Tall Man by Chloe Hooper

Author:Chloe Hooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

It’s a hard, hard country

It’s a hard, hard land

And to live in it you gotta be

A hard, hard man.

TJ sat drinking, not catching many fish. He planned to swap the catfish for turtle with a relative. He complained about a man who had come fishing with money in his pocket, so no one had caught anything. I had a credit card in mine and wondered if it was my fault.

COPS, NORMAN MAILER wrote, “contain explosive contradictions within themselves. Supposed to be law-enforcers, they tend to conceive of themselves as the law…They are attached umbilically to the concept of honesty, they are profoundly corrupt. They possess more physical courage than the average man, they are unconscionable bullies.”

Those contradictions find expression in all manner of ways. One white woman in her fifties told me that the first time she met Hurley in the Burketown Pub, he told her to sit on his knee, even though, as she put it, she was old enough to be his mother. When she declined he told her he was in charge of police and she’d have to do as he said.

If Hurley tended to conceive of himself as the law, it was partly because in Burketown he was the law. The white law, at least. And in Burketown, summary justice—cops doling out on-the-spot punishment with their fists—was not far removed from the Yanners’ philosophy of payback.

As Murrandoo Yanner told the Australian journalist Tony Koch in his December 2004 interview: “Had he not been a policeman, him and me would have been identical in many ways…Like him, I will take on the black or white who talks shit to me. He was a thug and a mug. I am the same.” Yanner continued, “He liked to give blokes a touch-up if they got out of line…He only had one fault—he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”

If a man hits his wife in a place as isolated as Burketown, given the way the legal system works, it takes too long and costs too much to get him locked up. Then the man’s released on bail, or the wife doesn’t want to press charges. He hits her again. According to one school of thought, it’s better to just give him a “touch-up.” Teach him a lesson.

For Murrandoo, the Dirty Harry syndrome had a lot going for it. “[Hurley] was a good copper, but we have a twisted view of what a good copper is,” Murrandoo told me. “A lot of people would rather have a fight with a copper, even if they’re breaking the law. If you half win, or don’t come off too bad, you’d rather that than a bunch of trumped-up charges where you got no chance in the legal system—a white jury in Mount Isa, this and that.”

Murrandoo remembered seeing a young man with a bruised face who alleged he’d been assaulted by Hurley. “I went down the next day, banged on the police station door, and Hurley was pretty busted up, so this young fella had given him a bit of a hiding too.

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