The Tall Man (29 page)

I had the impression of her spinning. When we first met she had a great stillness, a poise, which I knew was a front—but such a strong front—for someone made of something quick, hot, of high voltage. Now they had taken what she loved, the children—but why raise them to die so young? I wondered if these were her thoughts too, not just mine.

ACROSS THE WATER
on Palm Island that weekend, a dormitory reunion was being held. I had thought about going but it was impossible to get a bed. Hundreds of people who had been taken from their families as children and sent to the island came from all over Australia to see the men and women with whom they’d grown up. Most of the old buildings, the physical history of the dormitories, had been razed. But on the Friday afternoon, the ferry to the island was full of Aunties and Uncles singing mission songs as the boat sailed through a storm.

I remembered a hot, clammy night in Doomadgee when I went to the hall where the women held a weekly prayer meeting. Elizabeth was there, sitting with women mostly in their fifties, sixties or seventies. Toddlers wandered around—their grandchildren—exploring the plastic pot plants, the old piano, rows of rust-coloured chairs, and a locker full of Bibles that also held some children’s books. A little girl of six came over to me. She had bright, watchful eyes and as she sucked a hot-pink lollypop that matched her hot-pink T-shirt, she silently produced two books she wanted me to read aloud to her. The first was
Shapes and Colours
. The other one, from the early 1970s, faded and creased, was
Let’s Meet the Police
. She had picked the fundamentals.

The police recruits in the pictures were all white. They did star jumps in very tight shorts and T-shirts. As the old women sat looking through their Bibles, I started reading to the little girl:

Stephen and Jane were waiting for the parade to appear, then they saw some horses stepping proudly down the street. Father said, “Look, children, the parade is beginning. Here come the mounted police!”

Stephen looked at the horses and their uniformed riders and said, “I think it must be fun to lead a parade, I think I’ll be a policeman when I grow up.”

What had Chris Hurley dreamed of being? What had Cameron Doomadgee? The bitter joke of Reconciliation in Australia was to assume the lives of these two men could be weighed equally. When Hurley was doing rugby training at a Christian Brothers school, Doomadgee was in a youth detention centre. By the time Hurley was setting up a sports club for the kids on Thursday Island, Cameron had a child and a broken relationship. By the time they were thirty-six, the odds were that Hurley had more than half his life in front of him; Cameron had about a decade. As Hurley picked his way along the police career path, the other man was like his shadow. The date of their meeting was gaining on him. Hurley had tumult in his name, Cameron had doom in his.

“How did you know it was a police officer, Jane?” asked Father.

“He was wearing a uniform,” said Jane.

The women in the hall picked up their hymn books and began to sing:
Oh! What a wonder that Jesus loves me. I’m so glad that Jesus loves me … Yes, it was love made Him die on that tree … Jesus loves even me
. With no piano, their voices sounded thin and flat and raw: terrible and beautiful at the same time. Silence followed the last note. No one said a word, as if memories were warming them.

These women had grown up in the Doomadgee dormitory. Now they all wore the same simple cotton dresses—short-sleeved, with a few buttons down the bust, loose around the waist, balled from so much washing. I’d seen them hanging on clotheslines, their bright colours faded, all in a row like a kind of uniform. In the dormitory, they’d worn dresses made from burlap bags, and after the war, from old woollen army uniforms that were donated to the mission. Elizabeth and Cameron’s mother had been one of these women. Some in the hall that night were her cousins, some were her husband Arthur Doomadgee’s cousins.

Running over, running over, my cup is full and running over
. The women did hand gestures for “cup” and “running”.
Since the Lord saved me, I’m as happy as can be, my cup is full and running over
.

While Hurley’s mother was going to school and dreaming of becoming a nurse, Cameron’s mother was in a place where, according to a government official, life was “indistinguishable from slavery”, where girls had their mouths washed out with soap for speaking their tribal languages. If they fought with one another they were not fed. If one girl had a sweetheart they would all be punished: “Dong us all on the head with the Holy Bible, love, which is wrong,” Aunty Betty had told me. They were hit, and some had their heads shaved.

Those who tried to run away were flogged. Doreen Cockatoo remembered the missionaries putting one young boy who tried to escape “in jailhouse with a chain on his leg”. All the kids were taken to see him, as a deterrent.

In 1997 the “Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families” was delivered to the Australian Parliament. Known as “Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report”, it disturbed the nation’s conscience. Political leaders cried in public as they tried to recount the stories it told; stories of black parents who took their sick children to the hospital and then discovered they’d been adopted by white parents; stories of mothers and fathers who died of grief. The report found that many Indigenous children who were taken entered adulthood in “a cycle of damage from which it is difficult to escape.” Often they had only the most basic education, an ingrained sense of inferiority, feelings of numbness, and trouble developing relationships and parenting their own children. They had worse health, were more likely to be imprisoned and to suffer from depression, violence and substance abuse. They were more likely to die young.

At the Doomadgee prayer meeting, a voice said, “Number one seventy-two.”

“Number one seventy-two,” everyone repeated, and a moment later the singing started, so thinly I could barely distinguish the words. Then other voices melded and the song took off:
I’ve a wonderful saviour. He will keep me for ever. We’ll be happy together, my saviour and I!
The hymns all had a slightly romantic, swooning air, perhaps because in the old days, when boys over fifteen or sixteen were sent to work on cattle stations, all these maidens had been locked up and were not allowed to marry until they were twenty-one. With hymn singing the only sanctioned entertainment, they had sung then as they were singing now about the man who loved them; Jesus the saviour, and the suitor and the Father—to girls who were stolen or surrendered. Now all of them, sisters and rivals, were together again, with all the men long gone.

T
HAT WEEKEND
, while I was waiting for the trial to resume, wherever I went there were stacks of the
Townsville Bulletin
showing Hurley’s face with its brooding, stoic expression. On the front page of the
Australian
he was featured walking into court flanked by two Police Union officials in matching suits and ties. His fists were clenched; he was blank-faced, hard, as if wearing armour. The headlining story, however, was not about Hurley; it read,
Nation’s Child Abuse Shame.
A government-funded report titled
Little Children Are Sacred
had been handed down the day before, detailing widespread sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory. The report’s introduction put it like this:

HG was born in a remote Barkly community in 1960. In 1972, he was twice anally raped by an older Aboriginal man. He didn’t report it because of the shame and embarrassment. He never told anyone about it until 2006 when he was seeking release from prison where he had been confined for many years as a dangerous sex offender. In 1980 and 1990, he had attempted to have sex with young girls. In 1993 he anally raped a 10-year-old girl, and in 1997, an eight year-old boy (ZH). In 2004, ZH anally raped a five-year old boy in the same community. That little boy complained: “ZH fucked me.” Who will ensure that in years to come that little boy will not himself become an offender?

Reading of this horror as I waited in my hotel room for the trial to continue, I wondered what the point of justice for poor dead Cameron Doomadgee was. The war between police and Indigenous Australians is a false battleground. The spotlight on Hurley and Doomadgee locked in a death struggle ignored the great carnage taking place offstage.
Little Children Are Sacred
described Australia after the Fall. It seemed to me that concentrating on a white man killing a black man took the nation back to its original sin, as if expurgation of this would stem the rivers of grog and the tides of violence drowning life in these communities. If we could absolve ourselves of this first sin we might be able to pretend that the later ones—the ones now killing a generation—happened in a realm beyond our reach and responsibility.

In January 2007, in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, just south of Cairns, a fourteen-month-old baby had been raped and murdered: both the mother and the killer were from Palm Island. Who knew what had happened to them?

One Palm Island woman, Deniece Geia, told me that a lot of mothers don’t even know how to say, “I love you,” to their children, because they were never told themselves. There are reasons for complete social breakdown, and one of them must be people being forcibly taken from their parents, who had in turn been taken from their parents, who’d been taken from theirs.

• • •

I
N THE
D
OOMADGEE
hall, it was the women’s singing of “Amazing Grace” that left me winded. The Cherokee Indians sang their own version of this hymn when, forced from their homelands, they walked the Trail of Tears.
Through many dangers, toils and snares.

Across the road, an ambulance was parked outside the Yella Gundgimara Doomadgee hospital—named in honour of Lizzy Daylight. Was it delivering one of the riverbed people, one of these women’s sons or grandsons?
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine.
Each wrong note sounded right. These women who’d worked on stations for no money, who’d lived without rights, who’d heard from their parents and grandparents about surviving Wild Time, now sang about grace. It was too much. Their own resigned grace was all that stood between them and chaos. And it was too much.

Outside the hall, the Gulf country’s night sky was jammed with stars, the darkness vibrating. In 1850, up to a hundred Aboriginal languages were spoken across Queensland alone; now, around the nation, less than twenty are in good health. It is one of Australia’s great tragedies that most of the song cycles about these stars have also been lost since Europeans came. The songs contained knowledge about the Dreamtime, about the ancestral heroes’ endeavours and epic travels—and therefore about Shooting Star Dreaming, Dingo Dreaming, Black Cockatoo Dreaming, Flying Fox Dreaming, Wind Dreaming, Hail Dreaming, Fog Dreaming, Sugarbag (wild honey) Dreaming, and Shark, Dugong, Louse, Moon, Water Lily, Barramundi, Wave, Mosquito, Kangaroo Dreaming—on and on. Song lines and ritual song cycles of phenomenal complication. There were songs to make people better, songs to make them sick, songs to sing to babies so as to “make him good fella, strong fella”, songs for crows to come and eat all the camp’s scraps, songs about unrequited love, love magic songs, songs of the obscene, songs about fighting, songs for country, songs for hunting, songs for the dead, songs for mourning, songs for widows so they might be set free, songs to change the weather, songs to make you move from one place to another “ever more quickly”—epic songs with hundreds of verses that took all night to sing.

Later I heard from one of the Palm Island women about the last moments of the dormitory reunion. When it was time to leave, the ferry started pulling out to sea and the women on board began singing old mission songs. The women on the jetty—their sisters and cousins and friends—sang them back. They hadn’t seen one another for thirty, forty years. Most likely they would not meet again. They kept singing until the boat was out of sight, everyone weeping.

ON MONDAY MORNING
, June 18, it was raining. A gang of reporters and cameramen were lined up at the back entrance to the Townsville courthouse. The union’s media officer, Ross Musgrove, didn’t want Hurley to walk up the slippery front steps. In his baggy, light-grey pinstriped suit, shiny shoes and striped shirt, Musgrove looked like a Jazz Age flunkey talking on a mobile phone: “Okay, mate.” Ringing off, he held a finger in the air as would a director. “One minute!”

Soon a white car with tinted windows pulled up. Two union men stepped from the back, Hurley stepped from the front. The three marched towards the courthouse in single file, Hurley in the middle. As he approached the pack, Hurley took a millisecond to brace himself and turn stony. He looked straight ahead and tried not to flinch at the raindrops or the camera flashes. Their light on his ashen skin revealed the same heroic features and the same impassive stare. One blonde reporter joked to another about throwing her knickers at him.

Inside the courtroom, the red-faced, moustached
Townsville Bulletin
reporter showed me the second page of his newspaper:

Police are investigating a sign which appeared outside a store in Abbott St, Oonoonba yesterday. The words “I hate niggers” were used on the moveable letter sign. They have since been removed. The disposal and camping shop where the sign was located was closed yesterday and the owners were unavailable for comment.

The reporter told me that the Police Union and Hurley’s lawyers had rung the paper and asked for the piece to be dropped or reined in. At their behest, it was shortened and printed without a photograph of the sign. There was debate as to whether the disposal and camping shop was actually a gun store.

Tracy Twaddle had returned to court and sat in the back row with her head in her hands. Hurley’s partner sat in the front row in an almost identical position, but she was pert, neat, tailored, made-up, bejeweled. Tracy looked broken and exhausted in an old faded shirt over a cotton dress and (despite the rain) thongs. She had spent the weekend at home, sick. She wasn’t eating or sleeping. Tracy had never believed anything would happen to Hurley and she wasn’t going to start believing it now.