The Tall Man (7 page)

With dinner ready, the rest of the family went to watch television and Elizabeth brought two large bowls of stir-fried wild goat and rice to the table. The goat, I later realized, had been hunted by Cameron. Elizabeth thanked God for the food and prayed for those who did not have as much. She prayed for Sylvia’s sore foot to heal, and for any children in hospital: “May God with his great hands heal them.” She thanked God for our being in her home: “Only you know what’s in their hearts.” She prayed for the lawyers’ mouths, so that at the inquest they would be bold, and for my ears, so that I would not miss any important details.

Elizabeth laid three plates on the batik cloth, and the lawyers and I were served the dead man’s bounty. Really, this dinner was in honour of Andrew Boe. For the Doomadgees, like many Indigenous families, to be drawn into the law was to be drawn into an impenetrable labyrinth, all walls and no exits. Boe could lead them through. He could find out for sure what had happened to Cameron. I was welcomed warmly, as if his disciple. And later I looked back on this meal as the moment that I too was hooked in and set upon a quest.

After we’d refused second helpings, the rest of the family ate in the kitchen. Among them was Eric, Cameron’s only child, a quiet, polite sixteen-year-old wearing an American basketball shirt. Cameron used to take his son diving and fishing and hunting for possum, goat and echidna, using dogs and a spear. Eric lived down the road with his aunt Valmae at his grandmother’s old house. Twenty-two other relatives also lived there. Some of them had drinking problems. If Valmae had trouble she called in Jane and Elizabeth.

“We go and straighten them out properly,” Jane told me.

“How?” I asked, laughing; they were both slight women.

“Either with our fist or hit ‘em with a stick.”

Valmae told me she was worried about her nephew. “He lost if you ask me. Sit down with you and like he’s thinkin’ thoughts long way away. It’s showing out in him now.” She had been trying to keep him interested in boxing lessons with an ex-boxer who lived on the island. “Keep his mind busy,” otherwise “he’s just falling away slowly.”

Valmae showed me a photo of her and Cameron in their late teens, both of them striking, glowing with youth. Now in her early thirties, with five children, she had long, curly hair that she liked to tint red, an impulse she attributed to having a Scottish ancestor. A very sweet, sensitive woman, she was easily wounded and in deep mourning—not just for her brother. Shortly after his death, Doris Doomadgee had died. Mothers, Elizabeth had told me, would always try to protect their sons; hers was following Cameron to the afterlife to look after him.

Not all the siblings had the same father. The older children’s father was Arthur Doomadgee, from the Ganggalida tribe near the Gulf of Carpentaria. He had been banished to Palm Island from the mission community of Doomadgee in the mid-1950s, after knocking out all the teeth of a missionary who’d flogged his uncle to near death. Arthur was put in leg irons and sent to the island along with his young wife, Doris, who was of the Waanyi tribe from around the Gulf region’s Nicholson River. On Palm Island, Arthur became an alcoholic. Doris bore her last two children, Cameron and Valmae, outside the marriage. Their father was Francis Anderson, who had grown up in the Palm Island dormitory. The two children lived in Townsville with Anderson until he died. As six-and five-year-olds they came to live with their mother and the stepfather who gave them his name.

All the Doomadgee children grew up listening to Doris telling them Dreamtime stories. The Dreaming, or
Wanggala
to the Waanyi, is for Aboriginal people the equivalent of Genesis, a saga of creation rich in complex, philosophical layers about how rivers and water holes, the sun, the moon and the stars were created. According to the great Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, “One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming
in
time: it was and is everywhen.” It was and is “an age of heroes”, when the Ancestral Spirits in animal and plant form journeyed, stopping to fight, make love, give birth—and leave the evidence of their adventures on the landscape. Doris’s children would hear tales from the Dreaming and protest,“Oh! You’re getting it from library books.” But Doris had got it from stories she’d been told as a child.

At night the young Doomadgees would listen as their mother sat alone, talking in Waanyi to her dead father, Jack Diamond, who she believed returned as a crow if anything was wrong. She believed that he still sent her signs.

Before he died, Arthur Doomadgee returned to his homeland of Doomadgee to see his mother, Lizzy Daylight. Doris and the children accompanied him. Lizzy Daylight, whose bush name was Yella Gundgimara, is remembered by contemporary anthropologist David Trigger as “the grand old lady” of the Ganggalida people. Trigger wrote to me:

Lizzy Daylight was known to be in touch with the spiritual forces connected with Rainbow (Snake) Dreaming, and hence to such phenomena as storms, cyclones, lightning and so on. She [could sing] songs said to have the power to either stir up or placate Rainbow and hence also the physical phenomena connected with that Dreaming. And when she died, people spoke of how they saw rainbows both to the north (her mother’s coastal Ganggalida country) and the west (her father’s up river Waanyi country).

In many parts of Australia, the Rainbow Serpent—although its traits and abilities vary—is considered the most powerful Ancestral Spirit, a symbol of fertility that rules water and the weather. The old people from Doomadgee believed Bujimala, the Rainbow Serpent, carved out the landscape, leaving tracks for water. Its voice was thunder, lightning its tongue; sacred trees were its ribs; a falling star, perhaps, the serpent’s eye as its body writhed in the dark. “You can see shadow standing, rain time—pretty colour,” one old woman told a land-rights judge in the 1983 Nicholson River land claim. In other words, a rainbow was the serpent’s body in the light. Valmae told me, “You know how [there are] all these books about Aboriginal things; they all true. We just couldn’t get over it. They real all right.”

Sylvia, eating her dinner, listening, now told me a secret: there was a plug on Palm Island, and if there was ever a war, the elders could remove it and the island would disappear.

“What would happen to all the people?” I asked her.

“They’d swim,” she said, as if I must be crazy.

I asked Sylvia what she wanted to do when she grew up. She wanted to work in the kitchen of the island’s new Police Club Youth Centre. Her seventeen-year-old sister, named Doris after her grandmother, wanted to be a doctor, as she had ever since she’d had a heart bypass as a twelve-year-old. But the Palm Island high school went up to only tenth grade and she had not matriculated. Another of Cameron’s nieces wanted to be a model; her mother told me she’d have to get her off the island before … and she held her knuckles to her cheek, meaning before her daughter’s looks were ruined by beatings.

Jane, who was in her forties, said she wanted to be a fighter pilot because when she played video games in a Townsville arcade she was so fast that people crowded around to watch. If not a fighter pilot, then she wanted to be a cook, and if not that, a security guard. But just then she was not working.

The inquest was scheduled to begin in two weeks and Chris Hurley would be appearing. Hurley had been transferred to the plum posting of Surfers Paradise, on the Gold Coast, Australia’s answer to Miami. He might have been enjoying police work amid the sun, surf, sex, revellers and retirees, but Queensland’s
Courier Mail
had reported that the senior sergeant was “suffering” as he waited to tell his side of the Palm Island story. “He is just gutted,” a source said. “Mostly he feels let down by the community. This bloke spent most of his career in Aboriginal communities trying to help people and he just feels they turned on him.”

Andrew Boe asked Elizabeth how she felt about going to the mainland to see the police testify.

“I’ll forgive them what they done, because Jesus said,
Love thine enemy
.”

“If you say that, then it doesn’t matter what happens,” Boe suggested.

“It doesn’t matter,” Elizabeth answered, “because it’s in God’s hands.”

“I’m not that patient,” he replied.

“Aboriginal people got no choice but to be patient. If I didn’t have God in my life …” She paused.

Elizabeth had something more than Christianity in her life: she had blackfella protocol. Although Chris Hurley had been relocated, Lloyd Bengaroo had been denied a transfer and was back working on the island, helping white cops make their arrests. Elizabeth had seen him in the street and he couldn’t look at her. Were she a different kind of person, she told me, she would take his clothes off his washing line and send an item to her relatives across the border from Doomadgee in the Northern Territory. They would use them to do magic that would make Bengaroo grow sick and die. But instead Elizabeth tried to love him and to be patient. In prayer meetings she had been praying for justice. “We want justice for Cameron … that’s to make his spirit free. We want the truth. We want to hear the truth.”

Elizabeth was both Christian and blackfella, New Testament and Old. She could afford to love her enemy because she believed fiercely in divine retribution. “I work for God, so he gotta work for me.” She had been doing a course in firefighting. One day, standing close to a fire, she thought: This is what hell must be like. This is what whoever killed Cameron will feel. Where they’ll go. Just imagine how dry it will be. You’ll want to drink and drink and drink.

A
FTER DINNER
, the lawyers and I walked down to the jetty. It was eleven o’clock, the Milky Way was close above, and people sat along the jetty’s edge holding their fingers, with baited strings attached, over the water. They were mainly women and children, perhaps getting away from the drinkers. One child lay in the centre of the jetty, asleep on a pillowcase; two others were dozing in their strollers. I wouldn’t have thought there was much to catch at low tide, but the children used a torch to spotlight the dark water. If they found a fish they tailed it with the light while their friends dropped in lines nearby.

I sat on the jetty’s edge, the sea breeze a balm after the heat of the day. Water lapped around the wooden pylons. There was no horizon: the sky was connected to the water. It too was liquid, its stars like phosphorescence. In an article on Aboriginal astrology, I’d read: “Like the stained glass windows of medieval cathedrals [the night sky] provided, in effect, an illustrated textbook of morality and culture during the thousands of years when the only means of relaying the accumulated wisdom of the tribe was oral tradition.” People navigated and predicted seasonal shifts by the stars, but they were also the subject of religious stories. The Milky Way was commonly believed to be a river, with the brightest stars fish, other stars waterlily bulbs, and the dark patches lagoons. Some tribes thought that the dead lived in this sky world of great bounty.

Around Australia, as the frontier spread through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the Aborigines believed the white invaders to be the spirits of kinsmen returning from the dead. In northern Queensland, the ethnographer W. E. Roth wrote in 1903, many names for “white person” translate as “bogie man”, “ghost”, “corpse”, or even “grave”. And the names, of course, took on a terrible irony. The Aborigines showed these white ghosts where the water was. The white ghosts brought sheep and cattle and occupied the traditional hunting grounds and sacred sites. They took black women. And in North Queensland, as in many other places, every act of Aboriginal retaliation was answered with violence far exceeding it. “Shoot those you cannot get at and hang those that you do catch on the nearest tree as an example to the rest,” exhorted the
Northern Territory Times
in 1875. The Aborigines of the Gulf region, where Cameron’s family came from, called this frontier period Wild Time. The survivors were cleared onto missions; and this period was called Mission Time.

When I was at school in the 1980s, we never learned about Aboriginal history; we didn’t know the name of the tribe who’d inhabited Melbourne pre-settlement, let alone anything of Aboriginal religions or cosmology. Somehow we picked up basic facts. We knew that land was central to Aboriginal identity, that in fact blackfellas saw themselves as inseparable from the land. No land meant no Dreaming, and no Dreaming meant no identity, no meaning. Wild Time was, among other things, a violent religious upheaval. It meant the smashing of those stained-glass windows in the night sky.

Palm Island was settled with refugees from Wild Time; they lived cut off from the religion and culture of their traditional lands, and the despair that went with their removal was often fatal. Around the turn of the twentieth century, W. E. Roth heard old people on a mission singing a song: “This [country] made him die. The place he did not belong to. It was this [that made him] die.”

On the jetty a thin, white-haired Aboriginal woman sat with three of her daughters, one of whom was a hopeless alcoholic, of the kind the islanders call “drones”. The mother looked to be in her eighties, but was probably closer to sixty. Boe perched next to her and they started talking. She told him she thought things had been better in the missionary days. Palm Island was spotless then. Everyone had a job, even if they weren’t paid. There was a market garden, stockyards, a turtle farm, boat builders. All the houses were immaculate, and gardening competitions ensured that everyone’s yard was beautifully maintained. There were Christmas trees for the children. Dances. A football team. Drinking was banned. There was far less violence.

Like most older people I met, this woman, a half-caste, had been taken by police from her parents, from the “retarding influence of the old myalls”, the traditional Aborigines, and sent to live in Palm Island’s dormitory. This was an island of stolen children.

Across Australia, it is estimated, between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families in the period 1910–1970 and transported to distant missions, orphanages or foster families. Many children were separated from their siblings. They were often told that their parents had died, and they were given new names. One Palm Island woman, Bethel Smallwood, told me that her mother was haunted all her life by not being able to remember her own mother’s appearance. She could picture her outline, but could never give her a face.