The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper

A book that removed the bandage from modern Australia’s festering sore.

In 2004 on Palm Island in Australia’s deep north, 36-year-old Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he lay dead in the jailhouse. Police said he tripped, but his ruptured liver could not be attributed to a trip. The main suspect, Christopher Hurley was a decorated, charismatic cop with long experience in Aboriginal communities. The lawyer representing Cameron’s family asked Chloe Hooper to write about the case. He suggested it would take a couple of weeks. It took her three years, spent in some of the wildest and most remote parts of Australia following the events and exploring Aboriginal history and culture of that region.

The Tall Man is brilliant writing, a difficult, despairing, compelling depiction of noble humanity reduced, through generations of institutionalised oppression, to self-destructive, squalid powerlessness. I see parallels in Apartheid, another system of institutionalised oppression. The damage to the human spirit is so deeply ingrained in South Africa’s black people that only natural attrition and concerted affirmative action will hopefully eradicate it.

The book is a mixture of observational and immersive journalism. The reader is both a witness to and a participant in the unfolding story. Its focus is a life-altering moment, and its aftermath, involving two men, a perpetually inebriated Aboriginal man and a tall, white policeman, who share nothing but their age and an island. 

Hooper’s research is seamlessly woven into the narrative. This is one of the book’s ultimate strengths. Dispassionate, journalistic prose moves the narrative along, making it all believable. The explosive content is allowed to project its own drama. But Hooper regularly punctuates the narrative with observations that open a window into her own torment and where her heart lies. When a group of older Palm Island women, all of them mothers who have lost sons, file into the inquest, her own despair is revealed in the statement: In the airless room they emitted a low drumbeat of heartache. Telling observations also reveal her distaste for the police. The pro-Hurley rally occurred in a room filled with two thousand uniformed policemen: Tall men, big men with tans or sunburn and close-cut hair. The air was close, clammy with sweat and testosterone. No less telling is her observation of the 45-degree angle at which the police raised their hands when they voted.

Hooper gives the reader a palpable sense of place. Inescapable, stifling heat and humidity pervade the book. Separate black and white worlds exist in sparse, barely functional human habitation, against an incongruous backdrop of Palm Island’s natural tropical beauty with its mountains, white-sand beaches and shimmering waters. Also gripping are the mood and atmosphere, both underpinned by visceral hatred and a yearning for justice. The words c… and f…ing c…, regularly spat out at white people by young and old Aborigines of both genders, are jolting in the hatred they convey. Hooper is not in two minds about the causes of the hatred and the violence it unleashes when she points an accusing finger at the history of the gulf country. The furies had been unleashed, not just over Cameron Doomadgee’s death, but all the black deaths in custody. All the black deaths and all the injustices since Wild Time. Wild Time, Hooper tells us, was a period of violence in the Gulf Country, perpetrated by whites upon the Aboriginals after the Aboriginals had shown them where the water was, and thus helped them settle in the area.

Hooper’s voice reveals the struggle between her natural disposition for fairness and objectivity and her equally natural compassion, which gushes over the Palm Island Aboriginals. Amidst the wretchedness and squalor and unwashed, staggering bodies in filthy clothes, Hooper sees strength, nobility, dignity and pride, and love, especially among the women, whose burden is unimaginably heavy. She describes one of the prosecution witnesses as beautiful and ruined. Then we have Cameron’s sisters, devastated over the verdict of not guilty, but still thanking the barrister who led the prosecution. Hooper broke down in tears at the sight. The real power of this episode is in Cameron’s sisters following Hooper to offer her comfort, to check that she is ok.

The central drama revolves around the inquests into Cameron Doomadgee’s death and the subsequent trial of Chris Hurley for manslaughter. It brings up a number of themes. There is the Palm Islanders’ yearning for justice despite the formidable odds. Another theme is the advantage always enjoyed by Hurley over the Aboriginals, from the outset, when Hurley’s first investigator was a friend in the Townsville Crime and Investigation Bureau, to the jury’s verdict of not guilty, despite the prosecution’s lucid, damning summing up. References to the Dreamtime, mythology and song cycles that described the layout of the land regularly remind the reader of Aboriginal connectedness to this country. The Tall Man is a constant, looming presence. Sometimes, he is a malevolent spirit from Aboriginal folklore who comes out at night to terrorise people. At other times he is Chris Hurley. But the theme that saturates the book is the wretched plight of the Palm Island Aboriginals. Their dysfunction is as astonishing as it is heart-wrenching. They stagger about drunk at ten in the morning, men violently assault their spouses, children drink and smoke with impunity. Everyone looks a lot older than their actual age. And their only escape is death.