Chloe Hooper has written her account of a riot and
subsequent trial based on a black death in custody on Palm Island, QLD, a short
distance from the Townsville mainland. It has stayed with me for several days. It
is a journalistic novel in the vein of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ and I
keep thinking it would be an especially good book for high school aged
Australian’s to read.
On Friday, November 19 2004, Senior Sergeant Cameron
Hurley, on Palm Island, drove a woman named Gladys home after she was released
from hospital, after being bashed along with her two sisters, by her partner.
Hurley, at 34, was the senior policeman on the island. He was accompanied by
his black liaison officer, Lloyd Bengaroo. A man named Nugent walked by the
police car, shouting abuse. He was high from sniffing petrol and his mother had
just been beaten by the same man who laid into Gladys. He was quickly arrested
and placed into the police van. Then Hurley could hear another voice, belonging
to a man he said he didn’t know, Cameron Doomadgee. Hurley said he heard
Doomadgee swear at him, but this was not corroborated by anyone else in the
vicinity. They could only hear him singing. Hurley says the abuse was aimed at
Bengaroo, for being in the invidious position of both being black and helping a
white man arrest black residents.
Outside the station, Doomadgee hits Hurley on the jaw.
Hurley drags him into the station. He later claims they both fell into the
station after a struggle, but the facts are very murky here because of
contradictory evidence. The man who bashed the three sisters says that Hurley
was delivering a series of punches to Doomadgee’s body. In court it is
difficult to place much credence on this because this man had drunk over 40
cans of beer overnight, and half a dozen more in the morning. Doomadgee, and
the other man newly arrested, Nugent, are placed in the same cell. Doomadgee is
crying out for help, in pain. About half an hour later both men are checked,
and Doomadgee is dead.
Following all of this, as told in ‘The Tall Man’, there
is an investigation which results in a riot on the island- the investigation
has found the death has been caused by accidental fall with no evidence of
police brutality. The black people on Palm Island are naturally appalled.
Doomadgee’s sister came to collect her brother the next morning- why was he
suddenly dead? She was told only to come back in the afternoon. The
investigation, as outline by Hooper, was seriously flawed. For example, Hurley
was initially investigated by none other than two of his close police mates. The
emphasis in the interview it appears was the fact that Hurley was punched in
the face by Doomadgee. Hurley admitted he saw a ‘small’ amount of blood coming
from Doomadgee’s ‘small’ injury above his right eye, but claimed he didn’t know
how it got there. Hurley spoke of wrestle and resultant fall, but was strangely
emphatic that he didn’t fall on top of the black man, a story he stuck to
throughout. The three policemen, and a third more senior officer, again a
strong supporter of Hurley’s, all had drinks and dinner together that night.
The riot was seriously dangerous and violent, and only
managed when huge police reinforcements arrived. One of the first casualties
was Hurley’s property and all his luxury goods- all razed to the ground. The
man himself flew out quickly. The riot was precipitated by the actions of a
local named Lex Wotton who, upon hearing his friend had supposedly died from an
accidental fall, used a microphone outside the council buildings to say “Will
we accept this as an accident? No! I tell you people, things going to
burn…let’s do something!”
The inquest, which began three and a half months later, was
riddled with complications but eventually found, some two years after
Doomagee’s death, that Hurley was culpable: “ A simple fall through the
doorway, even in an uncontrolled and accelerated fashion, was unlikely to have
caused the particular injury.” This is when the police ‘closed ranks’, up in arms about the fact that it was the
first time a police officer had been found responsible for a death in custody.
This is a very well researched book. Hooper traces the
background of the two key protagonists by venturing to the places of their
past. These are terrible, in some ways shocking places like Burketown, North
West of QLD, where Hurley was a popular and dominant character. Not
surprisingly Doomadgee’s ancestral background is a place further west of
Burketown called Doomadgee. Hurley worked here too. The best way for an
ambitious policeman to accelerate through the ranks is to work in harsh,
unpopular conditions.
This book exposes a number of important things. First of
all we have interesting sections that reveal the part that faith plays in the
desperate lives of many poor people. There is always the thought that there is
something better in the future. Also, Hooper exposes in rich and unblinking
prose what it means to live in places like Palm Island if you are aboriginal.
The stories are incredibly sad, yet we have heard them before. Despair, extreme
alcoholic abuse, sexual and physical abuse, any number of suicides (including
Doomadgee’s own son found hanging from a tree not long after his father died),
emaciated people, people prematurely ageing and reliant on insulin, any other
number of health problems, poor housing and clothing, petrol sniffing, boredom
and hatred, nihilism, and generally terrible health. One comment of a slightly
different kind that stood out to me was of a young man bemoaning the fact that
you see the same people every day. So this is a snapshot of the claustrophobic
nature of life on Palm Island. Any yet youtube.com tells us that there are
attractive aspects of the island, that it is a place that is attractive for
tourists. Cathy Freeman espouses the beauty of the island. There are evidently
two sides.
Another important thread in the story is the way the
police support each other through thick and thin. Even though none of the
hundreds of officers who offer support to Hurley know what happened in that
police station on Palm Island, the police union is unwavering in their support.
Surely some, even many, would have doubted his story. It seems that support for
the fellow officer, regardless, triumphs over anything else. I guess each
officer feels it could be them who might in future need to seek similar
support. Perhaps it connects with a kind of ‘us versus them’ mentality.
Depressingly, for some, the death of a black man may be insignificant compared
to the career of a white man.
However the key part of the story of course is the trial
and the subsequent outcome. Some three years after the death in custody of
Cameron Doomadgee the jury at the Townsville courtroom delivered a verdict of
not guilty. This is despite the fact that it was beyond dispute that Doomadgee
had received a black eye and bruised jaw, bruises on his right eye and eye lid,
bruises on his forehead and the back of his head and both hands, four broken
ribs, a ruptured portal vein and, most alarming, no less than a liver almost
cleaved in two, probably caused by extreme pressure on the abdomen by something
smooth like a knee.
Reading about the trial at the end of Hooper’s book, I am
reminded of the trial in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’ In this book Atticus Finch
holds some comfort for the fact that the case against Tom Robinson actually
resulted in a reasonably lengthy deliberation of the fate of the accused by the
jury, even if Tom Robinson was found guilty. In ‘The Tall Man’ a member of
Doomadgee’s family takes some comfort from the fact that “we got this far.”
It is very difficult, it seems more and more to me, to
prove murder or manslaughter without incontrovertible evidence. Many men get
off rape charges for this reason. The parents of a woman named Elisabeth Membry
pretty much know who murdered their daughter in Ringwood, as well as the jury I
assume, but without forensic evidence how can they be absolutely sure? The
witnesses to Doomadgee’s death were either lying, unreliable or frightened.
Could a reasonable jury convict Hurley on the evidence before them? As it
turned out they were unable to do so. And Hurley doesn’t go to jail.
I heard someone say recently that there were a lot of
grey areas in this case. By this I mean that she found some reasons for why she
might excuse Hurley. It goes back to the fact that his was a very difficult
job, and he may have cracked. Some of us may have reacted the same way to
provocation after policing on Palm Island for a period of time.
The way I see it is that Hurley was in a position in
which he should not crack. If this
was his mental state he should not have been on the island. His inability to
provide any reasonable explanation for Doomadgee’s injuries was also not
acceptable. The tragedy of Doomadgee’s
death was greatly enhanced because there was no justice for the taking of his
life. Somewhere in the book I remember Hooper or someone else saying “What if
it was Hurley, not Doomadgee who had suffered these injuries and this death. Would
he have been believed?” it’s obviously a farcical question. There is something
about the stench of different rules for blacks and whites lingering in the air,
here. I can just see the fists going backwards and forwards, the knee going in
hard: “Do you want more Mister, Mister Doomadgee?” But of course I wasn’t
there.
