The Tall Man (12 page)

The inquest was like a great, old-fashioned crushing machine, slow to crank up but, once in motion, processing its victims with brutal efficiency. Tracy Twaddle, wearing black, was the first witness to be called by Terry Martin. In a tiny voice, she gave evidence that Cameron had not been in a car accident and had no visible injuries when she last saw him. On the morning he died, she said, he left the house around dawn while she was still asleep. She started to cry and dabbed her eyes with her kitchen wipe.

The next witness was Victoria Doomadgee, also in black, Cameron’s alcoholic, monosyllabic sister. The coroner reminded her that she had to speak, she could not just nod. She said she’d spent the night at Cameron and Tracy’s house. That morning her brother asked her to come and drink beer with him. He’d had no visible injuries. It was the last time she saw him.

Old Reginald Barry appeared next, and walked slowly to the witness’s microphone. He had lost an eye warding off a drunken son. He’d spoken to Cameron around 7
A.M.

I was sitting at my home there having breakfast and he came along and he sang out to me, “Hey, Uncle,” he said, “I’m looking for a smoke.” He came in and said, “I’m going to try and get a loan of a boat to go fishing.” And I looked at him and he was cold sober. “Uncle,” he said, “I’ll leave you now. Would you like me to bring you some fish?” and I said, “Yes, alright.”

It was an hour or so later when Cameron first turned into Dee Street. He stopped to chat to Edna Coolburra, an apple-cheeked older woman with long grey hair. Edna now gave evidence that they’d talked about her son, with whom Cameron had been best friends. Her son had died nearly twenty years earlier after a diving accident. Cameron was “just saying how much he missed him and that”. She noticed he’d been drinking, but he was “merry and in a joking mood”.

Leaving Edna’s, Cameron went to drink more. When Edna saw him next he was being arrested: “He couldn’t resist cause Chris was too tall for him … Chris is a big powerful person beside him.” She didn’t hear Cameron swearing at Hurley, but Steve Zillman in cross-examination suggested this was because she was hard of hearing. Zillman questioned Edna in detail about the timing of events, but like most Palm Islanders she did not wear a watch. She couldn’t remember if it was ten minutes or two hours after they’d first chatted.

It was Gerald Kidner that Cameron had been drinking with, at Kidner’s house, farther up Dee Street. When Gerald and his partner, Verna Snyder, decided to go and get their welfare checks, Cameron tagged along behind them on his way home to Tracy. In court, Gerald wore a black shirt trimmed with flames. He had trouble reading his oath. “The only thing he was saying,” he told the court, “was he was singing a song, ‘Who Let the Dogs Out,’ after Patrick got locked up … He just sang that song and he kept walking.”

Boe stood up and said, “Gerald, you’re a pretty good friend of Mulrunji, aren’t you? You were?”

Gerald Kidner: “Yeah.”

Andrew Boe: “Does he sing it out a lot?”

Gerald Kidner: “Oh, yeah.”

Andrew Boe: “And does he sing it out no matter who’s around?”

Gerald Kidner: “Yeah.”

Andrew Boe: “So he doesn’t sing that song for a particular reason, does he?”

Gerald Kidner: “No.”

Andrew Boe: “He just sings it?”

Gerald Kidner: “No, he just sing it.”

Next up was Gerald’s partner, Verna Snyder, emaciated, barefoot, shaking, apparently severely alcoholic. The coroner’s clerk had to read out her oath and she repeated it in a slow, quiet voice. Her testimony was like a broken song: “Only singing along the road and the coppers come along … They put Cameron [in] back.”

Terry Martin, counsel assisting the coroner, asked her who’d been singing.

Verna Snyder: “Cameron.”

Terry Martin: “What was he singing?”

Verna Snyder: “Call the dogs out.”

She broke down mid-testimony and sat with her head in her hands, distraught and overwhelmed.

A stray horse put its head through the door. Wind rushed in and riffled the coroner’s papers. Verna Snyder sat weeping. I can’t have been the only person in court who felt sick, who felt the whole thing was hopeless. On this island the law didn’t get any closer to the truth, it got further from it.

The day before, I’d driven with Elizabeth and Boe to remind witnesses not to drink too much. We stopped at a house shuddering with loud dance music. Teenagers, all of them wasted, started to crowd around the car. They were young, some no more than thirteen, and the closest things to zombies I’ve ever seen. One girl put her hand to the car window, staring in, clearly seeing no one. Beer cans lay all around; small children were underfoot. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

“Black man pretty hard to understand white man’s language,” a witness told me.

In this gymnasium, it was also plain the lawyers could barely comprehend the Palm Islanders’ language. Most of them didn’t want to be here. It was a case of “tippin’ elbow”—the black term for white officials checking their watches, anxious to fly out.

Terry Martin addressed the coroner: “I’m sorry, Your Honour, I’m not getting any of this at all.” Mayor Erykah Kyle went to Verna and put her arm around her. She was excused.

Gladys Nugent, the next witness, spoke softly, “under her skin”. Terry Martin kept asking her to repeat herself because he couldn’t hear. Gladys had been in the front of the police van when Hurley arrested Cameron. “[Cameron] was walking along quiet when I seen him … I never hear him swear.” But Zillman asked how much she’d had to drink that morning and made the implication clear—she was too drunk to know if Cameron had sworn or not.

Nobie Clay had been sitting with her baby son on her veranda, watching when Cameron was arrested. She was in her early twenties, barefoot and in full bloom. She had been a heavy drinker as a teenager, but was now sober. Nobie was a champion local boxer, taking a break from her career to raise her son. Unlike the other witnesses, she was bursting to tell her story. She described what Cameron looked like when he walked past:

He didn’t look sick. He wasn’t limping or anything. He looked straight at me. He had no marks or bruises on his face. Chris jumped out of the driver’s side. Uncle Cameron didn’t say anything to him as he was coming down the road. All he said was the lyrics to the song “Who Let the Dogs Out”. He was a happy drunk. As he was standing on the pathway, Chris jumped out of the driver’s side, with his two hands grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the vehicle. And Uncle Cameron just said to him, “Oh mate, you’re locking me up for nothing.” And then Chris said, “Shut up, Mr Doomadgee, I’m locking you up.” Uncle Cameron didn’t try to resist arrest. He didn’t try to hit him. Didn’t swear at him. Chris then grabbed him by the two arms, shoved him up against the back of the police paddy wagon. As Uncle Cameron went to turn to face him, Chris then grabbed his two legs and smashed him with like a spear tackle into the back of the paddy wagon. And that’s when I heard a loud banging. And on my statement it said that I didn’t actually see him hit his head but I know he’s hit his head because his arms were still by his side and his legs were still in the air … He gave Chris no reason to rough handle him like the way he did.

Steve Zillman suggested she couldn’t have seen all this if she was also watching her infant son. Nobie said she could and did. Then the PA system stopped working and the court was adjourned to fix it.

My picture of Hurley came in and out of focus: sharp and clear one moment, then a figure without edges, just a presence, a force hovering in the frame. I’d heard that he used to flirt with the island’s women and that he’d pick up drunk men and drive them out past the airstrip and leave them there so they had a long walk back to sober up. That morning, the police commissioner had described the senior sergeant as a “very fine officer”. But in the gymnasium, two mothers told me that their sons had returned from the watch house bruised; and I met a young woman who happened to be Cameron Doomadgee’s niece, called Barbara Pilot. Barbara told me that one day Hurley had run over her foot and then left her lying on the ground.

As I tried untangling the story of the morning Cameron died, Hurley was the good Samaritan one moment, helping Gladys retrieve her medication, and a brute the next, strong-arming Cameron into the van. Was he good cop
and
bad cop? Or in the morass of miscommunication and legal sophistry, had the real Chris Hurley got away?

From nowhere, Cameron’s dog arrived and sat beside the Doomadgee sisters. (Later, Elizabeth claimed the dog had bitten a witness who gave bad evidence.) Other dogs were already lying in the shade. Children collected the empty water bottles the lawyers left on the floor. Cameron’s son, Eric, was sitting with a friend. I had given Elizabeth some seeds and a set of tools for her garden. Eric had the red gardening fork tied with a bandanna to his calf. He was carrying it as a weapon, as if he had revenge in mind.

The court heard from Patrick Nugent, who Hurley had been arresting when Cameron first walked past the police van. Pale and thin, an El Greco figure with a bandaged hand, a sleeveless football shirt, and no shoes, Patrick was beautiful and ruined. (“Does it smell of sour milk to you?” the island’s white administrator had asked me earlier, wrinkling his nose at Patrick’s acrid body odour.) On the evening of Cameron’s death, Patrick had been interviewed by Detectives Robinson and Kitching. He told them he’d been taken to the station in a different vehicle from Cameron’s, then placed in a separate cell. In other words, he’d seen nothing. When the Crime and Misconduct Commission interviewed him two weeks later, he claimed:

I saw that Cameron was in the room outside the cells. He was lying on the floor on his back. Chris was on top of him … punching him in the ribs on both sides. At this time, Chris was telling Cameron to shut up and be quiet. He also said, “Do you want more, more Doomadgee?”

But the cell-surveillance tape showed Patrick was out cold, and couldn’t have seen anyone do anything. When he was asked to read through and swear by his statement to the CMC, Patrick sat still.

Terry Martin: “If you look at your addendum statement, do you say that the contents of that statement are true? Please have a read through it before you answer that question. I want to know if the statement is true, do you understand?”

Patrick Nugent: “Yeah.”

State coroner: “Mr Nugent, do you read okay?”

Patrick Nugent: “No.”

The coroner’s clerk rose and, standing next to Patrick, read out his statement. The two men were probably the same age, but Patrick’s English was limited and it was clear he had only a rudimentary understanding of what was going on. Even worse, he seemed to be trying to guess the right answer. Lawyers have a term for the tendency of Aboriginal witnesses to agree with whatever is put to them so as to be polite, avoid conflict, and get off the stand as quickly as possible—it’s called “gratuitous concurrence”.

Steve Zillman: “Now why did you make up those untruths and put them in your statement?”

Patrick Nugent: “Yeah.”

Steve Zillman: “You in fact couldn’t even stand up, I’d suggest.”

Patrick Nugent: “No, I was sitting down.”

Steve Zillman: “Mmm?”

Patrick Nugent: “I was sitting down and I got up.”

Steve Zillman: “You were so drunk you were just about unconscious!”

Patrick Nugent: “No.”

Steve Zillman: “In fact, you haven’t got a clue about what happened that day?”

Patrick Nugent: “No.”

Steve Zillman: “I’ve got nothing else. Thank you.”

Patrick was followed out of the gymnasium by photographers who ran after him down the dirt road. As their cameras flashed, he held his bandaged hand over his face. That evening he went home and tried to set himself alight. His grandmother found him and saved him. Someone had just told him that he’d been lying in the cell with Cameron when he died. He had not even known.

S
IX HOURS INTO
the inquest, the lawyers’ business shirts were transparent and clinging to their backs. The women fanned themselves. Outside, cicadas hummed, party music throbbed, children chattered leaving school.

Now it came time for Roy Bramwell to give evidence. He was a slouch-shouldered young man with an old face—and the Palm Islanders’ star witness. Down by the jetty one day, I’d asked Roy if he liked fishing. He pointed to an aluminum dinghy he hoped to buy and take beyond the reef to fish. He was born and grew up on Palm Island, leaving only to serve time in jail. He had been schooled to year nine and could read “a bit”.

On the morning that Cameron was arrested and locked up for swearing at Chris Hurley, Roy, who had beaten three women, was allowed to go home. Local translation: It doesn’t matter what you do to one another, just don’t insult a cop.

Roy Bramwell was a drunk—a violent one—and hardly the rock on which to build a case; though Father Tony, who was watching the inquest, pointed out that he was at least honest about his bad habits. Roy had been looking through his police statement every day, trying to memorise it. “It’s like a daily prayer for him,” Elizabeth said. But Roy worried that the lawyers would “put it all together and twist it”.

Terry Martin asked Bramwell: “In the assault on your de facto wife, Gladys Nugent, did you knock her out?”

Roy Bramwell: “Knocked her down.”

Terry Martin: “Yes. I know you knocked her down, but did you knock her out?”

Roy Bramwell: “No.”

Terry Martin: “Did you knock her down with a punch?”

Roy Bramwell: “Yes.”

Terry Martin: “And after you’d done that, did you do anything else to her?”

Roy Bramwell: “I kicked her and whacked her with a chair.”

Terry Martin: “You kicked her?”

Roy Bramwell: “Yes.”

Terry Martin: “Whereabouts?’

Roy Bramwell: “In the face.”

Martin led Bramwell to the moment he was sitting in the police station, and Roy testified: “What I could see—I could see just Chris. Because there’s a big filing—grey filing cabinet around there. I saw Chris hitting him on the ground, when he was on the ground … see his elbow was going up and down and he yelled, ‘More? You want more, Mr Doomadgee?’ … He went down on his knees. He’s a tall man.”