The Tall Man (18 page)

P
EOPLE HAD BEEN
kind to me in Burketown, but I had a constant sense that if I moved too far in any direction, something might go wrong. The rules were different from any I knew. It was hot in a different way. At night I’d leave the bar before ten and lie on my bed sweating, listening to people drinking and partying and fighting in the room beneath me. I knew it was melodramatic, but I couldn’t help feeling I had to be careful to get out alive.

One morning, Johnny Yanner took me fishing in his dinghy on the Albert River. All along the muddy banks were the recent imprints of crocodiles. When he spotted two bulging eyes above the water, he started turning the boat around so I could get a closer view. I begged him not to bother. At the river’s mouth, staring into the Gulf of Carpentaria, we dropped hand lines into the water and within moments both pulled out fish, the scales stunning in the sunlight.

At the end of my stay, the publican—different from the one in Hurley’s time—dropped me off at the airstrip in his truck and I waited to board the plane to Cairns with the passengers who’d just flown in from Doomadgee. On board I met a fresh-faced woman dressed in pink who waved a silk fan and held her jacket over her nose against the rancid smell of sweaty, unwashed bodies. She claimed Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and “white Australian” ancestry.

This woman, a Doomadgee police officer flying home for a holiday, was young and burnt out. She’d seen so many women with punched-up faces and so many children hurt too. She’d just seen a child killed in a drunk-driving wreck. I remembered a Townsville cop telling me that he’d carried a knife ever since being unable to cut down a suicide in time to administer CPR. It was also useful, he said matter-of-factly, for cutting seat belts after crashes. The young officer on the plane said she’d reached a stage where she couldn’t stand any more. She would say to herself, I don’t care. I don’t care. She was hoping for a transfer back to “civilization”, where she wouldn’t have to care. I remembered the sign on the Doomadgee war memorial—
FORGET
.

The policewoman made me think of Chris Hurley leaving all this and returning to Brisbane to see his family. Re-entering mainstream society, he could slip back in with an invisible cloak of whiteness.
Forget, forget
, said all the bitumen roads, neat houses, manicured lawns. But Hurley was like a man returning from a war—a war he couldn’t get out of his system. In November 2002 he was promoted to senior sergeant, and soon after arrived on Palm Island.

THE MAIN STREETS
of Townsville are lined with palm trees and emblems of colonial prosperity. Ornate urns and columns and wreaths swathe Victorian shopfronts that are still marked tailor, stationery, bank. Hot-pink bougainvillea grows weedlike up wrought-iron lace to balconies with French doors flung open to the breezes. The city was settled in the early 1860s as a place for boiling down the carcasses of sheep and cattle for tallow. A sugar industry developed around it, and to work the cane fields the planters imported (some say stole or enslaved) nearly fifty thousand Melanesian men and women from the South Pacific Islands—a practice known as “blackbirding”. Townsville is named for such a blackbirder, Robert Towns, an entrepreneur who in 1865 wrote from the fledgling settlement: “I never felt so unhappy from home in my life what from bites and blight.” He left the next month and never returned.

Townsville’s courthouse is a flat-roofed modernist building of weathered concrete. It rises amid more palms and tropical fruit trees, with small square windows staring out from its façade.

It was Wednesday, August 3, 2005, eight and half months after Cameron’s death, and Chris Hurley and the other police officers were only now being required to give evidence. Coroner Michael Barnes had stood down and the inquest was being heard by the deputy state coroner, Christine Clements, an attractive woman in her mid-forties whose manner gave nothing away. Clements had spent the past two days on Palm Island hearing evidence from the Aboriginal witnesses who’d earlier appeared before Barnes. This time they testified in a much smaller room at the island’s Police Club Youth Centre, with the aid of an interpreter. Now the court had reconvened in Townsville, where it was argued the police witnesses would be safe.

Erykah Kyle and a group of Palm Island women had travelled to the mainland for the hearing. Some of them looked much older, twenty years older, than they were. All of them were mothers with lost sons: sons in custody, sons who’d died in custody, sons who claimed to have been beaten by the police. Some had sons who had rioted, and although these men were now allowed back on the island, they were still awaiting trial. To enter the courtroom the women had to show ID, before being electronically scanned, then patted down. In the airless room they emitted a low drumbeat of heartache. I could feel their desperation for any tiny victory. “You long for it, long for it,” one of them said to me. Their heightened expectation was the antithesis of the police officers’ attitude. The same squad that had kicked down the rioters’ doors was on security and sat outside the courtroom, flicking through magazines. They all looked upwards of six-foot-four and they all had crewcuts. “This inquest is an example,” one sergeant told me, “of people trying to look for the worst in a situation.”

Tracy Twaddle and the Doomadgee sisters sat in the front row. Elizabeth’s eyes gleamed with
now
:
Now
it’s happening. She had been praying for this moment, and these lawyers—Boe, Callaghan, Moynihan, brimming with bravado and hot for the sport of it—were here to answer her prayers. The legal teams remained unchanged. Hurley’s lawyers—Zillman and Cranny—had an irritated air: this had already gone on longer than anyone had imagined. Terry Martin, counsel assisting the deputy coroner, examined the witnesses. The jurors’ seats were filled with court reporters.

The first witness was the head electrical engineer at Queensland’s Department of Public Works. He sat in the witness box as a section of the cell-surveillance tape was played, showing Cameron and Patrick Nugent stretched out on the floor. We stared down at the men, splayed as if at the bottom of a deep box. We could not see their features, just the outlines of their bodies, and one—Cameron’s—writhing. Patrick Nugent patted his head drunkenly. The tape was silent apart from the wretched, distorted sound of Cameron calling, “Help me! Help!”

The tape went for a long time. Hurley’s lawyers were murmuring and smiling about something. Tracy’s lawyer seemed to be trying to stay awake. Behind them Tracy sat quietly weeping.

After Hurley discovers Cameron is dead, he and the other police can be seen on the tape talking. Then, when the ambulance officers arrive, Hurley speaks to them in an animated style. None of these conversations are recorded. The only sound loud enough to register were the dying man’s cries.

Palm Islander Gordon Johnson had given evidence that he heard Doomadgee calling for help as he walked past the police station that morning. And now the engineer testified that it was unlikely Cameron’s calls would not have been audible throughout the police station. “[The police] would have heard on the intercom master what we hear on the tape.”

The ambulance officer who’d been captured on the video was up next. He’d entered the cell at 11:25
A.M.
and tried to resuscitate Cameron. He said he believed Doomadgee had been dead for at least twenty minutes, and he had a pronounced black eye. The video reveals the officer having a heated conversation with Hurley, but he told the court he could no longer remember what was said. He was excused.

The next witness was the one everyone had been waiting for: Police Liaison Officer Lloyd Bengaroo. Boe and Callaghan were especially keen to hear his evidence. Other than Hurley himself, Bengaroo would be the last eyewitness to the arrest to testify. In the video interview he gave police investigators the day after Cameron died, Bengaroo had re-enacted the events of the arrest but stopped at the moment when Cameron was taken inside the police station.

Bengaroo claimed he had stayed by the doorway. “I stood here,” he said to the police investigators, “because I was thinking, um, if I see something, I might get into trouble myself, or something … the family might harass me or something, you know …?” The “or something” he had referred to was, Callaghan believed, most likely police intimidation. Bengaroo, who had spent twenty years working in some capacity for the police, also had to observe “the code”. He was a man caught between two tribes—the blackfellas and the coppers—and both tribes had means of exacting revenge. Callaghan and Boe believed he knew more than he was saying. Under cross-examination he might reveal what it was.

Sombre, heavyset, Lloyd Bengaroo walked to the witness box wearing his police uniform. His long socks were pulled tight to his knees, and keys jangled in the pocket of his shorts. His hair was shaved close, his face pockmarked, his brow furrowed. When he sat down, fat rolled at the back of his neck. In a surprisingly soft voice he swore on the Bible, although he went on to admit he wasn’t a Christian. Nearly twenty years ago, I’d been told, his eighteen-year-old son was murdered one night on Palm Island over a cigarette. This son had been to school with Cameron Doomadgee.

A fierce cough plagued Bengaroo as he gave evidence.

Cameron come. He walked past. He said to me, “Bengaroo, you black like me. Can’t you help us?” I told Cameron, “Just, just walk down the road or you’ll get locked up” … I said that for his own safety. Soon as me and Chris Hurley’s put Patrick in the back of the police vehicle, both of us jumped in the front … We heard Cameron sing out from down the road, distant down the road … Cameron sort of said a few words … I knew he was saying some swear words but I couldn’t, didn’t hear what he was speaking out … [Chris said,] “We’ll drive down to lock him up.”

When they got to the police station, Bengaroo now claimed, he
did
witness the two men tripping through the doorway. He told the court he’d seen them falling side by side, and confirmed that no “part of Hurley came into contact with any part of Mulrunji”. Bengaroo also testified that he’d then gone inside the station after all, and that Hurley had not assaulted Doomadgee.

Peter Callaghan wanted to show Bengaroo the crime scene photograph of Cameron’s black eye. The police lawyers protested that this would be culturally insensitive. The deputy coroner put white paper around the photograph of the dead man’s face so only the wound was visible.

When Callaghan showed Bengaroo the photograph, the officer admitted that Cameron did not have a black eye when he was arrested. He could not explain how the injury had happened.

The courtroom was tense. I could hear Erykah Kyle and the older women at various points booing, moaning, or whispering encouragement: “Yes, yes.”

It was hard to know if Lloyd Bengaroo was trying to mislead or genuinely didn’t understand the lawyers’ questions. When asked directly whether he saw or heard anything improper, he did not add to his story. But in an exchange with Peter Callaghan he said something that had an honest ring.

Peter Callaghan: “You told [Cameron] to walk on down the road for his own safety—what did you mean by that?”

Bengaroo: “I told him to walk down the road or he’s getting locked up. For his own safety. I just told him to walk down the road or he’d get locked up.”

Callaghan: “And the reason you did that was ‘for his own safety’?”

Bengaroo: “Yes.”

Callaghan: “And a safe place is somewhere away from you and Senior Sergeant Hurley?”

Bengaroo: “Yes.”

Callaghan: “It wasn’t safe being near the two of you, for him?” Bengaroo: “It wasn’t, no.”

Once or twice Bengaroo seemed on the verge of saying more, but each time, by chance, someone in the court coughed or shuffled and some spell was broken. Callaghan was worked up, aggressive, in a kind of fury. Bengaroo crossed his arms, then briefly put his head in his hands. I wondered what he had thought of Chris Hurley—whether he had trusted him, whether he’d noticed something about the mood Hurley was in that morning. And I wondered what Bengaroo had thought of Cameron.

Callaghan: “Why was he being arrested?”

Bengaroo: “Creating a disturbance.”

Callaghan: “Who was disturbed?”

Bengaroo: “Myself and Chris.”

Callaghan: “And how were you disturbed?”

Bengaroo: “By the way he was calling out to us.”

Callaghan: “But you don’t know what he said.”

Bengaroo: “No, got no idea.”

Nor did Bengaroo know what legally constituted a public nuisance. He had never been trained in the matter.

At the end of the day in court, Lloyd Bengaroo stood down a hallway, surrounded by six police officers. They were all smiling. The scene was collegiate, even congratulatory. They picked a moment when the hallway was clear, then Bengaroo and his escorts stepped into the elevator. At the last minute, I found myself joining them.

“Safest lift in Townsville,” one young policeman said. It was Constable Kristopher Steadman, who’d waited outside the police station that morning while Hurley was alone with Doomadgee.