The Tall Man (16 page)

A story had emerged (and I found it was just a story, a mythical one) that Hurley had been run out of Burketown—or sometimes, the story goes, it was Doomadgee—by the local community, and Cameron, who was visiting relatives, had been a key player in this uprising. “Speak to X!” “Speak to Y!” Valmae and Elizabeth told me during my time in Doomadgee, claiming these people would prove the stories. But X and Y’s connection to events was always flimsy and the main protagonists were in jail or dead.

Some past connection between the two men was not impossible. Hurley claimed to have had no idea who Cameron was, but Elizabeth claimed Hurley had locked Cameron up for drinking in 2002 when her brother was visiting Doomadgee and Hurley was doing relief work. There is no record of Cameron having been in the Doomadgee watch house, but not every drunk was put on the books.

Elizabeth and I drove back from Blue Water along a dirt road with wooden signs high in the treetops: jesus saves! On the outskirts of Doomadgee a row of men and women known as the riverbed people sat along the weir, drinking: thirty, forty people in a straight line, their feet cool in the water. Nearby, other drinkers sat or lay in the middle of the road. Life rolled over, each day like the last: limbo with alcohol. I thought of Aunty Betty pointing out Bujimala’s red sheen in the green water. Here, Victoria Bitter beer cans lay by the river’s edge, their red-and-green aluminum shimmering in the sun; a nightmare incarnation of the Rainbow Serpent.

Doomadgee seemed better and worse than Palm Island. People were closer to their traditional lands, but further from opportunities to truly escape. A Doomadgee police officer told me he dealt mainly with alcohol-related crime and child abuse—not so much sexual abuse but neglect. He said there was a marked difference in the way parents treated their kids during the wet season, when the roads were inaccessible and people couldn’t leave to buy grog in Burketown. The children were better fed and were more likely to be at school than fishing. This cycle played out weekly too. Drinking and violence would peak, and fewer children attended school after welfare payments were made.

Aunty Betty did not believe alcohol was responsible for Doomadgee’s social breakdown. “Nothing to do with grog, love. It’s just the Dreamtime story dogs. We got it here.”

A Dingo Dreaming song line ran near the township. Young Aboriginal men were illicitly touching a powerful, sacred ochre related to this Dreaming, which “turn everything upside down, back to front”. In traditional times, the ochre was touched only by the initiated. It was believed to have strong love-magic properties, and women found themselves uncontrollably attracted to men who handled it. Elizabeth teased me that if anyone fell in love with me in Doomadgee I would never be able to leave.

Aunty Betty said,“You look, young kids today about fourteen, fifteen, they all mum and dad here. Young fathers and young mothers who never look for the future.” She sat staring in front of her. Lizzy Daylight had not taught her children her songs, had not wanted to pass them on to this broken new world. “This Law has been smashed like a chain smash. You know, when a chain break off your body.”

I SAID GOODBYE
to the Doomadgee sisters and took the fifteen-minute flight to Burketown, where we landed on another red-dirt airstrip. I started walking into town with an Aboriginal man who’d been a health worker at Doomadgee until he couldn’t take the suicides any more, having to cut bodies down from trees or pull them out of the water. He’d worked alongside Hurley but never saw him hurt anyone.

A ute came along and we got a lift to the Burketown pub, where I’d made a reservation. The town’s “heart and soul”—as it’s described in the guidebook—was straight out of
Crocodile Dundee
. Spears hung along the railing of the bar, and the bar stools were upholstered in crocodile skin worn to a dirty suede. Buffalo horns and spinning fans were mounted on the walls, alongside photographs of winners of the annual barramundi fishing competition—Burketown was a “fishing Mecca”. My room, above the bar, had a single bed and an air-conditioner.

I went to look around. Burketown’s population was 235 people, but this toy town was the district’s administrative centre, and in contrast to the ex–mission community, all the buildings were bright and clean and neat. Sprinklers ran day-long and filled the gutters with water. All the lawns were uncannily green, but the broad deserted streets shimmered in the heat as if it were always high noon. I sweated in the humidity like I was running a fever, and the little white church with its little white cross and the park with its pagoda and benches were aspects of my delirium.

The Visitors’ Centre, a corner in the council chambers, offered racks of brochures advising on humdrum natural disasters: “Lightning Protection Action Guide”, “Floods”, “Preparing for Cyclones”, “Crocwise in Croc Country” (
Never provoke, harass, or interfere with crocodiles, even small ones
).

Burketown was named for the ill-fated explorer Robert O’Hara Burke, who passed nearby on his overland journey to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1861. (Burke expired from starvation, having shot at Aborigines who’d come bearing gifts of fish.) On the saltpans outside the town there was once a famous tree, the Landsborough Tree, which was inscribed by William Landsborough in the course of a fruitless search for Burke. Now there is just a sign and a little fence around a charred stump. The Landsborough Tree was burned down in 2002, it is rumoured by blackfellas who were sick of the fanfare over white exploration. Not long after the tree had been inscribed, Murrandoo Yanner’s great-grandmother saw her husband beheaded in a massacre.

The land around Burketown was traditionally owned by Murrandoo Yanner’s tribe. He lived in the township with his wife and five children, and his siblings lived in adjacent houses.

Hoping to find Murrandoo, I went back to the pub. I wanted to ask him more about his friend Chris Hurley, but I’d been unable to reach him by phone before leaving Melbourne. At the pub door, blacks turned left, whites turned right. In the yellow glare of the strip lighting, the place was effectively partitioned, with the bar itself a kind of Switzerland. Sometimes the black elders crossed over to drink with the whites, but they would tell the young blacks to get back to their side. Some whites refused to drink there at all.

Patrons held their beer cans in polystyrene stubby holders, the regular drinkers keeping their own holders behind the bar. The regulars were mainly older white men, retirees, cattle station workers, council workers. They looked as if they spent their days in chains while eagles preyed upon their livers. Their organs restored by night, they returned to the same bar stools, faces slicked with sweat, to resume their stoic drinking. Their eyes glazed, their speech slurred, but they did not move from their bar stools until, without flourish, it was time to stagger into the night.

Meanwhile the young Aboriginal men and women played pool, singing, swaying, showing off their drunkenness, making theatre of it. They drank to perform the passions; the old whites, to block them. Within moments of my sitting down, a wizened ex-commando, whose name was poker-worked on the back of his bar stool, told me he’d come here from down south after finding his wife in bed with another man. He also told me not to lend any money to the blacks.

A young white man came in: six-foot-four, broad, barefoot, with eyes very close together. Most of the buttons on his shirt were missing, as if he’d been in a fight. He asked if I would like some fresh crocodile meat. In his hand was a pink plastic bag bulging with soft contraband flesh. He’d just cut it up and didn’t want it going bad.

One sunburned ex-miner, describing himself as “a nobody”, wore shorts and a low-cut blue undershirt revealing swathes of white flab and an old-style tattoo of a bikinied pin-up girl. His baldness was overtaking a crew cut. He looked around at the drinkers on his side of the bar and told me I wouldn’t find this calibre of person anywhere else in the world. “No one here will bullshit you.” Australia was two countries, he said. The south “was another country”. Southern culture was good, northern culture was good. It worked fine as long as the south didn’t try to impose its culture on the north.

Outside, a group of Aborigines sat drinking in a circle on the footpath. Forty years ago there were curfews. Blacks couldn’t come into town between 6
P.M.
and 6
A.M.
But if the old miner yearned for those days, he didn’t say it.

Murrandoo Yanner was out of town. I sat drinking a can of beer as slowly as possible and imagined Chris Hurley’s arrival at the pub: the long shadow he would have cast, his bulk filling up the low doorway, everyone at the bar having to look up at him. Hurley had worked the place out. In a town where the population was 90 per cent black, he figured his life would be much easier if he could be friends with Yanner.

During Hurley’s tenure between 1998 and 2002 Murrandoo Yanner’s was
the
face of radical Aboriginal politics. A month after Hurley’s arrival, the activist’s house was burned down by arsonists. At the time, Murrandoo was campaigning against plans for a local mine; he was calling for a treaty; he was meeting with the remnants of the Black Panthers on their 1999 Australian visit; he was in court appealing his prosecution for killing and eating crocodile (a protected species); he was encouraging black nations to boycott the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. Yanner is a man of natural, deep, winning charm, but it still says something about Chris Hurley that they became fast friends. Others might have shrunk back and bided their time.

A sign outside Burketown’s police station tells visitors which local roads are open and which are closed. The whites who turn up usually come in four-wheel drives looking for a remote hunting or fishing adventure. Next to the station is the cream-coloured Queenslander—a high-set weatherboard house—shaded by a poinsettia, where Hurley lived for four years. From the Aboriginal Co-operative houses nearby he would have heard the sounds of breaking furniture and slaps; so Murrandoo Yanner had told me when I first met him. On duty Hurley wore very short shorts—“tiny one trousers”, Murrandoo called them. Off duty he still wore shorts, plus a T-shirt and thongs.

In Burketown Hurley was eight or nine hours’ drive from Mount Isa, the nearest large town, along dirt roads that were underwater at least three months a year. To make sergeant at thirty meant he was doing well, very well. Hurley had a constable working for him and was away from the hierarchy. He was a small-town sheriff complete with a deputy. Hurley and Murrandoo Yanner came to an unofficial arrangement: they would sort things out man-to-man. What was the sense of getting a plane to come to Burketown to fly an offender out, or a driver making an eighteen-hour round trip, if Murrandoo could deal with the problem to the sergeant’s satisfaction?

“Say someone bashed someone,” Murrandoo explained to me. “He’d say, ‘I want it sorted out. I don’t want it growing into big family fights. If you can nip it in the bud now, I won’t charge either of them.’ Or if something was stolen from the caravan park, eight hundred dollars’ worth of rods and lines, and he knew who it was, he’d come and say, ‘Look, if you [can] get them returned, no names asked, I won’t charge them and I get to write my books clean, otherwise I have to do a day’s work.’”

Hurley did not much like paperwork, and with this arrangement “he got to go fishing, hunting, and chasing girls.” But the deal made him territorial. Murrandoo said that if police from other Gulf towns arrived to drink at the Burketown pub and they threw their weight around, the sergeant’s reaction was “This is my town, you fucking know your place, don’t mess with the locals.”

Previously Burketown’s police had booked people and stayed at arm’s length. Hurley, however, was into everything. If there was a dance at the hall, or a gymkhana or a rodeo at the fairgrounds, Hurley would be there, drinking and joining in. He walked a fine line, maintaining his authority while mixing vigorously with the locals. At the Gulf town rodeos, he’d go inside the travelling boxing tent, the sweaty big top with its sulphurous lighting and roll-up drum, and watch Little White Lightning, the Cowboy, and the Friendly Mauler challenge men from the crowd, black and white, to fight. Hurley would roar along with everyone else. He sat on Burketown committees, including the rodeo committee. People remember the year he offered to ride a bull to raise money for the Flying Doctor. He got a swag of donations, but when the day came the bull threw him off and the Flying Doctor had to airlift him to Mount Isa, which left them thousands of dollars out of pocket.

He seemed to love the place. He told people he saw Burketown as a model for reconciliation. As he had in other communities, Hurley endeared himself to people through his kindness to their children. “He bent over backwards for our kids at the school, doing anything and everything he could to help,” one of the Yanners said to me.

Burketown’s school is small and neat and sunny, with thirty-five primary students and two white teachers. Hurley helped out with sports and recreation, and took the kids on camping trips. “All kids in town, he spent a lot of time with them,” Murrandoo said. “On his weekends off, rather than chase the nurses and go drinking, he’d actually go along with the school trip, throw some kids in his car.”

Children climbed on him as if he were a tree, and their adoration was easy to take, like standing in sunlight. “He couldn’t do enough for us,” a seventeen-year-old youth playing pool in the pub told me. He remembered Hurley taking his class camping to Lawn Hill National Park, showing them how to march in the Anzac Day parade, teaching them how to drive on the local oval, the police car stalling and hopping. He remembered Hurley taking the bullets out of his gun and showing them its workings. The sergeant even fingerprinted the kids—”for future reference,” Murrandoo Yanner joked when I told him the story.

Murrandoo sent his youngest brother, TJ, to the pub to look after me. Around his neck, TJ wore a tobacco pouch he’d made from a kangaroo’s scrotum. He had heard that a vicious nineteenth-century bushranger’s testicles had been fashioned by his captors in the same manner; the idea struck him. A wallaby’s balls, he explained, were too small, but a kangaroo’s could hold an ounce of tobacco. Next to the pouch hung a snakeskin tobacco-paper holder. TJ showed me a snakeskin stubby holder, a snakeskin lighter, and a boomerang he’d made. (He told me he could also crochet but that if anyone poked fun, he’d punch them in the mouth.)