The Tall Man (4 page)

When Cameron had gone on another thirty metres or so—Hurley was later to claim—he turned and swore at the senior sergeant. Lloyd Bengaroo said he didn’t hear it. Neither did Gladys Nugent, now back in the van with her insulin. Kidner reckoned Cameron was singing “Who Let the Dogs Out”, a one-hit wonder by the Baha Men that went:

Who let the dogs out (woof, woof, woof, woof).

Who let the dogs out (woof, woof, woof, woof).

But Chris Hurley, who had endured every insult in existence, heard something more offensive, and this time he decided not to let it go. Perhaps he was still riled by Patrick’s “fucking queenie cunt”. Perhaps he was thinking of the abuse flung at Lloyd Bengaroo, who’d recently asked for a transfer after being hospitalised for stress. Perhaps he was thinking of the three women who’d just been beaten by a drunk like this one. Or perhaps in the heat his uniform was sticking to his skin, and he could feel the sweat in the roots of his hair, and this whole island was vibrating, the whole place out of control, and it was up to him to still it.

“Who is he?” Hurley asked.

“Cameron Doomadgee,” Bengaroo answered.

The two men got back in the van and Hurley reversed towards Cameron. “What’s your problem with police?” The senior sergeant didn’t wait for an answer. He was out of the van instantly and arresting Cameron for creating a public nuisance. “I’m locking you up, Mr Doomadgee.”

Lloyd Bengaroo opened the cage doors again. Nobie Clay, watching from a nearby balcony, said Cameron didn’t struggle but yelled, “You’re locking me up for nothing.” She reckoned she then saw Hurley pick up Cameron’s legs and spear him into the van. She heard the bass note of his head hitting the inside of the cage. It was 10:20
A.M.

With Cameron and Patrick locked in the back, Hurley and Bengaroo dropped Gladys at her sister’s house and by 10:26 had returned to the station. Outside, in Police Lane, Penny Sibley, a frail, grey-haired Aboriginal woman, was waiting to get money from Bengaroo. She was taking his goddaughter to Townsville to a land rights meeting. Hurley pulled into the garage, and when he opened the cage doors, she saw Cameron “going off, drunk, singing out, and everything”.

Then Cameron struck the senior sergeant on the jaw.

Hurley was stunned. No one on the island had ever hit him before. Penny Sibley said his face went “wild”. She and another witness, Tiny Bonner, said they saw Hurley punch Cameron in the ribs. In the garage, the two men struggled; Hurley tried to force his prisoner inside the station. As she watched them fighting, Penny Sibley began to cry. She said they entered the station, then the door slammed shut.

But Chris Hurley, Lloyd Bengaroo, and a young constable standing watching from within the garage all said that when Hurley and Doomadgee got to the station’s doorway, the two men tripped over a step and fell inside.

Standing by the door, Bengaroo did not move to see if his boss was hurt. The next day he told investigators: “I was thinking, um, if I see something I might get into trouble myself, or something.” Constable Kristopher Steadman, who had arrived on Palm Island fresh from the police academy the day before, also stood outside. He heard Hurley yelling angrily, but like Bengaroo said he waited until he thought it safe to enter.

Inside, Roy Bramwell was sitting by a filing cabinet, waiting to be questioned. The day before, he and the three Nugent sisters had started drinking at 11:30
A.M.
, and by midnight Roy had drunk forty cans of beer. He got up early next morning and had six more. Standing on the sisters’ veranda, Roy—“plenty drunk”—became angry because Gladys wouldn’t go home with him to take her insulin. They started to fight. In his statement, Roy later said:

During this argument I punched her sister, this is Anna Nugent, and hit her in the face. I punched her with one punch and this knocked her out. This was in the front yard. I punched Anna because she was being smart with her mouth.

I then punched the other sister, this is Andrea Nugent, and punched her once to the face and this knocked her out. I punched Andrea for the same reason. I dropped her on her knees and then the smart mouth did not get back up.

I then got into Gladys. I punched her once to the face and knocked her out. This was in the front yard as well. Gladys dropped to the ground and was on her knees. I started kicking into her and kicked her about three times. I kicked her in the face. I did this ‘cause I was angry with her ‘cause she didn’t want to come home with me.

After beating the three women, Roy went home alone and had a shower to cool off. Then he headed to the post office to pick up his welfare check. While he was waiting there, the Nugent sisters’ uncle Tiny Bonner found him, and another “tongue bang” (argument) began. That was where Sergeant Michael Leafe had found Roy, and that was how he came to be at the station.

But in his struggle to control Cameron, Hurley did not notice him.

The next day, and the next week, in separate police statements, Roy claimed:

Chris dragged him in and he laid him down here and started kicking him. All I could see [was] the elbow gone down, up and down, like that … “Do you want more Mister, Mister Doomadgee? Do you want more of these, eh, do you want more? You had enough?”

Roy’s view was partially obscured by the filing cabinet, but he said he could see Doomadgee’s legs sticking out; he could see Hurley’s fist coming down, then up, then down. “I see knuckle closed.” Each time the fist descended he heard Doomadgee groan. “Cameron, he started kicking around and [called] ‘leave me go’ like that now. ‘Leave me go—I’ll get up and walk.’”

Roy said Hurley did not stop: “Well, he tall, he tall, he tall, you know … just see the elbow going up and him down like that, you know, must have punched him pretty hard, didn’t he? Well, he was a sober man and he was a drunken man.”

Sergeant Michael Leafe, who’d just arrested Roy, was inside the station but he told investigators he didn’t see or hear anything. He claimed he left Hurley alone with Doomadgee for ten seconds while opening the door to one of the station’s two cells. When he returned the prisoner was limp. Leafe and Hurley each took Cameron Doomadgee by a wrist and dragged him on his back into the concrete cell. When they were done, Roy Bramwell said he saw Hurley rubbing his chin. The officer had a button undone.

“Did he give you a good one?” Roy asked.

“A helluva good one,” Hurley replied.

Then, Roy claimed, Hurley asked him if he had seen anything. Roy said no, and the senior sergeant told him to leave. Roy went back to the post office to get his welfare check, along the way warning some friends, “Chris Hurley getting into Cameron.” They told him, “Go tell someone, tell the Justice Group.” But Roy didn’t tell the Justice Group, a community programme run by elders to settle conflicts. None of them did anything. They went on drinking.

Meanwhile Hurley and Leafe went to get Patrick Nugent out of the van. He was so drunk they had to carry him through the hot, cramped box of the police station and dump him beside Cameron in the cell. Then Hurley put a videotape in the cell surveillance monitor and tried to get on with his day.

E
LEVEN WEEKS LATER
, Cameron’s family sat in the council boardroom, enveloped in the bile-coloured glow of this video, watching their brother die.

From high in the cell corner where the camera was installed, the two men sprawled on the concrete floor look like they’ve fallen from a great height. Cameron writhes. He calls out, “Help me!” The sound is distorted. It’s a desperate, agonised, animal cry. “Help me! Help!” he calls again. Patrick, half paralysed with drink, feebly pats Cameron’s head and Cameron rolls closer to him, for warmth or for comfort. They lie there inert for a minute or so. A digital clock runs on the top left of the screen.

Hurley enters—rangy in his blue uniform, with sideburns, a hint of a pompadour, and a glare. From this angle he looks enormous. He stands staring down as if at two dolls. When he leaves, Cameron lurches away from Patrick. Then he’s still. They’re both still. The seconds on the digital clock flick over. Life is escaping. Ten minutes, twenty; neither man moves.

The Doomadgee family sat in silence, watching.

After half an hour, Sergeant Leafe comes into the cell. He kicks Cameron. When there’s no response he kicks him again. At the inquest, this is called “an arousal technique”. Leafe leans over the prisoner. He touches his skin. Then he goes to get Hurley. The senior sergeant returns with a torch and flashes the light in Cameron’s eyes. He hunches over Cameron, puts his hand under Cameron’s nose, feeling for breath. He searches for a pulse, and for a moment seems to think he’s found one. But he hasn’t. It’s his own adrenaline surging. He rushes out; at 11:22 he calls an ambulance. When at last the ambulance officers arrive, they pull a defibrillator out of a medical bag and place it on Cameron’s chest. Chris Hurley stands against the cell wall, watching. It’s too late. The ambulance officer shakes his head. Hurley slumps down the wall with his head in his hands.

E
LIZABETH
D
OOMADGEE
walked out of the council building and sat on a bench under a mango tree. Nearby stood the wooden clock tower, each of its four faces broken. From here she could just see her daughter playing on the jetty. Kids rode up on wild horses and ran and backflipped into the water. Elizabeth stayed still. “The light shining on Hurley now,” she said finally, “but when the sun go down he a bad person.”

Everyone on Palm Island had a story about what happened on that day. And everyone had a story about Senior Sergeant Hurley. He denied that he had ever been violent towards Cameron Doomadgee. His supporters claimed he was “gutted” by the allegations made against him. They pointed to the extensive volunteer work he’d done with Aboriginal children and to his Aboriginal friends. He even had a skin name; he’d been adopted into an Indigenous family in Cape York, and in his mid-twenties he had an Aboriginal girlfriend. Old colleagues said Hurley would restrain other officers if they lost their temper.

In the wake of Cameron’s death, the senior sergeant was emerging as a model cop. Before going to Palm Island, I read this glowing article about Hurley in Brisbane’s
Sunday Mail
of December 5, 2004:

A Cop Who Cared

At 200cm tall, Palm Island policeman Chris Hurley was always going to make an impression on the remote Aboriginal communities he made it his life’s work to serve. Before the death of Cameron Doomadgee on November 19 and continuing unrest on the island, that impression appears mostly good.

One of his postings as a constable aged just 21 was to Thursday Island, where the community quickly warmed to the gentle giant.

Worried about the high crime rate among children there, in 1989, he took it upon himself to establish a sporting club for young people, writing dozens of letters to organisations seeking donations to equip the club.

When a Brisbane shopping centre offered equipment if he would travel down to collect it, he arranged for three young islanders to join him and get their first taste of the big smoke.

A photograph taken on Thursday Island shows smiling children clambering over the young officer as he told
The Sunday Mail
his dream was for the “kids up here to be better known for their sporting ability than getting into trouble”.

A second photograph unveiled on Thursday Island this week is another reminder of his stay. It is part of a new photographic exhibition on Aboriginal reconciliation and is accompanied by his words: “Reconciliation is a two-way street; it’s going to take a lot of effort by all Australians. At the end of the day there are more similarities than differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.”

In the exhibition photograph, a darkening sky is filled with rolling clouds. Hurley stands on a bridge and behind him a river runs wide but twists out of sight. He looks serious and strong. Wearing a broad-brimmed police hat, he leans over a map spread out on the hood of a police van. His eyes are narrowed as if seeing something just emerging on the horizon, as if it is coming towards him.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT
I spent on Palm Island there was no moon. Cicadas tuned in and out of the heat. As it grew darker, I sat on the motel veranda drinking with the lawyers. Boe had the manner of someone lumbered with exchange students in a war zone. “What have you learnt?” he kept asking, wanting epiphanies. Virgin forest surrounded us. We heard unknown creatures begin their nocturnal rounds. In theory we were safe: the motel stood between the police station and the police barracks. But the barracks were surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence that was heavily padlocked. As I watched officers lock themselves in and out, it was unclear who needed protecting.

Erykah Kyle dropped by to speak to Boe. Like the Doomadgees, she had invested her hopes in him. The pair had an easy rapport, sharing ideals of activism that seemed to belong to an earlier age. As a young woman, Erykah had been inspired by the American black power movement, and in the early 1970s she’d spent time at the rebel Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, campaigning for land rights. Now she had written and printed a pamphlet that was to be distributed all over the island.

COMMUNITY NOTICE

THE STATE CORONER IS COMING TO PALM ISLAND FOR THE START OF THE INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF OUR BELOVED BROTHER, PARTNER, FATHER, SON, COUSIN, NEPHEW, UNCLE AND MATE WHO DIED IN POLICE CUSTODY ON 19 NOVEMBER

PEOPLE WHO WANT TO ATTEND SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO LEAVE WORK FOR THIS

COMMUNITY SUPPORT IS NEEDED TO MAKE SURE THAT JUSTICE MIGHT COME THROUGH THIS TRAGEDY

From the veranda, I could see through the Cyclone-wire fence to a group of cops in a mess room playing pool with some nurses. Two officers drove in, parked their van, and heaved an old mattress over the windshield. Every night Palm Islanders threw rocks at the barracks: all its windows were covered by wooden screens.

I wondered what I was doing here, but my lawyer companions were on a mission and had no such doubts. We were two doors down from where Chris Hurley had lived. His white house was now a burnt, vacant lot: a clue to what had happened in the riot a week after Cameron Doomadgee’s death. As the cops played pool on the other side of the fence, Boe raised his glass and proposed a toast to the revolution.