August 24, 2006

Between Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef lies Palm Island, officially classified as the most dangerous place on earth outside a combat zone. Unemployment runs at 92 per cent, more than half of the men die before they reach 45, and alcoholism is endemic. Now tensions between the police and the Aboriginal population have reached breaking point over a suspicious death in custody, reports novelist Chloe Hooper

Palm Island’s breeze block air shelter is decorated with a collection of the local fourth graders’ projects on safe and unsafe behaviour: “I feel safe when I’m not being hunted,” one project reads. The island, in the far northeast of Australia, lies between the coast of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef. The World Heritage classified reef with its luxury island resort is, as the advertising slogan goes, ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next’. But no one would want to holiday here. Palm Island (population 3,000) is home to one of the country’s largest Aboriginal communities and, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the moat dangerous place on earth outside a combat zone.

I am travelling with two lawyers. Two months earlier, Cameron Doomadgee, a drunken Aboriginal was arrested for swearing at police. Less than an hour later he died with injuries like those of a road trauma victim. The police claimed he tripped on a step. The community didn’t agree and burnt down the police station. The lawyers are here to represent pro bono the Palm Island community in the state government’s inquest into the man’s death.

In 1916 the island was, to the government official designated Chief Protector of Aborigines, ‘the ideal place for a delightful holiday’. The surrounding shark inhaled waters also made it ‘suitable for use as a penitentiary’. From 1918, Aborigines were sent to the Palm Island Mission in leg irons, deemed variously: ‘a troublesome character’; ‘a larrikin; ‘a wanderer’; ‘a communist’. Usually they had made the mistake of asking about their wages, or practising traditional ceremonies. In its isolation the mission became increasingly authoritarian –– a kind of tropical gulag with all the arbitrary abuse of power that term implies.

Blacks were not allowed on Mango Avenue where white staff lived. Blacks were required to salute any white person they passed. Whites got choice cuts of meat: blacks got bones. At the cinema, whites sat on chairs carried by black servants, blacks sat on blankets. Permits were needed to fish or to swim. There were garden competitions and European dancing, and those who did not participate were questioned by police. A brass band learnt to play jazz and marching tunes, but failure to attend band practice could result in a jail sentence. Even in the `60s, a man could be arrested for waving to his wife or for laughing. A teenager whose cricket ball broke off, short length of branch could spend the night locked up.

In the `70s, when it became legal for Aborigines to drink alcohol, Palm Island opened a canteen selling beer. For people long used to intense subjugation, it was an opportunity to be literally ‘out of control’. It also unleashed a violence that had always been under the surface. Despite evidence that the grouping together of different tribes could be disastrous, over 40 different tribes with incompatible territorial, language and kinship ties were sent to Palm Island. It is now a study of dysfunction taken to its ultimate degree: the island has 92 per cent unemployment more than half the men will die before the age of 45; 16 young people have committed suicide in eight months. The police, far from being seen as saviours, are the focus of great suspicion and often hatred.

November 19, 2004 must have looked like another grindingly banal day. Shortly after 10am, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, 33, the island’s officer in charge, and Lloyd Bengaroo, the Aboriginal police liaison officer, were escorting Gladys Nugent, a big, gentle looking woman, to collect insulin from her partner’s fridge.

While the two men, waited, Cameron Doomadgee walked past, “Bengaroo,” he said to the police aide, “you black like me. Why can’t you help the blacks?” To which Bengaroo replied, “Keep walking or you be arrested, too.” Doomadgee retreated, but when he was 20m away, turned and appeared to say something. Bengaroo didn’t hear anything. Others, closer than Bengaroo, reckoned he was singing. But Chris Hurley heard something disrespectful and decided, at 10:20am, to arrest him for creating a public nuisance.

What happened at the police station is disputed: as Doomadgee was taken from the van, he hit the Senior Sergeant on the jaw while struggling. Two witnesses say they saw Hurley punch Doomadgee back. In the doorway, the men tripped on a step and landed side by side. Hurley stood and pulled his prisoner into the hallway. He didn’t, at the time, notice another Aboriginal man waiting to be questioned.

Roy Bramwell, 29, had been brought into the police station to answer questions relating to the assault of his partner. At the station, Roy says he watched as Chris Hurley dragged Cameron Doomadgee into the hallway, “Chris laid him down here and started kicking him. All I could see [was] the elbow gone down, up and down.” Roy’s view was partially obscured by a filing cabinet, but he could see Doomadgee’s legs sticking out. Each time the fist descended he heard Doomadgee groan.

But Roy says Hurley did not stop. Doomadgee was then dragged into the cells. Moments later, Chris Hurley came back and Roy saw him rubbing his chin. He had a button undone. Roy says Hurley asked him if he had seen anything. He said no, and Hurley told him to leave.

The cell’s surveillance tape shows Doomadgee writhing on the concrete floor trying to find a comfortable position in which to die. The camera is in a high corner and, from this angle, when Hurley and another officer walk in they look enormous. The officer kicks at Doomdgee which in court is referred to as ‘an arousal technique’ –– then leans over him, realising he is dead.

At 11:22am Hurley called an ambulance. Three minutes later the ambulance crew arrived and determined Doomadgee had been dead for at least 20 minutes. Doomadgee had a black eye, four, broken ribs and a liver almost cleaved in two. His injuries were so severe that even with instant medical attention he was unlikely to have survived.

Elizabeth Domadgee, Carmeron’s sister, is a handsome woman in her early forties with an almost stately quality. She does not have a telephone, and one evening before the inquest begins two lawyers and I drop by her house unannounced. Elizabeth invites us for dinner.

On the day Cameron was arrested Carol, his eldest sister, went to the police station ‘to take feed for him’. Although her brother had been dead for two hours, Hurley turned her away, telling her to come back at 3pm. Later, in the afternoon, a policeman, from the mainland, visited the family. “The detective had a red book with him,” Carol recalls, “and he read it out to us telling us we lost Cameron.”

We ask Elizabeth how she will feel seeing the police give evidence: “I’ll forgive them what they done, because Jesus said love thy enemy.” She tells us that Aboriginal people have no choice but to be patient. In prayer meetings, she has been praying for justice. “We want justice for Cameron, to make his spirit free. We want the truth. We want to hear the truth.”

Local witnesses will give their evidence on the Island. The police –– for security reasons, it is argued –– will give theirs on the mainland in Townsville. Court convenes in the local gym. It is distressing to watch the Aboriginal witnesses being examined and cross-examined. They are asked to read through and swear by their statements, which is impossible for the many who are illiterate. They are questioned about the timing of events, but few wear watches. They are asked leading questions in complicated legalese and some of them, confused or intimidated, try to guess, the right answer.

17 lawyers are lined up along the bar table, and all but Andrew Boe, the Burmese born lawyer working for the Palm Island Council, are white. The Domadgee sisters rely largely on their lawyers’ facial expressions to gauge what is happening. “Black man pretty hard to understand white man’s language,” one witness tells me. Likewise, often the lawyers can barely comprehend the Palm Islanders.

In the makeshift court, Roy Bramwell is now the star witness. His examination begins, badly. Although this is supposed to be an inquiry into the truth, not the worth of Roy’s character, there’s no forgetting that he was at the police station because he’d just bashed three women. If this ever went to trial would anyone believe him?

Roy says he saw Hurley punching Doomadgee, and the police lawyers work hard to discredit his testimony. Roy gets aggressive because he feels the lawyers’ put it all together and twist it. His frustration is palpable. Unbidden he stands up to show what he saw. Roy rests his knee on the ground, as he alleges Hurley did, and punches. For a moment, everything is silent: it is clear that a big man, knee to the chest of someone pressed against a concrete floor would cause extreme injuries. Quickly, the court is adjourned.

The inquest soon becomes bogged down in legal argument about releasing Hurley’s police records. It emerges there are 20 to 30 official complaints against him, of which he has always been unequivocally cleared. Hurley has, however, sometimes investigated these complaints himself.

When Hurley arrives, amid much excitement, it’s like glimpsing Colonel Kurtz. He comes through a back door to avoid photographers. A tall, rugged man he could be straight from casting as the sheriff. His police uniform is carefully pressed. Each crease is visible. He is clean shaven. tanned, calm, polite. It goes to make him a good witness. He calls Counsel Assisting the Deputy Coroner, Terry Man tin ‘Sir’, and looks him straight in the eye. He keeps very still.

Martin: “Do you have friends who are Aborigines?” Hurley: “Yes, Sir.” Martin; “Do you have anything against Aboriginal people?” Hurley: “No. I wouldn’t go to those communities if I had some something against Aboriginal people. I couldn’t serve in those communities.”

Martin takes Hurley back to the morning of November 19, 2004. Within the first few minutes, the Senior Sergeant claims privilege against self-incrimination. None of the testimony he gives will be admissible should he ever be charged in relation to the death.

Under privilege, Hurley describes Police Liaison Officer Lloyd Bengaroo’s feelings after Doomadgee challenged him about not ‘helping the blacks’. “His pride was hurt,” he says. Hurley would have the court believe that he arrested Doomadgee to save Lloyd’s honour. But in a place where alcohol consumption dominates life, Martin asks Hurley why he could not have just driven the drunk man home. Doomadgee was not known for being violent or a troublemaker, and could have been taken to a safe place to sober up, rather than to the police cells.

Martin then leads Hurley to the moment Doomadgee punched him. The Senior Sergeant claims he was not angered by this, but ‘annoyed’. And in this state he struggled with Doomadgee, until both men tripped through the station’s doorway.

Martin: “You didn’t land on top of him?” Hurely: “Well, I now know that medical evidence would suggest that. That I landed on top of him. If I didn’t know the medical evidence, I’d tell you that I fell to the left of him....I mean, life doesn’t unfortunately go frame by frame, and if it did, I would’ve been able to give a 100 per cent accurate version. But the version I gave was my best recollection and the most truthful. It was the truth that I thought.”

Martin reminds Hurley that in three previous police interviews he said he fell to the left of Doomadgee. This is what he said on the afternoon of Doomadgee’s death: the day after; and a few weeks later. There would now seem to be only two possible explanations for Doomadgee’s black eye and massive internal injuries, Martin claims: that Hurley had indeed fallen on top of him, or that Hurley had struck a series of forceful blows. Since he has repeatedly denied the former –– until knowing of the medical evidence –– could the latter be possible?

The 1989 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommended each death be treated as a homicide, and that police should not investigate other police, to avoid ‘collaboration and dare it be said collusion’. But 15 minutes after the paramedics pronounced Cameron Doomadgee dead, Senior Sergeant Hurley called his good friend, Detective Sergeant Darren Robinson. The men had served together on the island for the past two years and Robinson had previously investigated and cleared Hurley of other complaints. After the men spoke, Robinson then called two other officers who had also worked closely with Hurley before and held him in high regard.

It must have been reassuring for the Senior Sergeant that he, the main suspect, would be investigated by old colleagues and friends. He picked the detectives up from the airport and drove them round to the relevant areas of interest. Meanwhile, no part of the police station was made into a crime scene or sealed off. No areas were tested to see if there were matches with the blood from Doomadgee’s eye. No photograph, were taken of Hurley’, hands or boots. The transcript of Hurley’s police interview is striking for its camaraderie: the chief investigator refers to Hurley as ‘mate’ or ‘buddy’; Hurley calls him ‘boss’.

In the courtroom I notice the women from Palm Island. Some of them look much older; 20 years older, than they are. All of them are mothers with lost sons. Mothers with sons in custody; sons who have died in custody; sons in trouble with police. They sit in the airless room emitting a low drumbeat of heartache. The Doomadgee sisters sit among them, waiting for something to happen. “This just drag, eh,” Valmai Doomadgee says, but she believes her brother is watching over her. “It’s like he there telling me to keep pushing, don’t give give up.” Next to her sits Elizabeth who is trying, I imagine, to love her enemies.

Father Tony, Palm Island’s Catholic priest, says, that among families ravaged by alcoholism and violence, a completely different concept of forgiveness exists. He was with Elizabeth recently when she spoke at a Townsville church service. She told the story of her brother’s death and a policeman stood up and started to cry. He said he’d seen terrible things done to black people and how sorry he was. “He cried broken hearted,” Elizabeth tells me. She went over and I hugged him: “Brother, I forgive you.”

The Coronial Inquiry into Cameron Doomadgee’s death has finished taking evidence from all relevant witnesses. The Deputy Corner is waiting to hear final submissions, and will deliver her findings as soon as possible. –– Dawn/Observer Service

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