The Tall Man (21 page)

This relatively minor episode might be the Rosetta Stone of the death in custody. The senior sergeant proposes an alternative story: Barbara Pilot was kicking the ground. (The equivalent in Cameron’s case: he tripped over a step.) He gets involved in the investigation himself. Then his supporters step in. In the case of Pilot, Warren Webber, who would later head the investigation into Doomadgee’s death, commissioned Hurley’s close friend Detective Darren Robinson to look into her complaint. Robinson waited a month before he began. By this time, although her foot still ached, the visible wounds had healed. Robinson did not try to access Barbara’s medical records, or even to interview Barbara herself. Instead he questioned her partner, Arthur Murray. The interview went like this:

Robinson: “Is it fair for me to say and do you accept that a lot of people on the island do ‘drunk talk’?”

Murray: “Yeah.”

Robinson: “All right. You know, well, you’ve known Barbara, you know her better than me. When she was speaking to you the next day, did she tell you this was just drunk talk?”

Murray: “Yeah.”

Robinson: “Do you know why she said it?”

Murray: “Drunk.”

Robinson: “She was drunk. Okay. So she actually said to you that, ‘Hey, the police hadn’t run over my foot.’”

Murray: “No. She said, ‘The car just run over my foot.’”

Robinson: “Do you think she’s just trying to stir trouble?”

Murray: “Yeah.”

Robinson: “All right. Is it like her to stir trouble?”

Murray: “Yeah. Liar.”

Robinson: “She lies?”

Murray: “She lies all the time, she’s so drunk.”

Robinson: “Have you asked her or has she told you how it happened?”

Murray: “Yeah, she told me next day the wheel ran over her foot.”

Robinson: “Yep. All right, a wheel ran over her foot. It was drunk talk that the police ran over her foot.”

Detective Robinson reported to senior police that Barbara Pilot’s claims were “fictitious”.

On October 21, 2005, the Crime and Misconduct Commission questioned Robinson about his previous investigations into Hurley’s conduct. Robinson’s own chance of promotion had been jeopardised due to this investigation, and in the meantime he was stuck in Townsville, a place he found ugly. It seems the thirty-two-year-old thought he’d teach the CMC detectives a lesson. The transcript of Robinson’s interview contains two closely typed pages of a lecture on alcohol and memory that he delivered. It reads like a student’s plagiarized term paper: “Today I wish to talk about the dangers for investigators when relying upon a person’s memory … This brings me to advise yourselves about a condition in which memory is disturbed known as amnesia.”

He told the CMC that the Aboriginal witnesses had memory loss through alcoholism and their evidence against Hurley and himself—theoretically Robinson could have faced charges for perverting the course of justice—needed to be treated cautiously. The witnesses, he recommended, should each have an electroencephalogram, a brain-function test often used to assess brain death, and a computerised tomography scan to identify structural damage. They should also undergo analysis by a psychologist. Finally, he warned the commission against “bias-ism”: “Your investigation is to be an accurate reflection of the truth in all matters.”

Even among Cameron’s family there were some who had been critical of Boe and Callaghan’s pursuit of Hurley’s complaint records. It meant more waiting. More delays. But each witness’s story suggested a way to decode what had happened to Cameron. Douglas Clay’s claim that he had been knocked across the room in front of five officers made me wonder what Hurley might do to someone who actually struck him, especially if there was no one around. Noel Cannon’s story suggested that a knee to the chest—a common police “settler”—could have been part of Hurley’s modus operandi. The case of Barbara Pilot seemed to show that he was capable of duplicity. And it also showed something else: even if Hurley had no recollection of Cameron, Cameron knew exactly who Hurley was. His niece claimed that the senior sergeant had run over her foot and left her lying in pain on the ground.

HUNDREDS OF PALM
Islanders had followed Cameron Doomadgee’s coffin on the narrow road from the Catholic church to the cemetery, a journey of several kilometres on a blisteringly hot day. Cameron’s sixteen-year-old son, Eric, had led the funeral procession, holding a white wooden cross to place on his father’s grave. A year and a half after Cameron’s death, Eric had his own white cross. On July 31, 2006, he was discovered hanging from a tree in bushland on Palm Island. The family friends who found him cut his body down and carried it into town.

In the Aboriginal diaspora, people regularly pool money and travel hundreds of kilometres to bury their relatives. For Eric’s funeral, Elizabeth’s daughters Rosie and Doris drove from Doomadgee with their small children. Distant cousins came from further north. Claudelle Doomadgee, Eric’s homeless aunt, a “street lady” as she calls herself, took the ferry over from Townsville.

When I arrived, the day before the funeral, the island seemed quieter than usual, strangely peaceful in the blue-green refracting light. I’d read that the coastal people of Arnhem Land believe they can see their unborn children in the pattern of the waves. Eric had died two weeks earlier.

Andrew Boe flew in the day I did. We found Valmae in the council chambers, sleepless but happy to be able to keep busy finalizing the funeral programme, organizing poems and messages to go inside it. We went to look for Elizabeth, who was in one of the island’s gambling circles, trying to get some money together for the wake. She was vague and remote, embarrassed perhaps about playing cards. I guessed she wanted one win to wipe out all the losses. It had been hard for the Doomadgee family to find money to pay the Townsville undertaker for the funerals of Cameron and their mother. The added cost of Eric’s funeral would be crippling. Boe had sent an e-mail around his legal circle, and several barristers and a magistrate donated funds. Boe now told Elizabeth there was enough to pay off the debt and to erect three headstones. It did not seem to penetrate. When she returned to the circle, he handed her $10 and asked if she’d make a bet for him.

The next morning, Eric’s body was laid out in a small outbuilding of the hospital, where people could say goodbye. His friends, Palm Island’s young men, had dressed in long-sleeved maroon shirts and black trousers. Others, too, wore maroon, yellow or white, the colours of Eric’s favourite rugby team, the Brisbane Broncos. His cousins had pinned ribbons in these colours to their clothes.

Inside the building there started a terrible keening. The queue filed past Eric. In his coffin he had white silk around his neck. People touched his face and hair. In front of him sat his aunts and his stepmother, Tracy, all of them weeping. Grief had taken them somewhere far away. Eric’s parents’ relationship had broken down in the year after he was born, and he was raised by his grandmother. His aunts Elizabeth and Claudelle breast-fed him because his mother, Lyn, had a drinking problem. Lyn still lived on the island and now sat, devastated, with the other women.

As the hearse drove to the Catholic church, people stood outside their houses, bowing their heads. Drivers pulled their cars over and did the same. It was a larger church than the one I’d visited with Elizabeth a year earlier, but still it was overflowing. Mourners stood outside, staring in through the Cyclone-wire windows. Inside, plastic flowers were attached with masking tape to each pew.

“Jesus said, ‘Let not your heart be troubled,’” the Aboriginal pastor announced. She did not address the circumstances of Eric’s life, or why he may have ended it, or his father’s life and why it had ended. Recognizing Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life was enough to ease a troubled mind. As the service was ending, someone played “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” on a tape deck and there was a sudden howling from Eric’s aunts.

Palm Island’s young men reckon they can hear the Hairy Man urging them to kill themselves. In Doomadgee they say they can see the hangman. But no one spoke of sorcery at Eric’s funeral. And no one thought he had been drunk or stoned when he hanged himself from the tree.

Although there are no reliable statistics, health experts estimate young Aboriginal men are two or three times more likely than non-Aboriginal men to commit suicide. The sociologist Colin Tatz concedes the impossibility of ever truly understanding why someone takes their own life. But he has created a “typology” of Indigenous suicide, which includes the existential suicide, the person who “sees no horizon and … no means of altering such horizons as they have”; the grieving suicide, the person trapped in a cycle of mourning dead friends and relatives; and the political suicide, who, according to Tatz, has a score to settle, particularly with the police, and makes a “rebuke and a stand against authority”. Eric’s death fits all three.

The service over, I looked around the churchyard for Erykah Kyle, but I could not find her. Erykah was soon to retire from the mayoralty to write a book. I recalled what she’d said on my first day on the island, when we passed a group of youths with shoulders hunched: “Who knows their potential?” Eric was seventeen. He’d left school and had few prospects. On Palm Island, to reach puberty is for many to reach the edge of the abyss. The young inherit a community in which they have sovereignty over nothing but their own bodies—a sovereignty many willingly and rapidly relinquish. “Nothing to do and every day the same faces,” Claudelle’s seventeen-year-old son, also named Cameron, told me the night before the funeral. “This face and that face and that face.”

The women outside the church carried hand towels to wipe their eyes. Their clothes were bright and yet seemed blanched of colour. Young men stood very still, crying. None of Eric’s friends would consider visiting the hospital’s counsellor, just as he hadn’t after his father died. Eric had been grieving for his father and his grandmother. Like other people on Palm Island, he was still mourning one death when the next occurred: compound grief. One woman told me she’d gone to three relatives’ funerals in two weeks; another that she went to her mother’s and sister’s funerals on the same day.

According to Eric’s cousins, Eric wanted justice for his father and was making a stand. More than nineteen months had passed since Cameron Doomadgee’s death and still no charges had been laid. No decision had been reached about what had happened in the police station. The inquest had finished hearing evidence in early March 2006, but four months later the law remained silent.

As the hearse left the church, Elizabeth, who had stayed composed and stern during the service, pressed her hand to the car and followed it down the driveway. She blamed her nephew’s death on a television crew that had come a few days earlier and filmed Eric talking about his father. His other aunts had thought he should speak, that it would do him good to express his feelings. Elizabeth said she’d tried to stop him, believing it would stir up too much pain.

The Palm Island cemetery was a field of white wooden crosses against a backdrop of mountains. Most of its graves were carefully tended and adorned with colourful plastic flowers; on older graves, frangipani trees twisted in full fragrant bloom. Eric’s friends had jostled so intensely to be pallbearers along prearranged routes—from church to hearse, from turn-off to last coconut tree, from last coconut tree to grave site—that the wooden coffin almost broke open. They passed around a shovel to fill the grave, covering the maroon, yellow and white flowers that swathed the casket.

As at his father’s funeral, hundreds of people had gathered and most of them seemed to be sober. The Queensland government had just introduced an alcohol-management plan on Palm Island, banning full-strength beer. Only light and mid-strength beers could be sold at the canteen. Hospital staff and elders told me they had noticed an immediate difference.

Lex Wotton, who had not yet been tried on the charges of rioting and arson, was out on bail. He stood in the graveyard along with the other alleged rioters who’d been banned from the island at the time of Cameron’s funeral. Lex had entered a plea of not guilty. His trial had been delayed because his lawyers, the Sydney firm Levitt Robinson, succeeded in having it moved from Townsville to Brisbane. A Townsville jury, they claimed, was likely to be racist.

The trial was now scheduled for early 2007. Lex was not nervous. His sense of destiny gave him a peculiar calm. He told me that immediately after the riot, when he was locked up, a voice came to him urging him to see himself as “God’s vessel” and a leader of his people. Off the island, Lex was now celebrated by activists and sym-pathisers as a great warrior, a prophet. His lawyers had given him works by Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King to read.

Also standing at Eric’s grave site was David Bulsey, who had warned people on the day of the riot that their own child might be next. Tall and thin, wearing a sapphire silk shirt and black trousers, Bulsey was a close friend of the Doomadgee family. When the riot squad had kicked down his door that night, his pregnant wife, Yvette, was made to lie on the floor with their children, rifles pointed at them. Their daughter (another Cameron) was induced prematurely, and David and Yvette believed it was because of the raid. Now a year and a half old, Cameron was on heart medication. When she became upset, her mother could hear an irregular heartbeat. This child was Eric’s goddaughter.

I noticed Elizabeth standing away from all the other mourners, at the edge of the cemetery. Sometimes she was so regal, holding herself ramrod straight, giving orders to the lawyers with such authority, I would forget she’d been born into an island jail, leaving school in her early teens to help her mother do cleaning work. She was the bearer not only of her grandmother Lizzy Daylight’s legacy of power and resilience, but also of the hard-line Christian tradition in which she’d been raised. During the first phase of the inquest, Elizabeth had suspected Eric of breaking into her house for money or food, possibly because his other relatives were drinking and there was nothing to eat in their house. Elizabeth summoned the police, and when they arrived she asked them to give Eric a warning. It seemed odd to be calling on the cops at such a time, but she embodied both strict traditions, including all that was contradictory about the resulting hybrid, and somehow it worked in ways that astonished.