The Tall Man (8 page)

Children in the Palm Island dormitory were ordered out of bed at 5
A.M.
, and made to attend church three times on Sunday. The missionaries found it easier to teach children that Jesus would save them; adults were grounded in their traditional beliefs. Children caught speaking tribal languages had their mouths washed out with soap. Beatings were routine. Often there was not enough to eat.

“You were given a tin plate and cup, and if you forgot it, had to wait for others to finish and then look through the slops for what you could bear to eat,” Bethel Smallwood said. Girls wore dresses made from burlap bags and if they misbehaved they had their heads shaved. Native police escorted the girls everywhere. One of the girls was Amy Atkins, who now lives in Brisbane. She told me that in the 1950s the dormitory windows were nailed shut so the girls couldn’t run away. When she cried for home she was locked in jail for the night. The girls were taught basic literary, numeracy and housekeeping. When they came of age they were often sent to the mainland to work as domestic servants.

During the 1940s, Cameron’s mother was raised in the girls’ dormitory at Doomadgee; his stepfather, Arthur, in the boys’. The couple were sent to Palm Island in their early twenties, and like most people were allowed to raise their own children until they turned five, then the children were required to live in the island’s dormitories. Cameron Doomadgee’s three eldest sisters, Henrietta, Carol and Victoria, were taken from Doris, and so that she could see them for more than a few hours a week, she took on a dormitory job. Henrietta Doomadgee was making a cubby outside the dormitory in some long grass when “a white man”, not realizing she was there, poured out petrol and set it alight. She died in her mother’s arms.

That night on the jetty the lawyers and I also met three boys. They looked no more than thirteen, but said they were sixteen. One, who had a cigarette butt tucked behind his ear, sidled up to Andrew Boe and asked him for a smoke. Boe shook his head. Of his six children, the eldest, an Aboriginal foster son, had been in trouble with police. He was only a few years older than the smooth-skinned, keen, curious boy who now sat alongside Boe, wanting to talk.

The boy boasted that he drank Jim Beam. He teased one of the others, a quiet, chubby kid, for drinking camel’s piss, XXXX beer. He took the butt from behind his ear and tried to light it and when finally he succeeded the three shared the tiny stub between them. I asked the third boy where, if he could have a ticket to any place in the world, he would go. He said Brisbane, because he’d heard it had a park with a swimming pool that offered a free feed once a week.

“Are there drones in Brisbane?” he asked Boe.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Do you ever give them money?”

“Sometimes.”

“Miss, what song you like?” the quiet boy asked Paula.

She thought for a while.

They liked rap: Eminem, Usher and Destiny’s Child. Michael Jackson was “Sharpnose”.

The leader stood to perform a dance routine. The boy who wanted to go to Brisbane showed us some punches he’d learned in boxing. The quiet one made a series of birdcalls with his hands. They were full of spirit, full of life.

Boe asked them why
TALL MAN
had been written on the boulder near the airstrip. They didn’t know. But they knew who the Tall Man was. They’d been brought up with him, the island’s combination of Big Foot and the bogey man. The Tall Man was dangerous, while another spirit haunting the island, the Hairy Man, was short, ugly and mischievous. In all sincerity, the leader pointed to a nearby lightpost to show the Tall Man’s height. “His feet as big as a giant’s. You can see his red eyes when the lights turned out on the football field.”

When I asked other children about the Tall Man they reported: “He smells of stinkin’ things.” “He smells as bad as a bin.” “A bin tipped over.” A teenage girl, Rae Rae Clumpoint, told me: “At night when you’re by the campfire, big wind blow and you smell dead goat, you smell it, it’s strong, it’s stinkin’ and them wind blow, there’s Tall Man, they stand up behind trees and they move with the wind, they blend with the wind, they very tricky.” She told me she had been in Townsville once on top of a hill. “We smell dead goat, we knew that thing was hanging around us. If it takes you they will bash you, but they won’t kill you. That’s all they do to you.”

The boys on the jetty said the Tall Man lived in the hills but came down and watched people while they were sleeping. For no reason he would slap you across the face.

“He tall, he tall, he tall, you know,” Roy Bramwell had said of Hurley. Another witness, an old woman, had recalled: “The tall man get out and arrest him. I saw the tall man grab him by the arm …”

When we started to walk back to the motel the boys followed. At the end of the road, contractors were guarding the new police station. The boys had seen the old one burn down in the riot. “What do you do for sport?” Boe asked them.

“Throw rocks at coppers.”

Boe reached into his pocket and made a dare. He’d give $2 for each rock that hit the old, long-broken clock face.

Not one shot missed.

Headlights warned of a police van approaching and the boys bolted. They were gone before we even said goodbye.

SEVEN COPS WERE
usually stationed on Palm Island, but in the days following Cameron Doomadgee’s death there had been twenty-two. A grey-haired Aboriginal grandmother turned to one newly arrived constable at the airstrip and asked, “Why don’t you cunts fuck off?”

A fever was rising. At night barrages of rocks hammered the roofs of the police station and barracks, and when the officers went out into the dark they couldn’t see the perpetrators. On the evening of Thursday, November 25, six days after the death, the island’s young doctor, Clinton Leahy, met with the Doomadgee family and Erykah Kyle to explain the findings of the first autopsy. That night was unnervingly quiet. It was pay week, although even in off-pay week there were always parties going on somewhere. Revellers blasted loud music, kids were out playing, people fought. Now the streets, lit by a full moon, were silent and deserted.

Two constables were on patrol. Around eleven they parked their vehicle and sat on the veranda of an old man playing his piano accordion. People came out of their houses yelling, “Fuck off cunts! White shit! White trash!” The constables bolted. In the next shift, police picked up a woman with a black eye and two busted front teeth whose husband had bashed her and called her a “copper cunt” because she defended Chris Hurley. Otherwise, that night was the quietest anyone could remember: “just silence all night”.

In the morning the state coroner gave Erykah permission to inform the community of the pathologist’s findings. In jerky video footage taken by an onlooker, men, women, children and dogs line the edges of the mall, a paved area outside the store and council buildings, to hear how Cameron died. It is a bright, hot day. The amateur exposure of the camera floods the scene with sun and shade. Erykah Kyle stands at a portable PA system holding a microphone. She wears a black shirt, skirt, and, despite the heat, black pantyhose. Notes clasped in her hand, she is both dignified and at sea. The Doomadgee sisters are behind her, alongside Tracy Twaddle, who holds a handkerchief to her face. Elizabeth stares at the ground.

Erykah asks everyone to stand for a moment’s silence. Hundreds of people bow their heads. She tells them the pathologist believes Cameron’s death was the result of an accidental fall and that he’d found no sign of police brutality.

“We understand you want answers,” Erykah says finally, “because this is a mystery to us all.” She pauses and then reads from her notes: “There was an accident somewhere around the cell at about 10:40. He was found at 11:23 that day. There was a fall and the doctor, Dr Clinton, explained it was compressive force on his body; four ribs were broken and a rupture in his liver and from that a lot of bleeding …” She emphasizes
“a lot”.
“There was a big blood loss, a huge blood loss. That’s all the information I can give today,” she says. “No more questions to the family. Please show them your respect and think about the life of this man. We thank God for the life of Cameron Doomadgee.”

The crowd stands watching. They have heard this announcement as a verdict of “not guilty”. They’ve heard that Cameron’s death is going to be written off as yet another accident, another whitewash. A voice calls out for more information. But Erykah stands flailing. She doesn’t have the words.

“It will go to the CMC and from there …” Turning to people behind her, she pleads, “I need some help.” But there is no one who can give it. Her notes blow in the breeze. She might be thinking of her own son, who played with Cameron when they were children, and who had committed suicide in jail two years before. “You never get over losing a child,” she said to me one day, “never ever.”

The video records people yelling. The situation is too much for Erykah. She turns and walks back inside the council building. The Doomadgees follow her.

A thirty-seven-year-old plumber called Lex Wotton had been fixing a pipe nearby and joined the crowd. He’d planned to fly to Townsville that morning to go grocery shopping, but then the pipe had burst and the only other plumber on the island was drunk. Now he steps forward and takes the microphone, bare-chested in jeans and with red reflective sunglasses.

As a child, Lex had heard the mission bells telling people when to wake and when to sleep. Back then people still lined up for rations. In an old shed where he used to go and sit, he’d found an illustrated Bible. He couldn’t read well but was fascinated by the pictures of Samson, who was clever and heroic and strong, and who would break his bonds no matter how often the Philistines tied him up, and taunt them with his unnatural strength. Lex would look at Samson wrestling a lion, or slaying an army with the jawbone of an ass; even with his eyes gouged out he could push down the temple of his oppressors. Lex’s own father was a Kalkadoon, from a warrior tribe known for their ferocity and their ability to vanish from their enemies. In 1884 they made their last stand against the Europeans at Battle Mountain, with their spears held like lances, charging downhill straight into gunfire. The Kalkadoon word for bullet means “hole maker.” It is said that for years afterward their bones lay scattered over the ground.

The adult Lex has the muscular, V-shaped torso of a man who works out. He has scars running from shoulder to armpit on both sides, legacies of football and fighting. One of eleven children, he left school at fifteen, a talented athlete and a heavy drinker. He’d been to jail, but sober for a decade, he now commuted to work in Townsville, where shop people put his change on the counter rather than in his hand.

“Come on, people!” Lex calls. “Will we accept this as an accident?
No!
I tell you people, things going to burn. We’ll decide when. I’m not going to accept it and I know a lot of you other people won’t. So let’s do something!” On the video, half of Lex’s eloquence is in his body. Instead of decrepitude there is strength and muscle and presence. He is a fantasy of a figure before white contact.

Another man walks up to the microphone. David Bulsey is tall and slender, with a wonky dignity and a stare lit with fury. He grew up in the dormitory, but taught himself to read and write in a mainland jail. His brother had died in jail after being convicted for murder. Bulsey points like a preacher to the sky and then to the crowd. “I done the wrong thing!” he yells. “I went to prison. So have a lot of boys. So why should
he
get away with murder?” People are clapping. “We don’t want trouble on this island, we want bloody justice! If he get away with this, it’s going to happen again and again and again!”

Then Bulsey changes tone, speaking quietly, knowingly, and hits his target. “If you people don’t stand up, it’s going to happen again, and it may be one of your children next time.”

D
ETECTIVE
S
ERGEANT
Darren Robinson had a feeling something was going to happen. He sat at his desk in the station that Friday eating a steak sandwich, listening to the crackling PA system in the mall: “a familiar sound”, he told investigators the next day. “Come Christmastime they’ll all be down there doing Christmas carols and shit.” He knew the results of Cameron’s autopsy were being announced, and for his friend Hurley, the findings of a split liver were going to be controversial. Nothing in Hurley’s account of events explained how Cameron had sustained such a massive injury.

It was one o’clock. As Robinson put down his sandwich he heard breaking glass and knew. “I thought to myself …
It’s on. They’re coming
.” He ran into the next room; glass was strewn over the desks and the floor. All around, windows exploded behind the bent, jagged Venetian blinds; police were moving desks and filing cabinets to barricade the doors. The building was a box with nine cops inside it. There were people running on the roof. Stones hit the walls. “I was just waiting for this moment,” Robinson later told investigators. “I knew we’re in big trouble here.”

He ran outside. The highest-ranking officer, Inspector Brian Richardson, was trying to reason with the mob. The inspector, his wife—Detective Kathleen Richardson—and Senior Sergeant Roger Whyte stood looking out upon, as Whyte put it, “copious amounts of Indigenous people”. Two hundred Palm Islanders stood behind Lex Wotton, calling out about “that murdering cunt Hurley”. Why was he not in custody? Why had he not been charged with murder? Seeing a blue uniform made them angrier. Every cop was Hurley. Women were screaming. Adolescents threw rocks. Little kids gave officers the finger. Boys no older than ten held milk containers full of petrol.

But Darren Robinson had never seen anyone as angry as Lex Wotton. Lex was all biceps, abdominals, white teeth with ragged edges, and rage. He carried two enormous Stillson wrenches—long cast-iron plumber’s tools. Lex swung the wrenches round his head and smashed the station’s walls. “Oh, Lord God, remember me and strengthen me!” Samson had cried as he pulled down the Philistines’ temple. “You fucking killed him!” Lex screamed. “You murdering white cunts! You cunts killed him!”