The Tall Man (14 page)

Murrandoo had told me that the Waanyi people—Cameron’s mother’s tribe—were freshwater people, river people, but the Ganggalida mob, Murrandoo and Arthur Doomadgee’s people, who lived farther north by the sea, were both freshwater and saltwater. Ganggalida was the language spoken by twelve different clans, with Dreamings that included the Brolga, the Rainbow Serpent, the Hawke, the Dingo, the Dugong, the Groper, the Barramundi Devil, the Left-Handed Wallaby, the Shark and the Bushfire.

Having grown up on Palm Island, Elizabeth considered herself a saltwater person. Being used to mountains, she found the land around Doomadgee too flat. The climate was also not to her liking. It is notoriously tough. To the European there are two seasons, the wet and the dry. The period in between is called the build-up: days of over a hundred degrees Farenheit and 100 per cent humidity, when you walk outside and your shirt is soaked on impact; every bead of sweat is pulled from your skin as if the sun, despairing of the parched earth, turns to you. In the dry season, the Gulf country might be the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah: “The whole land a burning waste of salt and sulphur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it,” as the Bible says. Then each year in late November come the rains.

The Waanyi define five seasons. The period from December to March is
wirrngil
, translated as “rain no stop now—can’t walk around”. In a good wet season, towns are completely cut off; roads are under water, airstrips flooded, sharks swim the perimeters of cattle stations. For three or four months these raw towns become lush islands.

We were visiting in late April, in
ngajirr
—”cold weather time”—the time of
wurrarra wala gulana
(“wind coming from south”). But if the baking heat was unseasonal, no one told me.

The vibrator went off again and we landed, skidding at a sick-making angle that turned the gum and bloodwood trees diagonal.

The private detective followed us out of the plane to stretch his legs. He told me he had been stationed in this community as a policeman in 1996, when the blackfellas rioted after a cop was suspected of running over a man.

He didn’t connect me to the black women, and asked if I was writing a report. I said yes. “Have you been to an Aboriginal community before?” I nodded. He warned me to be careful of the “young bucks, being a white woman on your own”.

It was not the first caution I’d received. Another police officer, who knew Hurley and with whom I’d started corresponding, had once worked in Doomadgee and sent me this advice:

Just be careful where you tread as there is always hidden loyalties, mistruths, animosities between all the major players. As a visitor to Doomadgee you may find it on the whole a negative place. People don’t smile much and a lot is placed on who can control the most gov’t funding and have their clan employed. I personally have never seen the amount of negativity etc in any other community I have lived and worked in. But these are just my observations. Good luck.

I knew Doomadgee would not be Paradise Lost. It was another of the nearly twenty ex-mission communities set up around Queensland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to save the natives from the violence of the frontier and to civilize them. But I wanted to know where Cameron Doomadgee’s family had come from, and whether life here was different than on Palm Island.

The Doomadgee Mission was established in the early 1930s by Len and Dorothy Akehurst. They were Christian Brethren, evangelical Anglicans, from Sydney. In the beginning, the Akehursts rode a cart around the district, gathering children by promising their parents they would be taught to read and write. (“A” stood for “Adam” and “All have sinned.”) The original mission was on a site named Dumaji, on the Gulf waters, but mosquitoes, locusts, a cyclone and the lack of fresh water—“Satan … strongly contending us”—drove the Akehursts and their mission south in 1936, to the town’s present site. Troopers brought more children from around the region, in particular half-castes. Aboriginal mothers tried to disguise them with ash, but sometimes they had green eyes, and as one older woman told me, “when they bath time all the charcoal finished off them”.

A 1950 government report on northern Queensland missions found the Doomadgee Aborigines were “the cleanest, the best fed and best housed”, but also “the most severely restrained”. Boys over the age of sixteen were sent out to work on cattle stations, and the girls attended to the mission’s construction, gardening and domestic work. “It is indistinguishable from slavery … Girls are forbidden to leave the mission compound unaccompanied during the day and are locked up overnight. No amusements, other than hymn singing, are permitted.”

The Doomadgee missionaries ceded control of their settlement only in the early 1980s, at around the time the local clans were awarded land rights. The missionaries are still regarded by many Aboriginal locals with great affection, but they left the community ill-equipped to self-govern. Doomadgee’s population of 1,500 is entirely Aboriginal except for the white staff. These public servants control the school, the hospital, the police force, and all the resources—they are nicknamed by some locals the KKK.

Doomadgee—or Doom City as it’s called—consists of a bakery, a supermarket, a hospital, council chambers, a police station and courthouse, a school and a war memorial, all laid out on a grid of red dirt roads. On the Saturday we arrived, the township was practically deserted. Most people were fishing, or had travelled hundreds of kilometres to watch the Doomadgee football team play Cloncurry.

The white administrator of Doomadgee—titled “the CEO”—a trim, bearded, ex–navy man, had lent us a car, but ordered that it be returned at night in case of vandals. We drove first to the house of Elizabeth’s daughter Rosie, where relatives rushed out to greet the sisters with hugs and tears, and new babies with chubby cheeks were passionately admired.

Nearby, women sat in a circle under a tree gambling at cards. Children under the next tree were also gambling. Other kids played with toys they’d made by attaching strips of black plastic to beer cans. Later that afternoon, I saw kids spinning old bike and pram wheels down the dusty road while their friends threw beer cans and bottles, trying to knock them over. Broken-down cars were beached in most yards. Unless people were sleeping, their doors were always open. They sat outside on old car seats and office furniture, plastic crates, wheels.

“I never want to come here again in my life,” a white-blond apprentice painter told me gravely, “not seeing the way they treat their cars.”

The painters were in town to spray white lines on the airstrip. While the sisters stayed with relatives, the painters and I stayed in a house used by contract workers, alongside the white staff—teachers and nurses—and blacks who, because they lived near whites, were referred to pejoratively by other blacks as “flash”.

In the doorway of the house lay a shrivelled turtle that had lost its way and died. All was sun-blasted, stupefied—as if the town had sunstroke. Translucent geckos slithered along the walls, frogs were in the bathroom, ceiling fans burred. Outside, my white neighbours toiled in the blazing heat, dripping with sweat as they mowed their lawns, cleaned their barbecues, shifted sprinklers onto different patches of browning grass, willing themselves to be in the suburbs. I started to get a sense of what life might have been like for Hurley in these communities. In Doomadgee, claustrophobia battles with agoraphobia: it’s a tiny, close community in the middle of nowhere.

The CEO—a driven, welcoming man who had self-published a book on the British aristocracy—invited me to the Anzac dawn service. I’d forgotten it was nearly Anzac Day, Australia’s Memorial Day, our premier display of patriotism, in which we honour those soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who died in unlikely numbers in the First World War. He gave me directions to the war memorial and told me to carry a large stick to ward off feral dogs. Across town was only a fifteen-minute walk, but the hospital treated three dog bites a week.

I rose before dawn and found two long sticks. Through the darkness I walked, as if with ski poles. Dogs barked as I moved along. Their barking set off more dogs. They were invisible in the shadowy dark, but in the moonlight I was not. My heart racing, I arrived at the war memorial. Four hundred Aboriginal men joined the armed forces in World War I, and five thousand in World War II, but those who came back to Queensland had their wages sequestered by the government and never saw them. The waist-high wall at the memorial had a plaque bearing the names of U.S. servicemen who died in a nearby plane crash in World War II.

The CEO was the only person there. His grandfather had served at Gallipoli, his father in the next world war. Awkwardly, the two of us hung flags on top of the memorial, since the flagpole had been vandalised, then stood together in the dark for a minute’s silence. He murmured, “Lest we forget.” I felt like an intruder, and when he asked if I had lost any relatives, I did forget—my great-grandfather had been killed at Pozières. The CEO took down the flags.

At eleven there was another Anzac Day ceremony. The CEO now wore a suit, and chairs were set up facing the memorial on a patch of green lawn. A group of old Aboriginal people had been taken out of the nursing home by a white nurse and looked happy to be sitting in the sun. Except for a couple of female elders, the only others at the service were public servants—schoolteachers, police and nurses, the modern equivalents of the “missionaries, mercenaries, madmen, and misfits” who had peopled the frontier. One wizened male nurse had a swag of medals pinned to his breast. The police were in uniform. We took off our hats. The sun stung our faces. The CEO made a speech about sacrifice. We all stood in the heat while a small black boombox played a tape of “The Last Post”. The bugle call melded with the sounds of locals getting on with their day.

Most of the whites in this assembly had come to Doomadgee because they needed the experience to get a job back in “civilization”. You could advance here much faster than you could in the cities, as Chris Hurley had discovered.

H
URLEY’S STORY BEGINS
in the most ordinary way; it begins 1,600 miles away in the heartlands, in lower-middle-class suburban Brisbane. He attended Saint Laurence’s Christian Brothers College, a Catholic school perched on a hill in the once working-class suburb of Dutton Park. Jacarandas, poinsettias and frangipani framed the grounds. In the quadrangle were old brown-brick Spanish mission buildings topped with crucifixes and dotted with shrines—white plaster statues of the Virgin Mary.

Chris Hurley’s father had been president of Saint Laurence’s Parents and Friends Association. The Hurleys were a “good strong Catholic family”, “lovely, lovely, average people”, acquaintances said, regularly attending the close-knit local church and very involved in school activities, particularly sports. Hurley played rugby, joining the world of chants and drinking games, but he did not overly enjoy schoolwork and he repeated his senior year. After graduating, he did a twelve-month stint in a bank; then, in 1987, like many Saint Laurence’s boys of his era, and like his uncle and older brother Tony before him, he entered the Police Academy.

When Hurley joined the Academy police were still required to notify the commissioner before they married or divorced; fathering illegitimate children was cause for dismissal. Just over 5 per cent of officers were women, despite an application pool that was 25 per cent female. Tony Fitzgerald, in his 1989 report on corruption within the Queensland Police Force, wrote, “The tendency to select officers most likely to conform to present Police Force culture must be overcome.”

Those who knew Hurley well say he came out of high school with a point to prove. He had a sense of not having made it academically or socially, and he was going to find his way in the world by another route. He would show the old school network. Not that he turned his back on them. When he was looking for support for the Thursday Island youth sports club he founded in 1990, one of his many letters went to Saint Laurence’s Old Boys Association. The college, according to its website, “exists primarily to teach its students about the God who loves them and … attempts to have the values of the Gospel and the message of Jesus pervade all that happens.”

Hurley might not have enjoyed school, but all these years since, he had been living up to Saint Laurence’s principles, fulfilling a Catholic notion of sacrifice, walking like Jesus among the poor and unwashed, acting as his brother’s keeper. Policing was physical, but in this heat, in these badlands, Hurley had used his body to do good Christian work, fighting the power of evil. The Christian Brothers bred their boys tough, through prayer and liberal use of the strap, and Hurley could call on that if he wanted to. He had the stuff of a secular missionary.

Life in the Torres Strait, then the wild, remote Cape York must have been confronting for a suburban boy. Where there was drinking there was also violence, both domestic and payback. Fights might take place on the sports oval, and the weapons were fists, rocks, sticks, pieces of steel, fence posts. One police officer who’d worked in Doomadgee told me: “It’s hard for us to understand how three hundred people can start fighting over a fifth-grader calling another kid’s granny a slut.” Vicious enmities existed between families and clans that seemed part of an ancient revenge cycle.

In 1995, after five years in Cape York, Chris Hurley tried policing in Surfers Paradise, the beach town an hour’s drive from his family in Brisbane. Now senior constable, he was still looking for ways to get ahead: he and another officer were accused of acting as repossession agents during worktime without permission. Hurley spent three years in southern Queensland, but he liked the small-town feel of the frontier communities. In 1998 he answered the call of the wild by taking a promotion to Burketown. He went back to the wide streets, the red dust, the visceral intensity, the heat, the fights.

The posting was straight from a Boy’s Own Adventure: speeding along dirt roads, dodging water buffalo and kangaroos, cruising down rivers past jabiru and brolgas and crocodiles, catching barramundi. He was in his early thirties, he was in control, and you didn’t get this frisson in Surfers Paradise. In Cape York, he’d been given a “skin name”, a traditional language name, so that the locals, whose relationships are all dictated by kinship structures, knew how to place him. The links between the Cape and the Gulf are strong: the name meant something to people here. And perhaps there was a force beyond the fast-track promotions that attracted him to these places. Perhaps the communities drew him with their power—the proximity to sex and death and beauty and horror; to song lines that are badly frayed but still give off some charge; to what is raw and ancient: our deepest fear that good and evil spirits make sport with us.