise
(University of Queensland Press, 2005), pp. 50–51, 104 (Kidd is the source of the quote on p. 11); Dr Dawn May, “Race Relations in Queensland 1897–1971,” Appendix 1(b) to “Regional Report of Inquiry in Queensland, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,” 1991 (May is the source of the letter quoted on p. 12); J. P. M. Long,
Aboriginal Settlements: A Survey of Institutional Communities in Eastern Australia
(ANU Press, 1970), pp. 127–28 (Long is quoted on p. 12); Walter E. Roth,
North-West Central Queensland Aborigines
(Government Printer, 1887), pp. v, 71–90 (Roth is quoted on pp. 14–15).

THE DEATH
For information about the Torres Strait Islands I have relied on Jeremy Beckett,
Torres Strait Islanders
(Cambridge, 1987), and Anna Shnukal,
Broken: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Torres Strait
(ANU, 1988).Mark Alexander’s article “A Cop Who Cared” is quoted on pp. 28, courtesy of The SundayMail, Brisbane (December 5, 2004).

• • •

THE INVESTIGATION
Information about Queensland police culture comes from G. E. “Tony” Fitzgerald, “Report of a Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct,” 1989, pp. 200–203.

THE FAMILY
David Trigger discusses
Wanggala
Time and Wild Time in
Whitefella Comin’: Aboriginal Responses to Colonialism in Northern Australia
(Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 17–21. Information about the traditional beliefs of the Waanyi people comes from the transcript of the “Nicholson River (Waanyi/Garawa) Land Claim” (Australian Government Publishing, 1985), and W. E. H. Stanner, “The Dreaming” (1953), in
White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938
–
1973
(ANU Press, 1979), pp. 23–28. Lizzy Daylight is quoted on p. 48 from David Trigger’s personal correspondence to the author. Chris Hurley is quoted on p. 49 from Michael Madigan, “Palm’s Perilous Punch,”
The Courier Mail
, February 26, 2005. R. D. Haynes’s “Aboriginal Astrology,”
Australian Journal of Astronomy
, April 1992, p. 129, is quoted on p. 51. W. E. Roth’s
Superstition, Magic and Medicine
(Government Printer, 1903), p. 16, is quoted on pp. 51–2.

BELIEF
The quote on p. 70 is from Stanner, op. cit., p. 29. The quote on tribal sorcery (p. 78) is from Watson, “Becoming Bwgcolman,” op. cit., p. 258; Watson also details the Curry incident, pp. 127–72, as does Renarta Prior in
Straight from the Yudaman’s Mouth: The Life Story of Peter Prior
(James Cook University, 1993). For information about tall spirits I have consulted Percy Trezise,
Dream Road: A Journey of Discovery
(Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 127; Jennifer Isaacs,
Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History
(Landsdowne Press, 1980), p. 14; George Chaloupka,
Journey in Time: The World’s Longest Continuing Art Tradition: The 50,000 Year Story of the Australian Aboriginal Rock Art of Arnhem Land
(Reed, 1993), p. 60 (Chaloupka is quoted on p. 76 with the permission of New Holland Publishers); Tommy George, “Our County, Our Art, Our Quinkans” (Ang-Gnarra Aboriginal Corporation, 1995), quoted on p. 77 with permission.

THE INQUEST
Peter Sutton quotes the late Francis Yunkaporta’s description of “tippin’ elbow” in “The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia Since the 1970s,”
Anthropological Forum
11, no. 2 (2001), p. 129. Tony Koch’s article “Yanner’s Bitter Dilemma” (pp. 96–7) is quoted with permission from the
Australian
, December 11, 2004.

DOOMADGEE
Robyn Davidson, “No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet,”
Quarterly Essay
, issue 24 (2006), p. 15 (p. 102); Peter Sutton quotes W. E. H. Stanner (pp. 102–3) in
Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia
(Penguin, 1989), p. 15. Details on Gulf seasons come from
“Nicholson River (Waanyi/Garawa) Land Claim,”
prepared by David Trigger on behalf of Aboriginal people, 1982. I am also indebted to Dr Trigger for translating the Ganggalida on pp. 115–16.