The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
Cape £16.99 pp260
Cameron Doomadgee died from internal bleeding on the floor of his prison cell on November 19, 2004, after his liver was sliced in two across his spine. The degree of force required to cause that kind of injury is normally associated with a high-speed car accident or a plane crash. The 36-year-old Aboriginal Australian, moaning for help as he lay dying, also had four broken ribs and further wounds on his face, skull and hands.
There were only two possible explanations for such horrific injuries. Either he had been beaten to death (as an eyewitness testified) by Sergeant Chris Hurley, his home town's senior police officer; or, as all the policemen in the room testified, Doomadgee and Hurley had both tripped on a step, and Hurley had toppled onto Doomadgee (who, despite having fallen forward, had somehow landed on his back) with sufficient downward force to tear open an organ.
This may not seem, on the face of it, like the most challenging case in criminal history, but there was a considerable complication. The killing - or the stumble - had taken place on Palm Island, a lawless, desperate corner of northeast Australia where the rules of the Wild West still seem to hold sway. And, most important, Doomadgee was a drunk, unemployed “blackfella”, while Hurley was a white, dashing, all-Australian male. And it's the tension and resentment between the two cultures these men represent that provides Chloe Hooper with the combustible fuel for The Tall Man, a gripping, heart-stopping piece of true-crime reportage.
Palm Island, Hooper explains, is “a kind of tropical gulag” off the northeast coast of Queensland, where around 2,500 Aboriginal people live in a maelstrom of poverty, alcohol and dysfunction. Unemployment is 92%; male life-expectancy is less than 50 years; the suicide rate is triple Australia's national average.
When an inquest was then convened to further debate the case, the Palm Islanders appointed the campaigning Burmese-born lawyer Andrew Boe to represent their interests, and he brought Hooper along to chronicle events. Adopted by Doomadgee's family as “our writer”, Hooper spent the next two years investigating what had happened on the morning of November 19 - and also uncovering the reality of Doomadgee and Hurley's bruising frontier lives.
While admirably honest about the impassable divide between herself and the Palm Islanders as she traces Doomadgee's brief, gloomy biography, (“I felt incandescently white”) Hooper is keen to capture the reality of life in a broken indigenous community, glimpses of magic and folklore cropping up among the addiction, domestic abuse and constant calendar of funerals. The tall man of the title is a malevolent spirit who is said to live in the island's mountains, feasting on the reliable supply of the Aboriginal dead.
Just as enlightening are Hooper's visits to the beer-soaked, bar-brawling white settlements that also occupy back-country Queensland: “The last outposts of racists, crocodile hunters, war veterans, hermits, and every kind of heathen.” And home to people such as Hurley - white doctors, teachers, social workers and particularly policemen, who gain Brownie points and promotions for volunteering to bear the white-man's burden of Aboriginal community work, while running their distant outposts as personal fiefdoms.
The sluggish investigation into whether Hurley killed Doomadgee finally sprang to life in January 2007, when Hurley became the first Australian policeman to be charged over an Aboriginal death in custody. At which point Hooper's narrative finds another gear, as mainstream white Queensland enters the scene, looking startlingly ugly: pathologists who hadn't bothered to examine the victim's skull, investigating officers who'd had dinner with the prime suspect on the evening of the crime, spineless local politicians standing behind “the best police service in the world”, and, least attractive of all, the Queensland Police Union. Aided by a lazily complicit media, the union turned the handsome, matey Hurley into a local hero, A Cop Who Cared (take a bow, the Brisbane Sunday Mail), who was being stitched up by Australia's liberal elite. The self-pity, thoughtlessness and contempt for the legal process shown by the union is so gruesome that when Hooper mentions a roomful of beefy, uniformed policemen signalling their support for Hurley by all raising their arms “at a 45-degree angle”, the detail doesn't seem gratuitous.
Queensland's police force - along with its tourist board - won't thank Hooper for The Tall Man, but the rest of us should. This meticulous, compelling portrayal of the dark side of Australian life deserves the widest possible audience.