The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper

Author:Chloe Hooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407021065
Publisher: Random House

THREE

The Inquest Resumes

THE MAIN STREETS of Townsville are lined with palm trees and emblems of colonial prosperity. Ornate urns and columns and wreaths swathe Victorian shopfronts that are still marked tailor, stationery, bank. Hot-pink bougainvillea grows weedlike up wrought-iron lace to balconies with French doors flung open to the breezes. The city was settled in the early 1860s as a place for boiling down the carcasses of sheep and cattle for tallow. A sugar industry developed around it, and to work the cane fields the planters imported (some say stole or enslaved) nearly fifty thousand Melanesian men and women from the South Pacific Islands—a practice known as “blackbirding”. Townsville is named for such a blackbirder, Robert Towns, an entrepreneur who in 1865 wrote from the fledgling settlement: “I never felt so unhappy from home in my life what from bites and blight.” He left the next month and never returned.

Townsville’s courthouse is a flat-roofed modernist building of weathered concrete. It rises amid more palms and tropical fruit trees, with small square windows staring out from its façade.

It was Wednesday, August 3, 2005, eight and half months after Cameron’s death, and Chris Hurley and the other police officers were only now being required to give evidence. Coroner Michael Barnes had stood down and the inquest was being heard by the deputy state coroner, Christine Clements, an attractive woman in her mid-forties whose manner gave nothing away. Clements had spent the past two days on Palm Island hearing evidence from the Aboriginal witnesses who’d earlier appeared before Barnes. This time they testified in a much smaller room at the island’s Police Club Youth Centre, with the aid of an interpreter. Now the court had reconvened in Townsville, where it was argued the police witnesses would be safe.

Erykah Kyle and a group of Palm Island women had travelled to the mainland for the hearing. Some of them looked much older, twenty years older, than they were. All of them were mothers with lost sons: sons in custody, sons who’d died in custody, sons who claimed to have been beaten by the police. Some had sons who had rioted, and although these men were now allowed back on the island, they were still awaiting trial. To enter the courtroom the women had to show ID, before being electronically scanned, then patted down. In the airless room they emitted a low drumbeat of heartache. I could feel their desperation for any tiny victory. “You long for it, long for it,” one of them said to me. Their heightened expectation was the antithesis of the police officers’ attitude. The same squad that had kicked down the rioters’ doors was on security and sat outside the courtroom, flicking through magazines. They all looked upwards of six-foot-four and they all had crewcuts. “This inquest is an example,” one sergeant told me, “of people trying to look for the worst in a situation.”

Tracy Twaddle and the Doomadgee sisters sat in the front row. Elizabeth’s eyes gleamed with now: Now it’s happening.

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