THE COURIER MAIL
(28 June 2008)

CHLOE HOOPER
Edited version published: Courier Mail (28 June 2008)

By early 2005, a provocative story had been developing on Palm Island, one of Australia’s biggest Aboriginal communities. We all know it by now. Three months earlier, Cameron Doomadgee, a 36-year-old Aboriginal man, was taken into police custody. He was drunk, but upright. Doomadgee came out of custody dead, with suspicious injuries, similar to those caused by a car accident. His liver was almost cleaved in two. The Indigenous community blamed Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley—who claimed he fell on Doomadgee—and burned the station down.

Flying over to Palm Island by that stage, Chloe Hooper thought she would write a feature article that would take two weeks, max. “Pretty soon after arriving, there was a funny feeling you sometimes get, where the story is bigger than you thought,” she says. Now in 2008, she has followed the case for over three years. What started off as a feature article is now a book called The Tall Man.

Hooper was there on the invitation of Andrew Boe, the lawyer who flew out to represent the Palm Island community pro bono. She’d given Boe her word that if she were invited in by the community, she would stick with the story. “I didn’t know it would take so long, [but] I got hooked in,” she says. “What made me immediately so angry was that such a low price was put on Cameron Doomadgee’s life. You can’t help thinking: ‘What if this were my family?’”

Prior to writing The Tall Man, Hooper was primarily known as a novelist. Upon releasing her debut, A Child’s Book of True Crime, she was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Literary Prize in the UK. On paper, it seems strange that a fiction writer chose to cover the Palm Island case, now a notorious and protracted story, barbed with mind-spinning technicalities and legal u-turns.

She’s the first to admit that as a white woman, unfamiliar with Aboriginal culture or the law, she was going in a little green. (“Or white,” she adds.) However, The Tall Man isn’t such a leap. Hooper’s novel meditated on the nature of true crime stories, and elements of the Doomadgee case sometimes feel as though they’re lifted straight out of literature. By the end of the courtroom drama in Townsville, black Palm Islanders all sit on the upper level, while whites sit on the bottom. It’s straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The book has also proved riveting enough to entice overseas publishers, and will be published in the US and UK soon. “People everywhere understand,” Hooper says. “It’s universal, the themes of justice and revenge, hope and despair. ’Death in custody’ are these dread words, which make people’s eyes glaze over. But I wanted to write a book that people would keep reading—not because they felt they had to, but because it was a page-turner.”

Some will inevitably criticise The Tall Man for being overly intimate with the Doomadgee family. After all, Hooper was invited into the lives of that family, while accessing Hurley proved more difficult. Throughout the case, Hooper wrote Hurley letters via his solicitors, requesting time with him to tell his side of the story. “If you’re going to put yourself in the position of the Doomadgee family, you have an obligation to also ask that of Hurley,” she says.

The letters failed. Instead, Hooper spends much of The Tall Man examining Hurley through research, and going inside police union meet-ups in his support. In part, she empathises with police officers working in regions like Palm Island. “They spend time in communities which are brutal, and really difficult places to work. You’re called into situations which are often horrific, and you’re despised for doing it.

“In these communities, you can almost become your own worst enemy. You’re almost forced to follow a script of playing the tyrant.” If you read The Tall Man as a true crime book, the obvious question would be whether Hurley was responsible or not. Did he do it? However, Hooper has a different take. “In a way, the reader has to ask: ‘Could I have done it?’” she says.

Yet, The Tall Man never denies Hurley’s role in Doomadgee’s death. His testimonies come across as severely questionable. The book also quietly rages against how the case was handled, outlining fundamental shortcomings and compromises: how Hurley was initially investigated by police chums; the dilemma and impossibility of bringing legitimate Aboriginal witnesses to the stand; that the trial was held in Townsville, and not Brisbane.

Hooper also dismisses the idea that the Doomadgee case wasn’t about race. “That’s very cynical [to say it isn’t],” Hooper says. “I have trouble believing that if it were a white drunk who died in custody, that the police union would be spruiking on the streets with arms bands, with Hurley’s serial number stamped on them. Hurley became a poster boy for those who felt that blackfellas get too much, that this was political correctness run amok.”

In writing the book, Hooper often felt that sentiment directed towards her. At one point, she shares her umbrella with an Aboriginal woman, and a police officer stares her down with mute disgust. “I could feel the police watching intently as we crossed the wet road together,” Hooper writes. “She’s one of those.” One of what, exactly? “Probably a do-gooding leftie,” she says. “But I really didn’t come to this book with a set of political or moral certainty. I don’t feel that’s the book I’ve written.”

Instead, Hooper says she attempted to connect the dots between Aboriginal Australia’s past and present. “We’ve asked Aboriginal people to take complete responsibility for their present,” she says, “while for the last 12 years, we’ve denied what’s happened in the past. Cameron Doomadgee is two generations from Wild Time, which is the killing time. His grandparents are the survivors of massacres. His parents and his oldest siblings were Stolen Generation, put in dormitories.”

Despite the jury delivering a verdict of Hurley’s innocence, The Tall Man doesn’t finish with a neat ending. Right now, Hurley is involved in legal action to have damning coroner’s findings against him reviewed, while Andrew Boe has launched a civil action against the Queensland government and Hurley himself. “You’re hoping for this Erin Brockovich moment, and it doesn’t come,” Hooper says. “Life is like that.”

The Tall Man will leave some bitterness in readers’ mouths, and for different reasons. “Fifteen minutes from the mainland,” Hooper writes about Palm Islanders, “they lived in a different country.” For a nation that has recently chosen to reconcile with its Aboriginal past, The Tall Man questions where we’re at now. It’s an uncomfortable experience, mainly because it suggests an unwillingness in wanting to imagine our own people’s miseries.

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Last Updated :: 08 September 2008
All Content © Benjamin Law 2008