The Tall Man (25 page)

As you go farther north, the constable told me, you understand the problem of Aborigines better. It was easy down south, where you don’t see many blackfellas, but up here it was different. Over the border, he said, police in the Northern Territory were buying the wristbands too.

I
WAS TRAVELLING
north to Laura to see the tall spirits. I flew to Cairns then drove until the red dirt road was lined with old mango trees. Laura’s shopkeeper sat outside her store to keep cool. Otherwise the tiny town seemed deserted, asleep in the sun, and yet, like a Greek village among ancient ruins, Laura was surrounded by drama. In rock art galleries on cave and cliff-faces were paintings of
quinkans
, the tall spirits, who were said to inhabit the surrounding hills.

I hired a guide to show me around and, when I told him I was following the Palm Island case, he said he knew a gallery I’d find interesting. We drove away from Laura and, near a creek, turned and headed straight into bushland. “Trees!” he exclaimed, with an aftertaste of irritation having run down another sapling. We parked and started walking across a river, then uphill through long grass with dartlike seeds until we came on walking tracks that led us to the gallery. On a cave wall stretched a sorcery painting from the end of the nineteenth century: two white policemen, horizontal, rifles by their sides. A snake stretched farther along the wall, biting one of the men’s feet. Beyond the snake were the figures of two naked black men with round white eyes. They too had rifles. The guide believed these were self-portraits of the men who’d painted the police; that they had painted themselves with guns so they might by magic obtain them. Drawn as if from the core of the country’s history, this was a drama of revenge.

CHRIS HURLEY HAD
to bow his head to fit through the doorway of the Townsville courtroom. In a dark-grey pinstriped suit, he looked like a man from another era, a handsome 1940s figure with a granite face. It was as if he were made of material too hard to sculpt very deeply, leaving a bullish neck, broad nostrils, a big brow over mournful dark eyes, and a high forehead accentuated by oiled hair parted just off centre. He sat in the polished-timber dock, the giant who’d been brought to the fair.

The courtroom was a grand wooden box with ultramarine carpet, high ceilings, and a wall of small square windows. A relief featuring a British lion and unicorn hung above Supreme Court Judge Peter Dutney, who was in white-collared red robes. It was Tuesday, June 12, 2007. Outside on the pavement, Aboriginal dancers wearing body paint and laplaps had performed with clap sticks and bouquets of gum leaves.

“Christopher James Hurley,” read the judge’s clerk, “you are charged that on the 19th day of November 2004 at Palm Island in the state of Queensland you unlawfully assaulted and unlawfully killed Cameron Francis Doomadgee. Christopher James Hurley, how do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty, Your Honour.”

The security was fit for a visiting head of state. Extra court guards stood outside next to uniformed police. Inside, plainclothes officers sat in each corner, handcuffs visible under their jackets. The first rows of reserved seats were marked
DEFENDANT’S FAMILY AND SUPPORTERS
. Sitting here were Hurley’s two brothers—olive-skinned men of similar bulk but more average height—his kind-looking mother, and his girlfriend, a petite, curvaceous brunette with pale blue eyes, wearing gold earrings, bracelets, rings, and a tiny crucifix around her neck. Interspersed among the family were the police chaplain, a police psychologist, and the Police Union officials, including Gary Wilkinson and Denis Fitzpatrick. When the officials crossed their arms they revealed their blue wristbands. As stony-faced as men at a funeral, they wore matching ties, shiny shoes, and had the tight swagger of those who carry guns.

In a high-tiered gallery, as if floating above the court, sat the Doomadgee family. A Justice Department employee had warned me not to go upstairs if I was scared of heights. The gallery was vertiginous, and the air close with body odour. “It’s easier if you’re drunk,” a plainclothes officer said, gesturing to Cameron’s sister Claudelle, who lived in a local park. She sat with Elizabeth, Jane, Valmae, and their brother, Lloyd, who had travelled from Doomadgee. Tracy Twaddle had woken and not been able to face coming.

Elizabeth looked wary and tired and thin. It was eleven months since Eric’s death, and her hair had started greying in streaks around her forehead. She and her siblings wore yellow wristbands that a supporter had produced, stamped mulrunji 19–11–04 justice now!

From the gallery, the family looked down on the tops of the jurors’ heads—four men and eight women, all white and mostly middle-aged. They looked down on the lawyers. They looked down on Chris Hurley, grave and shifting in the dock—the tall man captive in his waist-high pen.

The two legal teams were lined up along the bar table. The defence comprised Hurley’s original lawyers, Glen Cranny, Steve Zillman, plus the steely old-school barrister Robert Mulholland QC. The Crown prosecutor, Peter Davis SC, was assisted by barristers David Kent and Jonathan Horton. Twenty journalists from around the country were gathered in a second courtroom down the hallway, where the inquest had been held. The trial was being shown on closed-circuit television and they could move around, type, field calls. I chose to stay in the first courtroom.

In his late forties, Peter Davis was tall too, but stooped, pale and thin, with glasses and fair, bowl-cut hair. A self-confessed “cold fish”, Davis prided himself on remaining emotionally aloof from his work. But this time he had not succeeded. He was shocked by the conditions on Palm Island, a slum on a lush tropical island, and the case had got under his skin. In a soft voice, he began:

The story is this—Mr Doomadgee, we know, was a resident of Palm Island. On the 19th of November 2004 he was on the island and he was walking down a street called Dee Street, and the evidence will tell you that Mr Doomadgee was drunk. The accused arrived in the police van in Dee Street. The accused then proceeded to arrest Mr Doomadgee. The van was then driven to the police station. Mr Doomadgee struck the accused. A short time later, the Crown say, the accused then struck Mr Doomadgee. Now that assault is count one of the indictment.

Mr Doomadgee, though, continued to resist and the pair of them then struggled. As they got towards the door of the police station there’s a step. It seems likely they tripped on the step and fell into the police station.

The Crown says that the accused man then killed Mr Doomadgee and he did that by administering some force, most probably with his knee, but with such force as to cause Mr Doomadgee’s liver to be virtually cleaved in two across his spine…

Davis projected onto a screen a CAT scan showing the profile of someone with a healthy liver. On the black image, skin and viscera were a light grey, framed by the spine—a curving white exclamation mark. Cameron’s abdomen, Davis told the court, had been squeezed so hard his liver was pushed back against the spine, which had almost torn it in two. He would “have died ten minutes after receiving such an injury”.

Davis then played a segment of the video re-enactment Hurley had made with his investigators the day after the death. The senior sergeant stood in the dingy police station, his head nearly touching the ceiling, and claimed he fell next to Cameron Doomadgee on the linoleum floor.

Hurley sat fidgeting. He straightened the fabric of his trousers over his thighs, pulled at his cuffs, adjusted the knot of his tie. He looked like a man unused to wearing a suit, one brought to heel. His mouth had become a line. He’d been to court countless times, but always on the other side of the dock, always for someone else’s trauma and mess. Now he was the accused, and it was in his hands that the stress showed. He knitted them. He rubbed one hand with the thumb of the other. He balled his hands into fists, tight fists, and sat bracing them on his knees, as if asking the court to guess which one held the key, the truth.

Throughout Davis’s opening address, the Police Union’s president, Gary Wilkinson, played with his watch, which emitted a sharp beeping. He was chaperoning Hurley’s mother. Wilkinson knew what it was to have trouble with the law. In the late 1980s, he was found to have given false evidence at an inquiry into a stolen-car scam involving police. He had also been charged with attempting to obtain a five-thousand-dollar bribe, but at trial was found not guilty.
Mbeep
.
Mbeep
.
Mbeep
. As he sat fiddling with his watch, Gary Wilkinson was about to face a Crime and Misconduct Commission investigation for allegedly selling a Police Union car to his wife at a discount of several thousand dollars.

Only when the defence barrister stood did Wilkinson place the watch back on his wrist, next to the blue wristband.

No-nonsense Robert Mulholland QC gave the defence’s story: Senior Sergeant Hurley had fallen on top of Cameron Doomadgee. Hurley was a big, heavy man—253 pounds to Cameron’s 163. Subsequent traumatic events had “eroded” the senior sergeant’s memory, hence his initial claims that he and Doomadgee had fallen side by side.

Mulholland, cultivating a practical, sensible demeanour, leaned forward, elbows on his lectern. His tone was “Let’s not get carried away.” By the end of the trial, he assured the jury and everyone else assembled in the courtroom, we would have no doubts about his client’s innocence. But he added a cautionary note: “When you listen to the evidence, members of the jury, you’re not expected to throw your common sense out the window. You came here with your common sense and experience of the world, and we would say to you, ‘Please use it when you listen to the evidence.’”

I looked at the jury: a platinum blonde with a double chin chewed gum and never stopped writing in her court-issued notebook; two senior men, with short-back-and-sides hair and the familiar scars of old sunburn, wore carefully pressed short-sleeved shirts in tropical tones of mango and papaya. In Townsville, it is safe to say, the jurors did have a rather particular experience of the world. Among other things, with the highest number of defence personnel in Australia, it’s a pro-military town. It’s also a town with considerable racial tension.

During June and July 2006, the Sydney law firm defending Lex Wotton had commissioned a market research firm to conduct a poll establishing a statistical profile of the Townsville community. The results helped them get his trial moved to Brisbane. More than four hundred people were randomly telephoned and asked about their perceptions of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland. They were told there were no right or wrong answers: “We are interested only in what you actually think.” Under “negative-themed comments” were listed the following responses:

• Ha ha—there are no wrong answers?! Well something needs to be done—they have no respect, they want everything for nothing and most of them are better off than me.
  
• In my opinion they are a protected species. You can’t touch them. You can’t kick them.
  
• I have a pretty low opinion of them. I know there must be some good ones—but I have only come across the scumbags.
  
• I’m tired of people being beat up due to being white.
  
• They use the parks and bushes as public toilets.
  
• They drink too much and they smell.
  
• They are mongrel dogs.
  
• Pass. I don’t have an opinion except to shoot them all.
  

The “negative-themed comments” accounted for 42.7 per cent of all responses; 43 per cent were “unsure”, “neutral”, or “ambiguous”. The remaining 13.3 per cent were deemed “positive”:

• They are all right.
  
• Pretty good footy players.
  
• They are just normal.
  
• They have a right to be here.
  

When those surveyed were asked what they thought of Palm Islanders, 63.7 per cent of the comments made were “negative-themed”:

• My father-in-law works there and says it is like a dump—the people are pigs.
  
• The same story—they get too much.
  
• Leave them on the island.
  
• Glad they are over there.
  
• It’s disgraceful that they are given an island, and can trash it the way they have.
  

Tony Mooney, Townsville’s mayor, did not dispute the poll’s findings: “Townsville is no different to any other community and if you did that survey around the suburbs of Cronulla or Redfern, you’d find the same outcome.” (In 1989, then Deputy Mayor Mooney allegedly drove away after his car hit an Aboriginal pedestrian. A witness chased him down but the police, it is further alleged, let him go without even a breath test.)

The jury for Chris Hurley’s trial was drawn from a population that, racist or not, saw every day the ugly and pathetic signs of chronic dysfunction, dependence and despair. According to the poll, Townsville’s white population was at best indifferent to Aborigines, but more commonly angry and contemptuous. When people live beyond the pale it is hard to see in them anything of ourselves. It is likely that those jury members
wanted
their streets vigilantly policed; they wanted to be kept safe from “mongrel dogs”. Peter Davis had had the opportunity to indict Hurley seven hundred miles south in Brisbane, to set the trial in a more neutral environment. Andrew Boe had told him he should. But Davis told me after the trial he felt it smacked of game playing, and took too cynical a view of Townsville jurors.