The Tall Man (20 page)

One police officer I met in Doomadgee who’d also worked on the island told me that while he hated to talk down Aboriginal communities, the island had nearly broken him. It was physically stunning—mountains, white sand beaches, shimmering waters—but one day, when he was sitting with another officer in the police barracks, a missile in the form of a full can of beer flew over the fence and just missed the other officer’s newborn baby. And one night, they got a call to an area known as the Farm, near the mission’s abandoned farmland, and along the way came upon a roadblock. It was dark. Getting out to clear the road, they knew they were in danger. People began pelting them with rocks. Such incidents weren’t uncommon. The police were threatened constantly; their windows were broken, their cars rocked. Once, as the officer was unlocking the barracks gates, a passer-by said to him, “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not allowed out!”

The most recent craze for the island kids was to cut the power cords off people’s main appliances, then fray the plastic coating at one end to make a whip. People couldn’t use their washing machines, but boys and girls of all ages were wandering around the streets swinging the cords with the skill and grace of stockmen. All the petals on the white spider lilies that had come out with the rain had been lopped off. At night you could hear flowers being beheaded with whip cracks that sounded like rifle shots. So many people were complaining about their missing cords that the police had started confiscating the whips.

In the Palm Island barracks, the officer and I finished our beers and he walked me back to the wire gates, releasing me, then locking himself back in.

“Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the lead actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.” So wrote George Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant”, an essay about his time as a British Raj policeman in Burma. “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy … For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

I thought of Hurley’s inscrutable face at the inquest. I thought of all the ways he’d tried to “impress the natives” with acts of kindness and of force. He even looked like a lead actor, and no one calls the lead actor a “fucking cunt” and gets away with it.

Hurley had told the inquest: “I wouldn’t go to those communities if I had something against Aboriginal people, I couldn’t serve …” But who knows if, like Orwell, who was hooted at wherever he went, Hurley’s life as a policeman wasn’t “one long struggle not to be laughed at”, and if it did not sometimes “get badly on his nerves”? Black communities can morph into the opposite of white communities on purpose. If Doomadgee kids were teased by their peers for not washing, they’d retort: “I’m no white man!” Junk was strewn in people’s yards in part because neatness was seen as a white ideal. It was as if the locals were saying, “You think we’re all abject—well, here’s what abject is. Here is chaos and self-destruction, unreason and cruelty. Here are all the things you accuse us of, all those things you’re frightened of. This is what they look like.” Hurley went straight in. But it would take a truly exceptional person to serve in these places and
not
develop feelings like Orwell’s.

Like the British police in Burma, cops on Palm Island were still “doing the dirty work of Empire at close quarters”, feeding good intentions into a broken machine and watching them come back in other, twisted forms. Were these cops also caught between a feeling of contempt for their countrymen who didn’t know the realities of life in these places, and a feeling that it would be, as Orwell put it, the “greatest joy in the world” to do violence to those who laughed at them, those useless, abusive men throwing rocks while their children didn’t have enough to eat?

O
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F
EBRUARY
27, 2006, seven months after the last adjournment, the inquest resumed yet again. It seemed to Tracy Twaddle and the Doomadgee sisters that they were forever waiting for something to happen. “This just drag, eh,” Valmae said, but she believed her brother was watching over her. “It’s like he there telling me to keep pushing, don’t give up.”

Behind the scenes a protracted fight had been playing out. In the course of the inquest, lawyers for the Queensland police commissioner and Hurley twice tried to prevent the senior sergeant’s twenty or so prior-complaint files from being seen by the opposing lawyers and used in evidence. Trial courts always seek to ensure that the burden of proof is greater on the prosecution than on the defence. Inquests, being fact-finding missions, are not bound by the same constraints, but nevertheless neither Hurley nor the Queensland Police Service wanted his records released.

Andrew Boe and Peter Callaghan had had to go to the Supreme Court to win permission to see the files. The police lawyers then claimed that, even though Boe and Callaghan could see them, they should not be able to use them in evidence. Boe and Callaghan went back to the Supreme Court and won the right to use the prior complaints in evidence, but only those that indicated negligence on the part of Hurley, or a propensity towards violence in arrest situations, and only those that related to Palm Island.

Deputy Coroner Christine Clements called two men to appear at the inquest who both claimed they’d been assaulted by Hurley in the Palm Island police station. The inquest also heard from a woman who alleged Hurley had driven over her foot and left her lying on the ground. Hurley was called back and cross-examined.

Over a period of five days, more than a dozen police—all of whom were white—also testified as witnesses to these incidents, but they had seen no evil, heard no evil, and would certainly not be speaking of any evil.

Police commonly feel they are subject to malicious false complaints: it is one of the justifications for “the code”. A Brisbane police sergeant told me he’d been accused many times of things he’d never done. He said there was a “culture of complaint” among those who were arrested—claiming they’d been assaulted gave them a sense of having a win, and a certain credibility among their mates.

But people in remote communities have good reason
not
to complain. First, there’s the perception that nothing will be done; second, they assume they’ll then be targeted by the police for minor things, such as their car’s roadworthiness, and by other white service providers friendly with the police. “You’ve got the hospital turn against you. You have the school turn against you,” said a man in Doomadgee whose son, the Crime and Misconduct Commission found, was beaten by police. “You have them all turn against you.”

The stories told by the three complainants at the inquest were, on one level, mundane. All three had been drunk at the time they came into contact with Hurley, and perhaps as a consequence it was virtually impossible to work out who was being honest. This had been the problem with Cameron Doomadgee’s case all along. Almost everyone had a strained relationship with the truth. Often the police seemed less than candid, but so did the blackfellas. With this level of drunkenness, the facts blurred, and were almost impossible to locate.

The first Palm Island man to give “similar fact” evidence was Noel Cannon. He had come forward after Cameron died and made a sworn statement to the Doomadgee family’s lawyers. In that statement he claimed he’d been picked up on July 8, 2004, for public drunkenness. He was in his brother’s front yard, sitting on a trampoline, talking to his three-year-old grandson, Gerry. He claimed:

Mr Hurley, the police officer, came past and was talking to Georgina, my partner, she was next door. I was talking to Gerry saying to him, “Don’t jump in the police van, if they see you, they’ll lock you up.” I was not using any bad language. Mr Hurley thought I was talking to him but I was talking to my grandson. I had been drinking. I would have had a six-pack that morning and then a few more during the day.

What Noel Cannon had neglected to mention was that Georgina was actually his ex-partner, and she had called the police because he was outside her house, drunk, stoned, and flouting a restraining order.

After Hurley arrived, Cannon went into his brother’s yard nearby and sat on a trampoline with his grandson. According to Georgina, who testified at the inquest, he started calling, “Piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy!” Senior Sergeant Hurley got Cannon on his stomach against the trampoline and handcuffed him; the child watched on.

At the inquest, Noel Cannon claimed that he was taken to the police station and Hurley “put me in the cell. He took all my clothes off. He left me in my shorts.” There was no mattress in the cell. Cannon says Hurley told him to wait for twenty minutes so he could do his paperwork. Cannon waited for what he thought was twenty minutes before calling out. Hurley “came in with a temper”. If Cannon was “going to keep singing out and kicking the door”, he’d be made to wait another half hour. Cannon waited, then started calling again. The next time Hurley came in, he “grabbed me by the throat, squeezed my throat, squeezed it … kept squeezing and squeezing until I wet myself.” Cannon claimed that while Hurley had him by the throat, “he sticked me up the guts”, meaning that Hurley had his knee in Cannon’s abdomen, winding him. “He threw a mattress in for me then.”

The senior sergeant denied the entire story.

The second man to give “similar fact” evidence was Douglas Clay, a twenty-five-year-old with a medical history of drug-induced psychosis. Clay is the son of Tracy Twaddle’s half sister, another Elizabeth, and the nephew of Lex Wotton’s older brother. He was drunk and having an episode when, on August 14, 2004, he walked into the Palm Island police station with a beer in his hand to ask for help. Chris Hurley told the inquest he’d been sitting with five other officers, including Darren Robinson. “I saw Dougie walk in the back door drinking a can of VB. And of course I thought that was unusual, just walking in the police station … he stated something along the lines of, ‘You fucking police cunts.’ I’m thinking, What’s going on here? I said to Robbo, I said, ‘Who’s this bloke?’ He said, ‘It’s Dougie Clay. Don’t you know him?’”

Hurley thought Clay might have been one of Darren’s informants, but in fact he was wanted just then for “touching up the nurse at the canteen the other night”. Hurley stood up to tell Clay to get out, and, he claimed, Clay lunged as if to head-butt him. Clay said Hurley gave him a “flurry of punches”, something Hurley denied: “I mean, a man’s first instinct’s survival. I reacted. I pushed his face away. I struck out at him basically. I slapped him. I pushed out hard in his face and I slapped his face hard and pushed it over towards the wall.”

Clay was dragged to the cells, his mouth bleeding. After he’d been locked up, Darren Robinson told Hurley, “Mate, he’s a nutter. He’s been over in Townsville in ward 10B.” That was a psychiatric unit.

The most damning evidence against Hurley involved the third complainant, Barbara Pilot, a round, soft woman of thirty. Barbara is the daughter of Cameron Doomadgee’s elder sister Victoria, and on the night of May 19, 2004, she was drunk. So was her partner, Arthur Murray, who pushed her down some stairs and hit her hard on the head with a screwdriver. An ambulance collected Barbara, and while she was at the hospital, Senior Sergeant Hurley arrived at the Murray house to perform his usual thankless task. (In the right light, Hurley can seem like Everyman walking through a landscape where the characters are Death, Drunkenness, Violence and Despair.)

He arrested Murray and put him in the back of the police van. As he was driving away, Barbara returned. She approached the van, remonstrating with “Big Chris”, who told her to go away. When she did not, she claims, he reversed over her bare foot. “She made the exclamation that I’d run her over,” Hurley told the inquest. “She was singing it out. I can’t recall whether she was screaming in pain but she was singing out, ‘You run me over!’” It was dark. Hurley opened the door, looked Barbara Pilot up and down, and apparently seeing no injuries, drove away. He went back to the station, put Murray in a cell, then left him unsupervised and went to the hospital to drink tea with the nurses.

Before long, Barbara Pilot arrived back at the hospital. According to the attending doctor, Clinton Leahy, “the bone [was] clearly protruding from her foot in a very unusual manner.” Dr Leahy, who testified at the inquest, claimed that while he examined Barbara, Hurley was waiting for him. The two men were friends. Hurley asked Leahy if he thought the injury was caused by a car tyre, but to the doctor “he seemed interested, to me, to find out that there was another cause for it.” Hurley ran through some different possibilities.

Dr Leahy testified: “I told him that I’d never seen an injury like this before, and in my opinion, it required something quite profound to push a bone, not only out of its joint, but through the skin and out into the open. And I told him that such a great force would be well explained by a car tyre.”

The coroner called a bone specialist from Townsville, to whom Pilot went subsequently for surgery, and a forensic pathologist on retainer from Hurley’s lawyers. They both told the inquest that the woman’s injuries were consistent with her having been run over. In fact, even Hurley—albeit under legal privilege—admitted the possibility: “I’d be ignorant to do that; to exclude it 100 per cent.”

Yet the night it had happened, that is exactly what he tried to do. He called his superior and family friend Inspector Gary Hickey to report the incident. At the inquest, Hickey read from a bound book the notes he’d taken of their conversation: “More consistent with kicking ground but possibly from car [according to] Dr Clinton Leahy. [But] Hurley claims not possible from position near driver’s window.” Then, of the victim: “Intoxicated, playing up.” Hickey ordered Hurley to start investigating Barbara’s allegation.