The Tall Man (3 page)

Outside the island’s store sat an elder from her tribal group, who Erykah took me to meet. As we walked towards him I felt like I was wearing the heat on my body, or like it was wearing me. “Uncle,” she called to the old man, “will you sing your Whale Song?” Partly blind from glaucoma, he sang in his first language about standing on cliff tops watching a whale below. Erykah clapped as he sang. She said she wished she could give him something. I gave her $10; she slipped it to him.

Back at the Doomadgees’, two naked toddlers were playing under a tap. Elizabeth Doomadgee stood at the door. In her early forties, a striking, straight-backed woman with tight dark curls, she had an almost stately quality, a force to her that could make her seem haughty, or as if she were controlling—just—a steady rage. Elizabeth called to her younger sister Jane. She too was tall and slender and in shorts and T-shirt. They got into the mayor’s car and we drove to the Palm Island Council building. In the council boardroom, with its sepia prints of high-achieving Aborigines hung on the faded walls, Boe and Paula sat with the sisters and talked about the coroner’s inquest that would commence in three weeks’ time. Elizabeth was poker-faced, sceptical, as if deciding whether to trust the lawyers. Jane was softer but silent.

Boe soon put the sisters at ease. He was attentive, convincing, and he also seemed to have a deep, instinctive sympathy. Boe’s family had fled Burma when he was four. On the tarmac of the Brisbane airport his father gave his five sons new, Irish Catholic names to help them fit in. After high school, Boe studied law while working to pay the fees and support himself. A star lawyer with his own practice by twenty-four, he was now thirty-nine and had six children, two of them adopted, with an Aboriginal magistrate. Palm Island’s tropical heat reminded him of Burma, the Doomadgees of his own family.

Boe asked the sisters whether there was a traditional name by which he should refer to their late brother.

“Moordinyi,”
said Elizabeth.

It meant something like “the departed one”. In the Gulf of Carpentaria, people traditionally used Moordinyi instead of the deceased’s name for a period after death, to prevent the living calling back the dead. But Erykah transcribed
Mulrunji
, and showed it to Elizabeth, who nodded coolly. (She had trouble spelling.) Perhaps people still used the correct term back in Doomadgee, the Aboriginal ex-mission town near the family’s ancestral lands in the Gulf region, from which they had taken their name. On this deracinated island, however, the family and witnesses continued to call the dead man Cameron. In the months following his death, only the lawyers and journalists used Mulrunji.

Elizabeth, at that moment, was less worried about tradition than she was about the inquest, in particular about witnesses being asked for the timing of events; no one on the island wore watches. She and Jane feared a trap. Boe told them not to worry. By representing the community, he would work to highlight not only the culpability of Hurley but the systemic flaws in Queensland policing. He had organized two highly regarded barristers to fight solely for the family.

Boe explained what would be happening. In two days, on February 8, the state coroner and the legal teams representing the police and the Doomadgees would fly to Palm Island for the pre-inquest arguments. Inquests were supposed to be held as close to the place of death as possible. Boe believed this one should be on Palm Island; the police lawyers would argue that the island was unsafe and the inquest should be held in Townsville. Wherever it was held, the coroner’s broad task was to decide what had caused Cameron’s death and to recommend measures that might prevent similar deaths occurring. The coroner was not to make a finding of criminal guilt, but if he suspected any crime he was obliged to refer the case to the director of public prosecutions, who would determine whether Hurley should be charged.

Elizabeth told Boe she was concerned that her epileptic sister might throw a fit during the inquest and frighten the coroner away. Jane was worried that the tumour with which she’d been diagnosed would stop her learning her police statement by heart. They asked if Boe could help them borrow two hearing aids from the hospital for another sister and a niece. Both were partly deaf, probably due to untreated childhood ear infections, and would have difficulties hearing the evidence. Elizabeth herself was diabetic—like deafness, that was endemic in Aboriginal communities. She did not take medication, she told me, because God was protecting her. Fifteen minutes from the mainland, they all lived in a different country.

Starved of information, without any sign of legal progress, Elizabeth was prepared to believe that this serious figure in an Armani beanie and a swagger that was part arrogance, part idealism could be her saviour come. A fervent Christian, she told me Boe’s arrival was proof that “God believes enough is enough.”

Elizabeth and Jane were anxious to see the cell-surveillance tape, and Boe told them he would play his copy—but first they wanted to assemble the rest of the family and get some tissues.

The store was closed, so Erykah and I drove around the corner to the hospital and she spoke to two young white nurses. They didn’t recognize Erykah. When she asked for the tissues, the nurses opened a few cupboards and said they couldn’t find any.

Back in the council boardroom, Jane said tissues would be no use anyway: she’d need a towel for her tears. She had naïve, unblinking eyes but held her face as if always braced for bad news. A dozen people had gathered. Cameron had been one of ten siblings, of whom, Jane explained, “Only three are dead.” Sitting in the boardroom were five of his sisters: the eldest, Carol, in her early fifties, along with Victoria, Elizabeth, Jane and Valmae, the youngest at thirty-four. (A brother and sister had both died; another brother, Lloyd, lived back in Doomadgee; another sister, Claudelle, lived on the streets of Townsville.) Also present were Cameron’s brother-in-law, his aunt, his niece Doreen with her young baby, and Tracy Twaddle. Tracy, Cameron’s partner of ten years, was a pretty woman with big finger-waved curls, bow lips, and a stunned, private air. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. The family looked like they’d come in from a storm. Their sleeplessness, their grief, their anger all submerged in polite and embarrassed silence.

The lights were turned off. The family sat in the dark, hunched close around a laptop. On the screen, the police cell was suffused with yellow-green light. In solemn quiet, the Doomadgees watched, hoping to find out how Cameron had died.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2004,
was just another perfect, grinding day. By 9
A.M.
it was around ninety degrees, and the humidity made it feel hotter. Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley had gone to Palm Island’s hospital after the three Nugent sisters had been bashed. The sister with a smashed jaw would have to be medivaced to Townsville. The sister with a black eye had asked for a lift home.

Hurley said no at first, he was too busy. But Gladys Nugent, a big, gentle-looking woman, was diabetic and needed an escort to collect “sugar” (insulin) from Roy Bramwell’s fridge. Roy was her partner, and it was he who’d just beaten Gladys and her sisters. So shortly after ten, Hurley and Lloyd Bengaroo, the island’s Aboriginal police liaison officer, took her to Bramwell’s place in Dee Street. Hurley told her to go in and come straight back out.

The senior sergeant waited in his van: the archetypal sheriff, clean-cut with deep-set dark eyes in a strong, handsome face, bristlingly physical and tall. Everyone had to look up to him as if to a man upon a horse. He had been promoted to senior sergeant two years before, at the age of thirty-four, and was now officer in charge of the island, with a staff of six white policemen and an Aboriginal liaison officer. He was “Boss Man”, and he’d risen through the ranks young and fast.

In front of him was the sea; the mountains reared up close behind. On Dee Street one house was salmon pink, the next dark blue, then light blue and lime green and yellow—a tropical mix, bright colours to disguise that every second house had broken windows, graffiti, small children playing around beer cans. This was now Hurley’s natural environment. He had become a creature of the Deep North, a specialist in places on the edges of so-called civilization, Aboriginal communities and frontier towns in Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria, places where the streets, the days shimmered as if you were in a kind of fever—all of it, with its edge of menace, like some brilliant hallucination.

The senior sergeant had done his training in Cairns and was transferred as a twenty-one-year-old constable to Thursday Island, the administrative centre of the hundred or so windswept islands in the Torres Strait. Local custom is a mix of Aboriginal and Papuan cultures, and the people speak a creole known as Torres Strait Broken (
Oli Gos
= Holy Ghost;
broke skin
= sex;
algita
= crocodile;
lugaut
= beware;
plisman
= policeman). This was the high tropics, where the tarmac lifted in the heat and buildings looked decrepit the moment they were built. Only a few years earlier they’d taken down the pictures of Queen Elizabeth and the maps of the British Empire from classroom walls. English missionaries had come to Thursday Island in 1871 to teach the natives “shame”, the wearing of clothes, and to stamp out, more or less, the Darkness Time practices of headhunting, idolatry and sorcery. The missionaries’ arrival was still celebrated every year by locals and visiting Christians in the Coming of the Light ceremony. A dinghy rowed through the maze of coral reefs and mangrove swamps, carrying the gospel ashore; then there was a church service and drumming, feasting and dancing.

Hurley liked dancing. He liked to party. He had a personality to match his outsize build. He’d swing girls over his shoulder, spinning them in the air. He’d stand in the centre of a crowd, telling jokes: a cocky, exuberant larrikin. Thursday Island had made him a different man. He told an Aboriginal friend that he’d once found himself in a police boat searching for some islanders lost at sea, angry at having his plans for the night spoiled. It was then he realized he was a racist, and decided to change.

His conversion led him deeper into Aboriginal Australia. After two years on Thursday Island, he spent the next five working in Cape York: Aurukun, Kowanyama, Bamaga, Pormpuraaw, all Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities set up by missionaries to protect the natives from the violence of the frontier and to bring “light to the darkness” of their lives. The churches were mostly gone now. The places had become impoverished ghettos of alcoholism, petrol sniffing, brutality, arrests, and early deaths. Hurley had found a niche in these communities, and in the towns nearby: Cooktown, Laura, Burketown. They were in part the last outposts of racists, crocodile hunters, war veterans, hermits, and every kind of heathen, along with young teachers and nurses and cops who wanted to party, then get out. But Hurley had applied for these places. And the locals seemed to like him. He was kind, and wonderful with their children, always joking around or playing sports with them. He was popular with old people too, protecting the grandmothers from young men threatening them for their bank cards.

He’d done a stint back in civilization, in the tourist resort of Surfers Paradise, but he seemed to gravitate to the tough places. And Palm Island was tough. During his first year, stories had been published about the cruelty of the children who rode the island’s wild horses like bicycles rather than creatures of flesh and blood. They rode them in wet board shorts and the horses had sores the size of dinner plates. Animal welfare inspectors found that the kids drove the wild ponies out into the water until they were exhausted, until they drowned. A horse was found in a fishing net out at sea. Another was found brain dead with a bucket around its head. Children had put petrol in the bucket. A mare had been stabbed when in foal. Another had had battery acid poured over its open wounds.

Hurley had done two years on Palm Island and had signed up to do another year. He and the other officers kept sane by hiking or cycling the bush tracks, snorkelling the reefs, going fishing in the police boat, Jet Skiing—to the locals’ chagrin—on the dam, and spending sultry evenings drinking and playing pool. But now he sat waiting for Gladys Nugent, who had been bashed and was still half drunk and probably wouldn’t thank him for his trouble, but turn her eyes down like they all did.

Through the closed window of the van, he and Police Liaison Officer Lloyd Bengaroo could hear a young man yelling abuse from Roy Bramwell’s front yard. It was Gladys Nugent’s nephew Patrick, a thin boy whose mother was one of the women Bramwell had beaten. Drunk and high from sniffing petrol, Patrick was calling the police “fucking queenie cunts”.

“Are you hearing what he’s saying?” Bengaroo asked.

Hurley got out of the van.

Patrick’s grandmother asked the senior sergeant to arrest him. Hurley didn’t need any convincing; Bengaroo held open the back doors of the police van while Hurley put his prisoner into the cage.

At that moment Cameron Doomadgee walked past barefoot. He had with him his dog, Bulbush (“great hunter”), and a pack of orangey neighbourhood mutts. “Bengaroo,” he said to the police aide, “you black like me. Why can’t you help the blacks?”

In his fifties, Lloyd Bengaroo was overweight and overburdened, with a craggy face and buried brown eyes. He’d grown up on Palm Island. For twenty years he’d been a community police officer, with the power to arrest, but his role had changed. He was now supposed to be working to bridge the gap between police and blackfellas, and he could no longer even touch offenders. This was meant to be for his own good, to spare him the loathing of his fellow islanders, but the community reckoned Bengaroo was a police “watchdog” or “errand boy”—and told him so constantly.

“Keep walking or you be arrested too,” Bengaroo told Cameron.

Cameron Doomadgee, thirty-six, was lean and fit and proud of it. (He’d joke to his fishing companions that they had more fat than the turtles they hunted.) This morning he was on a full-scale bender of beer, cask wine and “goom”—methylated spirits mixed with water. For all he’d drunk, he was “walking pretty good, staggering but not falling over,” according to Gerald Kidner, his drinking buddy, who was walking ahead of him.