[English] NYTimes Sunday Book Review

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

NYTimes 'Sunday Book Reviews'

'TALL MAN: The Death of Doomadgee'

By Chloe Hooper llustrated. 258 pp. Scribner. $24

Book reviewed by ALISON McCULLOCH Published: April 16, 2009 

www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/books/review/McCulloch-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2


Amid the tropical islands dotting the Great Barrier Reef off Australia 
lies one that goes unmentioned in vacation brochures. 

Called Palm Island, it boasts golden beaches and blue waters surrounding 
an interior of lush green. It was, a government official declared in 
1916, “the ideal place for a delightful holiday.” Instead, it became a 
prison for Aborigines where, for some 50 years, the state of Queensland 
sent those it sought to punish — "troublesome haracters, larrikins, 
wanderers or communists."

In November 2004, the 36-year-old stepson of one of those “troublesome 
characters” was found dead in a police cell on the island. 

He had four broken ribs; bruising on his hands, back and face; and a 
liver that had been “almost cleaved in two.” 

His name was Cameron Doomadgee, and in her new book, “Tall Man,” Chloe 
Hooper sets out to tell his story. 

It is not an easy one to tell. From the time he was found unresponsive in 
that concrete cell, Doomadgee came to bear the unbearable weight of black 
Australia’s grievances against white. 

In turn, the policeman accused in the case would be tried not just for 
this sin, but for all. The facts would prove elusive, swimming in and out 
of focus, filtered through the murk of prejudice, anger, despair, and 
gallons and gallons of booze. 

Witnesses changed their stories (one committed suicide, as did 
Doomadgee’s son) and positions hardened as politicians, lobby groups and 
the national news media joined the parade.

Hooper followed the case and its main characters for two and a half 
years, and she does their complexity a remarkable justice. 

She became involved a few months after Doomadgee’s death, when a lawyer 
representing the island’s Aboriginal community said he needed a writer. 

Hooper’s first book, “A Child’s Book of True Crime,” was a novel — 
arguably a curious grounding for a work like this one. Or perhaps it set 
the stage perfectly, with its clever and penetrating account of a 
gruesome murder. Yet Hooper surely could not have foreseen the tempest 
into which she was stepping with the Doomadgee case. “I had never heard 
of Palm Island,” she writes, and “like most middle-class suburbanites, I 
grew up without ever seeing an Aborigine, except on the news.” 

About 2,500 people live on Palm Island, many of them, like Doomadgee, 
descendants of those banished from the mainland. Doomadgee’s stepfather 
was sent to Palm in leg irons in the mid-1950s “after knocking out all 
the teeth of a missionary who’d flogged his uncle to near death.” 

Officially a mission, this “tropical gulag” was one of around 20 set up 
in Queensland to “protect the natives from the violence of the frontier” 
and bring “light to the darkness” of their lives. Now, the missionaries 
are gone and the communities they left behind have become “impoverished 
ghettos of alcoholism, petrol sniffing, brutality, arrests and early 
deaths.”

Senior Sgt. Chris Hurley, the officer who locked up Doomadgee, seemed 
attracted to these brutal settlements. “Do the things that draw a 
missionary to savage places also lure a cop?” Hooper wonders. “Does the 
cop get the same rush from lawlessness that missionaries get from the 
godless?” 

While Hooper was embraced by the Doomadgee family, she had no access to 
Hurley — a limitation she tries to overcome by visiting places he worked 
and talking to people he knew. 

She meets Murrandoo Yanner, an Aboriginal activist from the tiny 
northwest Queensland settlement of Burketown, where Hurley was posted for 
four years. “All kids in town, he spent a lot of time with them,” Yanner 
said of Hurley. “On his weekends off, rather than chase the nurses and go 
drinking, he’d actually go along with the school trip, throw some kids in 
his car.” Which is not to say Hurley was averse to chasing nurses and 
drinking — women Hooper spoke with described him as a sleaze. But on one 
thing, Yanner is adamant: “He was definitely no racist.”

The morning Doomadgee was arrested, Hurley was in the middle of yet 
another domestic violence case. Three sisters had been beaten, and Hurley 
was escorting one of them home to pick up her insulin. As he and a fellow 
officer waited outside in their van, Doomadgee staggered past. It was 
around 10 in the morning, and Doomadgee was, Hooper writes, “on a full-
scale bender of beer, cask wine and ‘goom’ — methylated spirits mixed 
with water.” What happened next is in dispute. 

Hurley said Doomadgee swore at him, and though this was a cop “who had 
endured every insult in existence,” he did not let it go, arresting 
Doomadgee for creating a public nuisance. 

Inside an hour, Doomadgee was dead. 

A week later, local residents gathered to hear the pathologist’s findings 
from Erykah Kyle, the mayor. “Erykah asks every­one to stand for a 
moment’s silence,” Hooper writes. “Hundreds of people bow their heads. 

She tells them the pathologist believes Cameron’s death was the result of 
an accidental fall and that he’d found no sign of police brutality.” 

Within 24 hours, the police station and Hurley’s house had been burned to 
the ground, and 21 islanders faced rioting charges. 

The justice system largely takes over from there, and is today still 
grinding on. Hurley ended up making history, becoming both the first 
police officer in Australia to be found responsible for a death in 
custody — though by a coroner, not a criminal court — and, later, the 
first to be charged in such a case. In June 2007, he was acquitted of 
assault and manslaughter charges, and last December the coroner’s finding 
of responsibility was set aside. 

The Doomadgee family has appealed and is suing for damages. 

Hooper travels to remote settlements and reaches into prehistory in her 
effort to penetrate this fractured story, learning of song lines, of 
Hairy Man and Tall Man spirits (Hurley, at 6-foot-7, evokes the latter). 

And though there is no resolution, she makes of it all an extraordinary 
whole. “I had wanted to know more about my country,” she says at the end 
of the book, “and now I did — now I knew more than I wanted to.”


Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New 
Zealand. A version of this article appeared in print on April 19, 2009, 
on page BR9 of the New York edition. 

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Cheers,
Stephen