The Tall Man (22 page)

With her youngest child, Sylvia, now at boarding school in Cairns, Elizabeth cared for four foster children aged under ten—three girls and a boy. I’d seen them running around her house looking for food, for attention, for fun. One of them was Elizabeth’s great-niece. Elizabeth told me that her mother had used the girl as a shield against the girl’s father when he violently attacked her. Despite her own tribulations, Elizabeth planned to take two more boys to keep the other company. Hanging in a broken frame on one of the walls in her house was a government certificate commending her work with children.

Now she stood away from the crowd, arms tightly crossed, holding herself. Andrew Boe walked over to her, and when he put his arm around her shoulders she began to cry uncontrollably, bending towards him as if in physical pain. She was saving all these children but she had not managed to save her own nephew.

The endless legal inquest, with its undertones of moral outrage, real and feigned, was supposed to prevent more deaths. But somehow it had missed the dead man’s son. That was the sickening part. Whatever the legal system decided about Cameron’s death, nothing would change for Eric, whose grave now lay alongside his father’s.

After the burial, the young men who were Eric’s friends all posed for photographs in front of the fresh white cross: first a group shot, then they took turns for single shots. They crouched close to the newly formed mound, touching it tenderly. I thought of young martyrs posing for the video camera before blowing themselves up.

Elizabeth had long since left the graveyard, but Boe and I waited with the rest of the family, who we were driving in a van lent to him by the council. Valmae wanted Eric’s friends to have as much time as they needed.

My past twenty-four hours on the island had been strained. I would talk to Eric’s cousins and find them staring back at me as if I were speaking a different language. The most basic phrases sounded utterly foreign. Boe told me that something similar had happened to him: he’d been driving Eric’s aunts and at one point it was as if they were talking in tongues—as if people who live without hope could not be understood by people with hope in abundance.

When the boys were finished, Valmae handed me her camera. She stood in front of the grave with Cameron’s elder sisters and his nephews and nieces, including Barbara Pilot with her foot that still ached from having been run over by Hurley in the police van. They wanted separate shots of Eric’s aunts, cousins, in-laws—the husbands and wives of Eric’s aunts and cousins. Then everyone gathered behind the grave for a group photo. ‘Smile! Smile!’ called Dwayne, Eric’s burly, mentally disabled cousin. “Smile!” he called to me, becoming upset. It was the photographer, he believed, who was meant to look happy.

FOUR DAY SAFTER
Eric Doomadgee’s funeral, on August 16, 2006, the inquest into his father’s death sat for the last time. It was hot in Townsville, the sun bit the skin. In the bright light everyone looked older.

All the evidence having been taken, the lawyers were making their final submissions, summarising their arguments before the deputy coroner went back to Brisbane to compose her findings. Normally final submissions are presented in writing, but this was now a high-profile case and there was seen to be a need for transparency. Tracy Twaddle and Cameron’s sisters were in court, but not many Palm Islanders had travelled to Townsville. The community’s interest in the inquest seemed to be waning; it had dragged on and on and people with their own haul of problems had to focus on surviving day to day. This moment in court was largely for the local media—the Townsville reporters—who again sat in seats usually reserved for the jury.

Paula Morreau had taken up a scholarship at Harvard Law School, but before leaving she had, along with Andrew Boe, painstakingly prepared a tightly spaced, hundred-page document. For Boe, this fight was personal. He had defined himself by it. He’d fought it as if he were fighting for a man he’d known and loved, and in a way he was: his Aboriginal foster son had been in trouble with the police, and had spent time in custody; this young man might have found himself in a situation like Cameron’s that morning on Palm Island.

The case had driven Boe for nearly two years and cost him well over a quarter of a million dollars in forgone fees. Few could have afforded to pay him for the hours he’d put in. He was offended when he saw signs from other lawyers that to them this was just a job. But now he was exhausted and frustrated and emotional. He thought the deputy coroner would rule that Cameron’s death was an accident, and all this effort would have be for nothing.

Two days earlier, the local news had run stories about a professional white footballer accused of saying “fucking cunt” on the football field. Should he be suspended? Reprimanded? In Townsville the controversy created a minor furore. Now Boe addressed Deputy Coroner Christine Clements for the last time:

Police arrest people for street offences, language offences, frequently. The statistics show that most of those people are poor people who live on the streets. Most of them happen to be Indigenous. There’s an awful irony that the newspapers in the last forty-eight hours are dealing with what might happen to a football player using the very same words that Mulrunji was arrested for. The Palm Island community cannot understand why it is that the law is applied differently to them.

“A mustard seed can move a mountain,” Elizabeth had told me as we walked to the courthouse. She was thinking of Jesus telling the disciples, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove.” I wondered if her faith now felt that small—and this fight that great.

To Andrew Boe, the mountain was the legal game. The inquest was a mountain of legal precedents and sections and codes, of closed-rank police and rival personalities along the bar table, of one-upmanship, adrenaline and ego.

At a coroner’s inquest, unlike in most court situations, members of the deceased’s family have a statutory right to voice their distress. It’s part of the fact-finding. Elizabeth had planned to speak, but after Eric’s death chose not to. Tracy Twaddle now walked to the witness box, her eyes cast down. With bobbed curls and no makeup, she had the same fine features as the Doomadgee women. Her large body was hunched in old clothes—widow’s black with a print of white flowers. The year before, she’d gone to hospital with pneumonia after sleeping at night on Cameron’s grave. A teacher’s aide, she’d found it hard returning to work after his death and was now unemployed. In her living room the walls were covered in photos of Cameron. Tracy often sat there playing solitaire. She had wondered if she wanted to continue living.

“Can I sit down?” she asked the deputy coroner, keeping her eyes low.

“Yes. Please,” Clements answered.

In a soft voice, Tracy read out a statement she had written. She was articulate but she said her piece modestly and without a hint of guile:

I met Cameron, Mulrunji, in 1994 and we lived together soon after that. We had a simple but happy life together. He was unselfish, and he was caring, and he tried to do the right thing by the people. He’d help anybody. He didn’t—he didn’t care what colour they were. He wasn’t mean. He was always caring. He was always there for me and his Mum and his family.

And Cameron was always joking and ready for a laugh, you know, he always lifted our spirits. I think he saw the good and right in life. And he never sat around and brooded over things. And in a way he was an inspiration to me, because I used to watch him and, you know, think gee, he knew how to enjoy his life. He was content. It was a simple life and happy.

Cameron was a hunter and he was proud to carry on that tradition. He was a proud hunter. He was always proud that he could provide food for us: goat, possum, fish, and share it out amongst his family and friends.

Cameron was, you know, more or less in his prime when this happened to him—when he lost his life. He was still a young man, and he had a lot to look forward to. He was especially proud of his son, Eric—he meant the world to Cameron. He was a proud father, and to watch his son grow and to be there when Eric became a man was something Cameron always talked about, but that’s never going to happen now.

Cameron wasn’t violent or troublesome in the community. We had our little ups and downs. He wasn’t a saint or anything, but he was a real and genuine person, and he was a good person. He was saying to me, you know, we’ve been together for a decade, I’ve made up my mind we’re going to grow old together.

My life is on hold. I get frustrated because everything’s dragging on slowly. I think about if we’re ever going to get real justice for him. Everything is still up in the air.

Eric was even more in a state of anguish than I was and tragically, Eric killed himself just a couple of weeks ago. In spite of this, you know, I’ll always try to be positive, because of Cameron. He’s never far from my mind. That’s all I can say.

People in the courtroom cried.

Everyone on the island described Cameron as happy-go-lucky, as the last person to look for a fight, as a peaceful man to whom they would never have imagined this happening. But it was hard to reconcile the picture of the Cameron who “saw the good and right in life” with the Cameron who drank methylated spirits, or with the man whose hospital records showed he had suffered knife wounds and alcoholic seizures. Tracy had delivered a eulogy, and eulogies smooth away sharp edges—but this also seemed to be a question of perspective, or of degree.

It was one of the problems of looking at the island from the outside. A few days after her partner’s death, Tracy had told investigators that Cameron wasn’t usually aggressive when he was drunk; he was more often silly, goofy. If there was a problem, she said, she would lock herself in the bathroom. This was ordinary life up and down every street. And for her, it was a good life, a happy one. From the outside, Palm Island often doesn’t make sense. From the inside, perhaps it does.

Anthropologist Peter Sutton, who has for many years studied and lived with the Wik people of western Cape York, writes that in Indigenous communities, outsiders’ “compassion fatigue” is matched only by locals’ “tragedy tolerance”. Palm Islanders are infuriated by people who criticise their island and the way they live. White people do all the same things in the suburbs, Elizabeth once complained. Another woman told me that whites in Townsville called her people niggers, adding with outrage, “But we try to live peacefully here, not like them negroes who always shooting each other.”

That all this is contradictory is the one constant in the story. Cameron’s grandfather’s family, the Diamonds who fled from the Northern Territory during Wild Time, came from a place called Nguyjburri.
Nguyjburr nguyjbul
translates as “meat that’s gone rotten”, and the area had a Rotting Meat Dreaming. The Dreamtime encompasses all the phenomena of the world, good and bad, the Dreamings that provide and the Dreamings that take away, the Dreamings of the Rainbow Serpent and the Catfish, but also of painful and unpleasant things. One can, for instance, have a Diarrhoea Dreaming, or Cough, or Itchiness Dreaming, or a Dead Body Dreaming.

These Dreamings are many-layered, a metaphilosophy, their details only for the initiated. In the early 1960s, W. E. H. Stanner described the Aboriginal view of life as “a joyous thing with maggots at the centre”. Decay is part of the world. And in the midst of what is rotten—the history of Palm Island, addiction, the hopelessness of early deaths—there is the ongoing human attempt to find joy.

Tracy Twaddle might have been romanticising in her statement to the court, but she was still being genuine. She meant every word. In all this tragedy there was love. There is love on Palm Island. There is happiness on Palm Island. And contradiction is in the matter of being alive.

WOULD ANYONE PAY
for Cameron Doomadgee’s death? Would anyone be held responsible? Finally, on the morning of September 27, 2006, Queensland’s deputy state coroner, Christine Clements, handed down her findings as four armed police officers stood outside the Townsville courtroom and another waited inside with a gun, pepper spray, and handcuffs—the full utility belt. The Doomadgee family were not feeling optimistic. Chris Hurley was nowhere to be seen.

Christine Clements had been Sphinx-like, but occasionally she would regard the male lawyers as a dismayed headmistress might regard foolish schoolboys trying to impress. Now she started reading from her thirty-nine pages of findings and, as she did so, dropped a series of grenades. She found that Senior Sergeant Hurley, “the ultimate figure of power and authority on Palm Island”, had arrested Cameron Doomadgee on a public nuisance charge, the public being the senior sergeant, who said he had heard him swear. She found the arrest “completely unjustified”. She also found: “Police Liaison Officer Bengaroo must surely have seen more than what he has told this court … His accounts vary to such an extent regarding factual matters that he must be considered unreliable.” She felt “some sympathy” for Bengaroo, “powerless to exert influence on the unfolding tragedy”, but noted “he was careful not to see or intervene in a situation where he knew he had no power to influence what happened.”

She found that the senior officers who investigated the death—Detective Inspector Warren Webber and Detective Inspector Mark Williams—had been “as wilfully blind as Bengaroo chose to be.” She found it was “unwise and inappropriate” for Detective Robinson to investigate Hurley, and for Hurley to pick up Robinson and the other investigators from the airstrip and socialise with them during the investigation. It was “a serious error of judgement” for the investigators to share a meal with Hurley at his home that evening. The investigation was “compromised” by Hurley having the chance to discuss the case with the other police witnesses. It was “reprehensible” that Detective Senior Sergeant Kitching had not passed on Roy Bramwell’s allegation of assault to the pathologist at the time of the first autopsy.