The Tall Man (2 page)

Tropic of Despair, Bitter Paradise, Island of Sorrow
were the headlines I’d been reading in Queensland’s newspapers. Three months earlier, on November 19, 2004, Cameron Doomadgee had been arrested by Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley for swearing. Forty minutes later, Doomadgee was dead with a black eye, broken ribs and a ruptured liver. Hurley said he had tripped on a step while entering the police station, and the state-appointed pathologist reported no signs of brutality. The community did not agree: a week later, a mob burned down the island’s police station and the senior sergeant’s house. Chris Hurley went into hiding on the mainland.

A
FEW WEEKS
before coming to Palm Island, I’d happened to meet Andrew Boe, a Burmese-born Brisbane criminal lawyer who was visiting friends in Melbourne, where I live. An elegant, monk-bald figure with glasses, and a tattoo on his biceps in Burmese that meant “freedom from fear”, he was best known for defending Australia’s notorious serial backpacker killer, Ivan Milat. Boe had read of Cameron Doomadgee’s case in late November and had flown to the island in December, volunteering to represent the community pro bono at the state coroner’s inquest into Doomadgee’s death: an open hearing that would seek to establish how he had died. Boe had attended his funeral. Many hundreds of mourners, on a scorching day during the buildup to the rains, silently followed the coffin through the streets for kilometres, all the way to the graveyard.

Boe wanted someone to write about the case. The inquest would take a week or two, he said. I agreed to come along. I had spent most of my twenties living overseas, and I knew very little about Indigenous Australia. Like most middle-class suburbanites, I grew up without ever seeing an Aborigine, except on the news. The Reconciliation Movement—our country’s fitful attempt to bridge relations between the first Australians and all who followed—is a cause pursued by thousands who do not actually know any of the 2 per cent of the population who are Aboriginal. “I suspect you are yet to understand how complex and ‘hopeless’ the state of the indigenous situation is,” Boe had written to me after our meeting. And it was true that until I had met him, I had never heard of Palm Island. Not that I told him so—he did a hard line in moral earnestness. Among his reams of suggested reading—scholarly articles on traditional Aboriginal swearing rituals, case law, government reports, the five volumes produced by the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody—he’d included a list of what would be inappropriate to wear. “Be mindful of exposing underwear unduly. Don’t try to be feral.”

“Do you ever rest?” I wrote back to him.

“Rest …?” came the hand slap. “We have to use our freedoms and privileges to see what respite we can give to those less equipped to deal with their challenges.”

It was now early February. In two days’ time, the state coroner—the government-appointed investigator of deaths—would arrive on Palm Island for a pre-inquest hearing to resolve where the inquest would take place in three weeks’ time. Boe and his partner, Paula Morreau, a bright-eyed, dedicated young lawyer, had arrived to prepare their case. Boe had brought with him files of witness statements and the surveillance tape from Doomadgee’s cell on the morning he died.

P
ALM
I
SLAND IS
a place where history is so close to the surface, so omnipresent, it seems to run parallel to daily life. According to the original inhabitants, the Manburra people, Palm and its adjacent islands—Orpheus, Fantome, Eclipse—were formed in the Dreaming, the time of all creation, when an ancestral spirit, the Big Snake or Rainbow Serpent, broke up and left behind fragments of its body. When on June 7, 1770, Captain James Cook anchored the
Endeavour
among these tropical islands—shards of the Snake’s backbone—he saw “several large Smokes upon the Main, some people, Canoes, and we thought Cocoa Nut Trees upon one of the Islands”. He sent some men ashore but “they returned on board having met with nothing worth observing.”

A century later, the sea lanes along the east coast of Australia were well travelled and the islanders were accustomed to pearlers and fishermen, their seas being rich with bêche-de-mer, the sea cucumbers the Chinese believed were aphrodisiacs. North Queensland by the end of the nineteenth century was a multiracial community of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Pacific Islanders, in addition to Aborigines and Europeans. Southern states called it Queensmongreland. The historian of the Australian frontier Henry Reynolds argues that the Federation of Australia in 1901 was the equivalent of the American Civil War, but in reverse: the South conquered this steamy, racially diverse, “occult” North with its vision of White Australia. Asian immigration was restricted and thousands of Pacific Islanders were deported. “Unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia,” said the founding father Alfred Deakin.

Deakin and his ilk were less perturbed by the fact a diverse group of more than 350 Aboriginal tribes had been living on the continent for at least fifty thousand years, from the time land bridges existed between Cape York and New Guinea. By Federation, it was believed, they were doomed, and even in the 1940s Europeans wrote of their duty to “smooth the pillow of a dying race”; it was the general view that within decades the Aborigines would either die out or be bred out.

In 1897, Queensland had introduced the Aboriginal Protection Act making all “full-blood” Aborigines and female and underage “half-castes” wards of the state. “They are and will always remain children, and therefore must be protected, even sometimes against their will,” wrote the ethnographer W. E. Roth, now officially deemed “northern protector of Aboriginals”. Every district in Queensland was assigned a protector, most often a local policeman, not always an upstanding one: “Sgt on verge of DTs, eyes propped out, face lean but purple dewed with constant sweat,” wrote one observer. The protectors had responsibility for forcing people from their traditional lands onto reserves, which were predominantly run by Christian missionaries. Before long, the need for another separate reserve was identified: a place for those who protested their treatment.

In 1916 Palm Island’s potential struck the Queensland government. An official found it “the ideal place for a delightful holiday”, and the remoteness also made it “suitable for use as a penitentiary” to confine “the individuals we desire to punish”. From 1918 until the late 1960s, hundreds of Queensland Aborigines were sent to the Palm Island Mission, which served as a regular reserve as well as an openair jail. Although the state Parliament had been advised that “the grouping of many tribes in one area would mean continual warfare amongst themselves and practically survival of the fittest,” members of more than forty different tribes were nonetheless sent to Palm Island, in a grouping together of people with incompatible territorial, language and kinship ties. Adults often arrived in handcuffs or leg irons, deemed variously “troublesome characters”, “larrikins”, “wanderers” or “communists”. Some were sent there for practising traditional ceremonies or asking about wages. Children were sent alone or in groups and were placed in the island’s dormitories.

In the mission’s isolation it became increasingly authoritarian—a kind of tropical gulag. The island’s white superintendent, who “got the law in his own mouth”, issued permits to fish and permits to swim. To discourage traditional ceremonies, there was European dancing, and those who did not participate were questioned by police. A brass band learned to play jazz and marching tunes, and failure to attend band practice could result in a jail sentence. To leave the island, to marry, or to draw wages from a bank account, the Aboriginal inhabitants had to seek permission from the protector. Permission, as this letter to a new bride attests, was not to be assumed:

Dear Lucy
,

Your letter gave me quite a shock, fancy you wanting
to draw four pounds to buy a brooch, ring, bangle, work
basket, tea set, etc., etc. I am quite sure Mrs. Henry would
expend the money carefully for you, but I must tell you that
no Aborigine can draw 4⁄5 of their wages unless they are sick
and in hospital and require the money to buy comforts …
However, as it is Christmas I will let you have 1/5/-out of
your banking account to buy lollies with.

In the end, countless people never saw their savings. Aboriginal wages were appropriated by government departments or taken by protectors who forged the
X
of most workers’ signatures.

By 1967, the year Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were granted equal rights, Palm Island was still a completely segregated community. In 1970 a commentator described the white administration as “monarchical” and the island itself as “the most extraordinary of all Aboriginal settlements … completely unlike life in ordinary Queensland”. An Aboriginal Council was given some autonomy in the mid-1970s, but just as a new beer canteen was opened. Palm Islanders have come to call themselves the Bwgcolman, after the traditional name for the island. Today, with a population around 2,500, it is home to one of the largest Aboriginal communities in Australia.

To get to Palm you take a two-hour ferry trip or a fifteen-minute flight from Townsville (population 150,000), the largest town in North Queensland. Seven hundred miles north of Brisbane, the state capital, Townsville, is an army centre with four military bases. It’s a hot and dry and tough town. Like many places in the North it still retains a feeling of being the über-Australia that should have been. Big-city lawyers and southern liberals are given short shrift. At its airport the lawyers and I were picked up by a taxi driver in shorts and a starched short-sleeved shirt. His face was a rash of cancers. As he drove us to the terminal, where we could fly to a thousand-dollar-a-night resort or to Palm, he began complaining about people arriving from down south. He could always pick them.

“How?” I asked.

“Because they’re fuckwits,” he answered.

E
RYKAH
K
YLE HAD
been Palm Island’s mayor for a year. She was in her early sixties, with light brown skin, glasses, and greying curls under a hat crocheted in the red, yellow and black of the Aboriginal flag. Erykah’s maternal grandfather was white, and mixed relationships were illegal. That’s why her grandmother and her mother, a half-caste, were ordered by police to Palm Island. Her mother was placed in the dormitory; her grandmother was sent out to work on one of North Queensland’s vast cattle farms, where her family presume she died. Erykah’s father’s family, who came from the Burdekin River, inland from Townsville, were also sent to Palm Island, in 1918, probably so their homeland could be cleared for farming.

Erykah took us for a quick tour of the island. In the tropics, buildings seem to ripen—then sag and wilt and rot. People spilled out of houses into yards, onto the street. We stopped at a beach hemmed by the island’s densely forested hills—ancient volcanoes. Two chestnut horses were foraging nearby, wild ones left over from the mission stockyards. They roamed the hills and township, grazing on nature strips and gardens.

Boe, Paula and I were to stay in an accommodation known as “the motel”. Surrounded by a high Cyclone-wire fence, it was a series of spotless rooms with no apparent overseer. My room had barred windows, a steel-frame bed, a ceiling fan, and a nail on the wall with a coat hanger.

Boe wanted to explain the legal process to the Doomadgee family. At his suggestion I went with Erykah to pick up Cameron Doomadgee’s sisters for a meeting.

Erykah had known Cameron since he was a young boy. As a man, she said, he was happy-go-lucky; he loved to hunt and fish, and worked two days a week on the work-for-the-dole scheme, selling mud crabs on the side. Cameron had been a good friend of her own son, who two years earlier had been found dead in his cell in a mainland prison. An inquest took an hour to decide that he had committed suicide. There were no signs of foul play, but not knowing what had happened in the last hours of his life had left Erykah with an open wound. She showed me a photograph of her son diving into a water hole: he was young and strong, the water dappled in light.

Driving, we passed a group of young men walking uphill with their shoulders hunched. One carried a spear. “Who knows their abilities?” Erykah said.

She parked in the Doomadgees’ driveway. Theirs was one of the island’s newer houses, a white kit home. Large rocks had been dragged onto the block to landscape the garden. Frangipani branches stuck out of the sun-blasted earth, as did other cuttings: lychee, pepper, guava. A woman came briefly to the door, then for no apparent reason Erykah reversed out of the driveway. Something had been wordlessly arranged. The family were eating and wanted us to come back in twenty minutes.

Erykah told me that in the mission days her people found ways to communicate under the missionaries’ radar, with their eyes and hands. W. E. Roth had noticed something similar in the late 1890s: all across northern Queensland there were hand signs, subtle and complex, for different plants, animals, birds, snakes, fish, weapons, emotions and ideas. There were signs for “sunset”, “forgetfulness”, “Silence: be quiet!” for “bad person,” and “run!”—which, he wrote, was “Both fists closed and circular movement with each: the feet hurrying onwards.”

To kill time, we kept driving. Erykah talked about growing up on the island. One of twelve children, she was always top of her class, but got caned a lot: she had a defiant streak. She was not allowed to walk down Mango Avenue, where whites lived, and she was supposed to salute any white person she passed. Whites got the choice cuts of meat, blacks got the bones, and only in adulthood did Erykah taste milk that hadn’t been watered down. In the 1950s a man could be arrested for waving to his wife or for laughing at the wrong moment. Anyone who complained was sent for solitary confinement to nearby Eclipse Island, on a diet of bread, water and any fish they could catch with their bare hands. She remembered a man called Mr Starlight, who spoke out against the missionaries. He was always being sent to Eclipse Island. Her father smuggled over
Reader’s Digest
s for him. Mr Starlight ended up in an insane asylum.