The Tall Man (9 page)

For the first time in his two years on Palm Island, Robinson wanted his gun. He and the other officers “fucking literally ran inside” and opened the safe where the firearms were kept. Inspector Richardson suggested they lock themselves in the police station, but Robinson thought that was “bullshit … we’re going to die, mate, they’re going to burn us.” Most of the crowd faced the front of the station. Robinson led his fellow officers out of the side door and over Police Lane to Hurley’s yard, then through a gate to the police barracks.

Ten other police officers were there waiting for them. Three more coming in from the airstrip had been radioed; they watched the crowd from a hilltop as if “watching a shoal of fish”. Of the officers, twenty were white, one was Aboriginal, one of Torres Strait Islander descent; only three were regular to the island. Now a high wire fence separated the police in the barracks from the crowd gathering outside. No one seemed drunk, Robinson noted. “They were cold sober.”

“We are going to burn you!” they called. “White cunts!”“Kill the cunts! The Captain Cook cunts!”

The police could hear windows smashing next door at Hurley’s house. People were throwing anything they could find: coconuts, mangoes, paving stones; a six-foot star picket came over the fence like a spear.

“I saw kids walking with shopping bags full of rocks,” one officer said later, “all of them throwing whatever object they could peel off the ground or pull off a tree.” This was an outbreak of visceral loathing. It was payback: the symbolic clash of two laws. The furies had been unleashed, not just over Cameron Doomadgee’s death but over all the black deaths in custody, all the black deaths and all the injustices since Wild Time. Thick dark smoke started spewing from the police station.

Video footage shows Palm Islanders of all ages standing on the other side of the lane, watching the station burning. The Doomadgees stood there too. The cell in which their brother had died was razed. Some cheered as it went down. All the power vested in those walls was vanquished. Later, the crime scene photos would show decomposed bulletproof jackets and Glock handguns, their polymer frames now puddles of plastic.

A siren began to wail and the police trapped in the barracks realized kids had broken into the police van and were switching the lights and siren on and off. A gas tank exploded. Bright orange flames came from next door: Hurley’s residence. The police could smell gas.

“Oh, shit! This is the Alamo!” cried one cop on the phone to command, begging for the army to fly in. “We’ve got to get the fuck out … It’s a simple fact they will take us.” The officers started to wet towels, filling any containers they could find with water, but then the water ran out. Lex Wotton had turned it off.

Many of the officers believed they were going to die. They passed around a mobile phone and rang their families to say goodbye. Men asked their wives to tell their children they loved them. Wives were crying but the husbands had to hang up and give the phone to the next man.

Then Senior Sergeant Roger Whyte went outside and walked over to the fence with his hands up. He had spent six years working in the ex–mission communities of Cape York and he had “an intuition” about how “far you can take ‘em. I said to my inspector, I said, ‘Listen, boss, we’re gonna get overrun here, we need to attempt to communicate … otherwise … we’re gonna have to shoot one.’” As Whyte approached the fence, more rocks came towards him.

But Lex Wotton, who had been trying to jimmy open the gate’s padlock, now ordered the crowd to stop throwing rocks. They did so. “You’ve won! You’ve won!” Whyte called. He negotiated for an hour’s grace, sixty minutes to get off the island. The Torres Strait Islander cop, Bert Tabaui, heard Wotton yell, “We’ll give you an hour to get off our island, then we’ll kill you!”

The crowd returned to the mall around the corner and waited. As the fire roared behind him, Senior Sergeant Whyte addressed the other police. “There may be a case where you’ll have to discharge a few fuckin’ rounds in the air to scare the shit out of these cunts!” According to Robinson, Inspector Richardson added the command to “fire … a warning shot in the air, and if that didn’t work it was fine, you know, you have the support of the Service to start shooting people.”

The police knew there were very few guns on the island, although some worried that if they opened fire they’d be beaten to death. Those with guns counted their bullets. Those without looked around: one man took a pick handle off the wall, another man a cricket bat, another a set of pool cues, which he snapped in half and gave to those with nothing. One man took a barbecue lid to use as a shield.

They cut a gap in the wire fence and moved quickly down Mango Avenue, the street where blacks had once been forbidden. The hospital was two hundred metres away. When they had all reached the ambulance bay, they formed a guard while Inspector Richardson went inside to check on the reinforcements with command. In the background, the view was paradise: blue sea and tropical islands. In the foreground, the crowd re-formed: two hundred people, armed with pieces of wood, screwdrivers, spears, iron bars, even butter knives. The police could hear rocks hitting the hospital behind them. People were still yelling: “Kill them whities!” “Kill them, they’re murderers.”“This is our island.” Ash and debris floated through the air. The smoke got thicker. All around were the sounds of crashing timber and buckling iron—the sounds of the station and Hurley’s house falling down.

A group of Palm Island men stood under the hospital’s great mango tree drinking beer they’d stolen from the police barracks. A ten-year-old drove a sedan around the streets. Each time he passed, the crowd cheered. A cop holding a spade for protection was told he would be killed and the spade used to dig his grave. The Indigenous officers were called “whiteman lickers” and ordered to “cross the line”.

Lex faced the police. He was still angry, but the anger was now controlled. “Time’s up!” he called. “All I wanted was for you to get off the island!”

Erykah Kyle, who had stood back watching as the crowd exploded, was shocked at how far things had gone. She and Lex began to argue. “You had your time to talk!” he yelled at her. “Now I’m taking over.”

An older woman next to Erykah interjected, telling Lex: “We want the police here. Who is going to protect us from you men if they go?” Others started abusing her, and she and Erykah walked away.

As the rioters and the police stood staring at each other, each perhaps saw its reverse. The blackfellas saw men from stable families, men who’d had fathers, men who’d finished school, men with jobs, who owned houses, who had travelled, who’d had chances, men whose deaths would be properly investigated. They saw the police who had put them and their brothers and their fathers in jail.

The police saw “pack animals” turned wild, ungrateful children. And they believed themselves to be the real victims—poorly paid coppers called on to do society’s dirty work.

The cops told Lex they couldn’t leave. They had no transportation. A car drove past and Lex flagged it down, telling the driver he wanted to give the cops the car to get to the airstrip. The driver refused and kept driving. Lex then organized for two council cars to be offered up; they were parked outside the hospital with the keys in the ignition. The police believed this was a trap. They’d heard that an ambush had been set up on the road out of town.

Lex Wotton didn’t know it, but police reinforcements had arrived at the airstrip and were making their way to the hospital. Darren Robinson walked into the crowd, trying to stall the riot leaders until help arrived. The air was leaden with smoke. People stood with shirts over their mouths. “I’m just talking shit to get us more time,” Robinson explained to police investigators the next day.

Incredibly, he chose to deliver a lecture to the Palm Islanders. Local police, he told them, needed to be part of the community. He had great rapport with the children. He’d spent his own money on magic tricks to develop that rapport. He told the crowd that as the Palm Island detective he was “doing more child sex offenders than ever before and … um, it’s probably hit home at that stage that they have destroyed evidence against paedophiles in the community, people that raped kids, that they only have themselves to blame that they were letting sex offenders walk around in this community.”

When asked by the investigator how the crowd responded, he said, “Oh, everything that came out of their mouth was white cunts, you know. Get off our island … going into this stolen generation thing … you know, and I’m just shaking my head, in fucking disbelief that they’re bringing up that shit at this time.”

The thunder of helicopters filled the smoke-clouded sky. Extra police had now arrived and still more were coming. Inspector Richardson came outside and told Lex, “We are not leaving this island. We are the police. You are the ones causing the problem … we are not going anywhere! No way in Australia!”

Lex Wotton turned around and faced the crowd. The revolution had failed. His idea that the police would leave the island had been biblical in ambition and naïveté, a declaration of war he had no chance of winning. His actions would draw national attention to Cameron Doomadgee’s death, but at that moment he knew he would soon be the one inside a jail cell.

“The party’s over,” he called, “we’ll all go home!” Then he turned to the police. “You can come around later and pick me up.”

H
URLEY’S WHITE HOUSE
was burnt to the floorboards. A crumpled mass of corrugated iron, once his roof, lay on the ground, peeled off to expose rooms of ash. “He had absolutely his whole life in that house, he had thousands and thousands of dollars of stuff,” a young constable later remarked. Kids had broken the lock on Hurley’s front gate. Finding petrol near his lawnmower, they threw it on his motorbike and bicycle and on the police van, setting them alight.

Darren Robinson found his door kicked in and his rooms ransacked. Clothes and CDs and books were scattered over the floor. Food was out of the fridge. A television lay on its screen. His futon frame was broken. He started making a list of things missing: knives from his knife block, five games for his Sony PlayStation II, a tin of coins (“value approximately $100”), beer, cordless phone, fishing reels, spear gun, mountain bike, ski rope, Calvin Klein jeans, Adidas running shoes, Nike thongs. Also gone were his magic tricks.

That night, Robinson became the most important cop on Palm Island. He was the only one able to recognize any of the rioters besides Lex Wotton. By order of the police commissioner, there were now eighty officers on the island, carrying trash bins full of batons and stun guns and semiautomatic rifles. Detective Inspector Warren Webber, originally the senior investigator of Cameron Doomadgee’s death, had just been removed from the case by the Crime and Misconduct Commission. Now he had a new gig: co-ordinating the riot response. Webber declared an emergency situation under the Public Safety Preservation Act 1986, which allowed police greater powers.

Going from house to house through the dawn of Saturday, November 27, Darren Robinson led a team of twenty-four officers in balaclavas and riot gear, including thirteen from the Special Emergency Response Team (SERT), who were newly trained in counterterrorism tactics; seven officers from the Public Safety Response Team; two dog handlers with Rottweilers; and two police negotiators. First he took them to Lex Wotton’s low-set, mustardcoloured house on Farm Road, where Lex was shot in the chest with a taser. He dropped to his knees and was then, according to his wife and children, surrounded by cops who struck him on the legs with a baton, handcuffed him, and dragged him away.

Altogether the police raided eighteen houses, but in five found no one they were looking for. In one house a man who couldn’t speak or hear, who usually only opened his door when his elderly mother shook a rattle outside it so he felt the vibrations, had his door kicked down and was made to lie on the floor with dogs and guns facing at him. Children and pregnant women had the red lasers of rifles playing over their faces. Some youths arrested at remote Wallaby Point alleged the police told them that if they were shot, no one would know what happened to them.

The CMC later disputed the legitimacy of Webber’s declaration of emergency. It was difficult to investigate the conduct of individual officers because they were all wearing balaclavas and called one another by code names, such as Horse, Hippy, Speed, Buzz and Law.

Eighteen men and three women were charged with rioting. The men were flown to Townsville and incarcerated. After ten days they were granted bail on the condition that they not return to the island.

• • •

N
INETEEN OF THE
twenty-two police officers involved in the riot prepared victim impact statements, the first step towards receiving a compensation payout. The officers said they were suffering posttraumatic shock. They couldn’t sleep, had nightmares, and cried uncontrollably. Nine went into therapy, two went on medication. Some now felt fear, others hatred.

One officer wrote that his children no longer played sports on the weekend because they didn’t want to mix with black kids. One officer said he cared nothing for the people of Palm Island, and “this I feel has diminished my humanity a little.” Another said that he had quit his role in three charities. And another claimed to have trouble socializing with anyone not a police officer. There was an officer who felt he had lost his Catholic faith, and now “I do not trust Indigenous people for fear of violence … I fear for my family because if they can try to burn my body, they will burn and hurt my loved ones.” Another stayed up all night guarding his infant son because he was scared blacks would find his house and attack him. He had sold up in case whoever stole his identification from the Palm Island police barracks came seeking retribution.

Another officer wrote, “I will spend my last dollar on alcohol,” and another that he had considered shooting himself ever since the riot, when he’d “placed a bullet in my top pocket in case I had to shoot anyone and I ran out of bullets I could have one bullet left to shoot myself as I was convinced they would murder me and or burn me to death.”