BOOK OF THE DAY: ANGELA LONGreviews The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm IslandBy Chloe Hooper Jonathan Cape 258pp, £16.99
HE WAS a tall man – two metres – but Snr Sgt Chris Hurley was strong and bulky too, “a big bugger” in the laconic language of his home in Queensland, the Australian state which mixes perpetual beach holiday with a dash of fascism.
If a man like that falls on you, you know about it. But did Hurley fall on Cameron Doomadgee and accidentally cause his death, one of hundreds of indigenous fatalities in police custody?
Chloe Hooper traces the story of the good cop/bad cop rolled into one, and Doomadgee (36), an Aboriginal arrested by the policeman one hot day in November 2004. Where they lived, heat was pretty well unflagging, be it during the so-called winter months of dry warmth or the fetid swamp of the wet season, with “plants . . . close to drowning. Vines entwined fences as if intent on suffocating them.”
Hurley was an ambitious cop on Palm Island, a place of white sand, turquoise seas, lush vegetation – and unceasing drunkenness and violence. As Hooper recounts, it was turned into something of a reservation for Aboriginals early in the last century.
Doomadgee was just one of thousands of indigenous Australians living in poverty, strife and alcohol. He also joined a significant sub-group – the 30 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who die in police custody, whereas indigenous people comprise about 2 per cent of Australia’s 21 million population. Doomadgee’s death became a cause célèbre.
The story was that Doomadgee and Hurley had tripped and fallen as one was escorting the other into Palm Beach police station on November 19th, 2004. Hurley later claimed he fell to the floor, to the left of Doomadgee, and that repeated upward elbow movements reported by witnesses were signs of his efforts to pull the other man upright.
Whatever the truth of this, a semi-conscious Doomadgee was moved to a police cell and found dead less than an hour later.
His injuries included crushed ribs, black eyes and a ruptured liver: all consistent, the local doctor acknowledged, with a car or even a plane crash.
Doomadgee’s arrestable offence was hazy in the aftermath, but it appeared some harsh words and swearing had been directed at Hurley and his Aboriginal assistant, Lloyd Bengaroo. There had been no apparent trigger for what in the laconic euphemism of the community was a “touch-up” – a fellow pokes at you and you poke at him.
Enraged, the local Aboriginal community marched on the police station, hurled barrages of missiles and torched it. There was a state of war between whites and blacks on Palm Island.
Chloe Hooper arrived eight months later, with two lawyers who had offered to represent the Doomadgee family at the inquest.
She spent time on Palm Island and other places in the wild lands of Australia’s northeast – “FNQ” or Far North Queensland. She met the key figures – except for Hurley – and gained a sense of the place, its hardness both due to nature and created by man.
In 2007 Hurley was acquitted of charges of manslaughter and assault. It had been the first time a police officer stood trial over an Aboriginal’s death in custody, despite years of agitation and a Royal Commission in 1991.
At one point, Hooper quotes Murrandoo Yanner, an Aboriginal community leader who had been friends with Hurley: “He was a thug and a mug. I am the same.”
Hooper writes of the deprived lives of the Aboriginals, who take their lot as it comes, but have a deep river of hatred to draw from. But she also recounts the drinking from dawn, the vicious beatings of women, the slashing of tyres in white people’s caravan parks.
Hooper’s balanced narrative suggests there are no easy answers. “The bitter joke of Reconciliation in Australia was to assume the lives of these two men could be weighed equally.”
- Angela Long, Australia-born and Dublin-based, is a journalist, lecturer and media consultant.