The Tall Man

Palm Island’s grimy air terminal was decorated with a collection of the local fourth-graders’ projects on safe and unsafe behaviour. One, a rough drawing of a bottle with a cross through it, read: ‘Stop Drinking!’ Another: ‘I feel safe when I’m not being hunted.’ The island’s Aboriginal mayor collected me and the two law-yers I’d travelled with and drove us into town along the narrow road fringing the water. Rocks jutted from the shore. On a boulder someone had spray-painted in purple ‘TALL MAN’.

In the township there was a jetty, a beer canteen, a hospital, a long-broken wooden clock tower, and one store. Outside the store a child sat in a rubbish bin while another cooled him with a fire hose. In the circle of shade under a tree, more children played a gambling game: some form of two-up, with bottle lids or seed pods landing in the dirt.

Two men in their early thirties were stumbling around, leaning on each other.

‘They’re brothers,’ the mayor said. ‘They’re blind.’

‘Obviously.’ I assumed she meant blind drunk. One of the brothers then shook out a white cane and I saw that the men were connected with a piece of string, the man with the cane leading his brother by the wrist.

‘How did they go blind?’

‘Nobody knows.’

Two white women – teachers, or nurses, or police - were walking briskly through the heat in shorts and T-shirts. They looked as awkward and out of place as I felt. ‘Who are they?’ I asked the mayor.

‘Strangers,’ she answered.

One of the women smiled at me, curious perhaps, and briefly I was unsure whether to reciprocate. I felt incan-descently white.

Travelling to Palm Island had been like a sequence in a dream: the pale green sea so luminous and the plane flying so close I could almost see the life in it – dugongs, giant turtles. All around were moored small pristine islands. Then, on the horizon, like a dark green wave, came a larger island. As the plane turned to land, the wilderness unfolded. Mountains of forest met the palm-lined shore, which met mangrove swamps, the coral reef. Then the dream shifted.

‘Tropic of Despair’, ‘Bitter Paradise’, ‘Island of Sorrow’ were the headlines I’d been reading. Three months ear-lier, on 19 November 2004, an Aboriginal man called Cameron Doomadgee had been arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he was dead on a cell floor, with injuries like those of someone who’d been in a car or plane crash. The police said the man had tripped on a step, and the state-appointed pathologist reported no signs of brutality. The community did not agree: a week later, a mob burned down the island’s po-lice station and the arresting officer’s house. The officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, went into hiding on the mainland.

A few weeks before coming to Palm Island, I’d met An-drew Boe, a Burmese-born Brisbane criminal lawyer who’d been in Melbourne, where I live, visiting friends. An elegant, monk-bald figure with glasses, and a tattoo on his bicep in Burmese that meant ‘freedom from fear’, he was best known for defending the serial backpacker killer, Ivan Milat. Boe had read of the Palm Island case in late November, and had flown there volunteering to represent the community pro bono. He had attended Doomadgee’s funeral. Many hundreds of mourners, on a scorching day during the build-up to the rains, silently following the coffin through the streets for kilometres, all the way to the graveyard.

It was now early February; Boe had with him the surveillance tape of Cameron’s cell from the morning he died. In three weeks’ time, he and his junior Paula Morreau, a bright-eyed, dedicated young lawyer, would be appearing for the Palm Island Aboriginal Council at the Queensland Coroner’s inquest into Cameron Doomadgee’s death. Boe wanted someone to write an article about the proceedings. They would take a week or two, he said. 

Until I met Boe, I had never heard of Palm Island. Not that I told him so - he did a hard line in moral earnest-ness. Among his reams of suggested reading – scholarly articles on traditional Aboriginal swearing rituals, case law, government reports, the five volumes produced by the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody - he’d included a list of what would be inappropriate to wear. ‘Be mindful of exposing underwear unduly. Don’t try to be feral.’
‘Do you ever rest?’ I wrote back to him.

‘Rest . . .?’ came the hand-slap. ‘We have to use our freedoms and privileges to see what respite we can give to those less equipped to deal with their challenges.’

Palm Island is forty-five kilometres off the coast of Queensland, 1100 kilometres north of Brisbane, and the same distance again from the tip of Cape York. It is a place where history is so close to the surface, so omnipresent, it seems to run parallel with daily life. According to the traditional owners, the Manburra people, Palm and its surrounding islands – Orpheus, Fantome, Eclipse – were formed in the Dreaming, the time of all creation, when an Ancestral Spirit, the Big Snake, or Rainbow Serpent, broke up and left behind fragments of its body. When Captain James Cook anchored The Endeavour on 7 June 1770 among these tropical islands – shards of the Snake’s backbone – he saw ‘several large Smokes upon the Main, some people, Canoes, and we thought Cocoa Nut Trees upon one of the Islands’. He sent some men ashore and ‘they returned on board having met with nothing worth observing.’

A century later, the sea lanes along the east coast of Australia were well travelled and the islanders were accustomed to pearlers and fishermen; their seas being rich with bêche de mer, the sea cucumbers the Chinese believed were aphrodisiacs. North Queensland by the end of the nineteenth century was a multiracial commu-nity of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Pacific Island-ers, in addition to Aborigines and Europeans. Southern states called it ‘Queensmongreland’. The historian of the Australian frontier, Henry Reynolds, argues that the Federation of Australia in 1901 was the equivalent of the American Civil War, but in reverse: the South conquered this steamy, racially diverse, ‘occult’ North, with its vision of White Australia. Today the North still retains a feeling of being the über-Australia that should have been.

In 1916 Palm Island’s potential struck the Queensland government. An official found it ‘the ideal place for a delightful holiday’, and the remoteness also made it ‘suit-able for use as a penitentiary’ to confine ‘the individuals we desire to punish’. That official was the state’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, an office created nineteen years earlier under Queensland’s first Aboriginal Protection Act, which made all full-blood Aborigines, and female and underage ‘half-castes’ wards of the state and re-quired them to move from their traditional lands onto reserves. After 1897, every district in Queensland was assigned an Aboriginal Protector, most often a local policeman, not always an upstanding one: ‘Sgt on verge of DTs, eyes propped out, face lean but purple dewed with constant sweat,’ wrote one observer. The protectors had responsibility for moving people onto reserves, which were mostly run by Christian missionaries.

From 1918 until the late 1960s hundreds of Queensland Aborigines were sent to the Palm Island mission, which served as a regular reserve as well as an open-air jail. The state parliament had been advised that ‘the grouping of many tribes in one area would mean continual warfare amongst themselves and practically survival of the fittest’. Nonetheless members of more than forty different tribes were sent to Palm Island, casting together people with incompatible territorial, language and kinship ties. Men often arrived in handcuffs or leg irons, deemed variously ‘a troublesome character’, ‘a larrikin’, ‘a wan-derer’, ‘a communist’. Some were sent there for practising traditional ceremonies, or asking about wages. Children were sent alone or in groups and were placed in the island’s dormitories.

In the mission’s isolation it became increasingly authoritarian - a kind of tropical gulag. The island’s white superintendent, who ‘got the law in his own mouth’, issued permits to fish and permits to swim. To discourage traditional ceremonies, there was European dancing; those who did not participate were questioned by police. A brass band learnt to play jazz and marching tunes, and failure to attend band practice could result in a jail sen-tence.

To leave the island, to marry, to draw wages from a bank account, the Aboriginal inhabitants had to seek permission from the Protector. Permission, as this letter to a new bride attests, was not to be assumed:

Dear Lucy,
Your letter gave me quite a shock, fancy you wanting to draw four pounds to buy a brooch, ring, ban-gle, work basket, tea set, etc, etc. I am quite sure Mrs. Henry would expend the money carefully for you, but I must tell you that no Aborigine can draw 4⁄5 of their wages unless they are sick and in hospital and require the money to buy comforts . . . However, as it is Christmas I will let you have 1/5/- out of your banking account to buy lollies with.

In the end, countless people never saw their savings.

By 1967, the year Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were granted citizenship, Palm Island was a completely segregated community. An Aboriginal Council was given some autonomy in the mid-1970s, just as a beer canteen was opened, unleashing violence that in the penal set-tlement had always been under the surface.

Palm Islanders have come to call themselves the Bwgcolman, after the traditional name for the island. Today it is home to one of the largest Aboriginal communities in Australia, its population somewhere between 2500 and 3000, but since the island was forgotten in the last census, no one is sure.

To get to the island you take a two-hour ferry trip, or a fifteen-minute flight, from Townsville, an army town with four military bases. A hot and dry and tough town. At its airport the lawyers and I were picked up by a taxi driver in shorts and a starched, short-sleeved shirt. His face was a rash of cancers. He began complaining about people arriving from down south. He could always pick them. ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Because they’re fuckwits,’ he answered.

*

Erykah Kyle had been elected Palm Island’s mayor a year earlier, in March 2004. She had light brown skin, glasses, and greying curls under a hat crocheted in the red, yellow and black of the Aboriginal flag. Erykah’s maternal grandfather was white. That’s why her grandmother and mother, a ‘half-caste’, were ordered to Palm Island. Her mother was placed in the dormitory; her grandmother was sent out to work on a pastoral station, where her family presume she died. Erykah’s father’s family, who came from the Burdekin River, inland from Townsville, were also sent to Palm Island, probably so their homeland could be cleared for farming.

Erykah took us for a quick tour. In the tropics, buildings seem to ripen - then sag and wilt and rot. People spilled out of houses into yards, onto the street. We stopped at a beach, hemmed by the island’s densely forested hills - ancient volcanoes. Two chestnut horses were foraging nearby, wild horses left over from the mission stock-yards. They roamed the hills and township, grazing on nature strips and gardens.

Boe, Paula and I were to stay in community accommodation known as ‘the motel’. Surrounded by a high cyclone wire fence, it was a series of spartan rooms with no apparent overseer. My room had barred windows, a steel-framed bed, a ceiling fan, and a nail on the wall with a coathanger.
On Boe’s suggestion I went with Erykah to pick up Cameron Doomadgee’s sisters for a meeting. She had known Cameron since he was a young boy. As a man, she said, he was happy-go-lucky; he loved to hunt and fish, and worked two days a week on the work-for-the-dole scheme, selling mud crabs on the side. Cameron had been a good friend of her own son, who two years earlier had been found dead in his cell in a mainland prison. An inquest took an hour to decide that he had committed suicide. There were no signs of foul play, but for Erykah it was unresolved. She showed me a photograph of him diving into a waterhole: he was young and strong, the water dappled in light.

Driving, we passed a group of young men walking uphill with their shoulders hunched. One carried a spear. ‘Who knows their abilities?’ Erykah said.

She parked in the Doomadgees’ driveway. Theirs was one of the island’s newer houses, a modest white kit home. Large rocks had been dragged onto the block to landscape the garden. Frangipani branches stuck out of the sun-blasted earth, as did other cuttings: lychee, pepper, guava. A woman came briefly to the door, then for no apparent reason Erykah reversed out of the driveway. Something had been wordlessly arranged. The family were eating and wanted us to come back in twenty minutes.

Erykah told me that in the mission days her people found ways to communicate under the missionaries’ radar, with their eyes and hands. W. E. Roth noticed something similar in the late 1890s: all across northern Queensland there were hand-signs, subtle and complex, for different plants, animals, birds, snakes, fish, weapons, emotions and ideas. For ‘sunset’, for ‘forgetfulness’, for ‘silence: be quiet!’ For ‘bad person’, for ‘run!’ - which, he wrote, was ‘Both fists closed and circular movement with each: the feet hurrying onwards.’

To kill time, we kept driving. Erykah talked about growing up on the island. One of twelve children, she was always top of her class, but got caned a lot: she had a defiant streak. She was not allowed to walk down Mango Avenue, where whites lived, and she was supposed to salute any white person she passed. Whites got the choice cuts of meat, blacks got the bones, and only in adulthood did Erykah taste milk that hadn’t been watered down. A man could be arrested for waving to his wife, or for laughing at the wrong moment. If anyone complained they were sent to nearby Eclipse Island with only bread and water and any fish they could catch with their bare hands. She remembered a man called Mr Starlight who spoke out against the missionaries. He was always being sent to Eclipse Island for solitary confinement. Her father smuggled over Reader’s Digests for him. Mr Starlight ended up in an asylum.

Outside the store sat an elder from her tribal group, who Erykah took me to meet. As we walked toward him I felt like I was wearing the heat on my body. 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 ten dollars; 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. She seemed haughty, as if 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 coun-cil chambers.

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 coronial 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 did not mention he had been at their brother’s funeral, but he soon put the women at ease. He was attentive, forceful, and had a surfeit of self-belief. 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 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 this term instead of the deceased’s name for a period after death, to prevent the living calling back the dead. Erykah transcribed ‘Mulrunji’, and showed it to Elizabeth, who nodded coolly. She had trouble spelling. Perhaps people still use the term back in Doomadgee, the Aboriginal settlement near the family’s ancestral lands in the Gulf Country from which they had taken their name. But on this deracinated island, the family and witnesses continued to call the dead man Cameron. In the months following his death, only the lawyers and journal-ists used Mulrunji.

Elizabeth at that moment was more worried about detectives asking her the time of events; no one on the island wore watches. She and Jane feared it was a trap. Boe told them not to worry. He explained what was happening: in two days, on 8 February, the State Coroner and the legal teams 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 caused Cameron’s death, and to recommend measures that might prevent similar deaths occurring. He 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. In representing the community, Boe would highlight the systemic flaws in Queensland policing without which the death might not have occurred, and he had organised two lawyers to fight for the family.

Elizabeth told Boe she was concerned that her epileptic sister, Victoria, 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 niece. Both were partly deaf, probably due to untreated childhood ear infections, and would have difficulty hearing the evidence. Elizabeth was diabetic – like deafness, an endemic disease in Aboriginal communities. She did not take medication, she told me, because God was protecting her. Fifteen minutes from the mainland, they lived in a different country.

Having been starved of information, or any sign of legal progress, Elizabeth was prepared to believe that this serious figure in an Armani beanie and with 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.’

The family was anxious to see the cell-surveillance tape, but first they wanted to get some tissues. The store was closed, so Erykah and I drove around the corner to the hospital where she spoke to two young white nurses. They didn’t know who Erykah was. She asked for 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. From nowhere 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, Victoria, Elizabeth, Jane and Valmae, the youngest at thirty-four. (A brother and sister had died; another brother, Lloyd, lived back in Doomadgee, and 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.

They looked like they’d come in from a storm. Their sleeplessness, their grief, their anger all submerged in polite and embarrassed silence.

Boe, having gone outside needing air, left Paula to show the film. 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, radiating deathly quiet. The Doomadgees watched hoping for some clue as to how Cameron had died.

Extract published courtesy of Hamish Hamilton
© Chloe Hooper