Status
Collection
Publication
Description
In 2004 on Palm Island, an Aboriginal settlement in the "Deep North" of Australia, a thirty-six-year-old man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he was dead in the jailhouse. The police claimed he'd tripped on a step, but his liver was ruptured. The main suspect was Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, a charismatic cop with long experience in Aboriginal communities and decorations for his work. Chloe Hooper was asked to write about the case by the pro bono lawyer who represented Cameron Doomadgee's family. He told her it would take a couple of weeks. She spent three years following Hurley's trail to some of the wildest and most remote parts of Australia, exploring Aboriginal myths and history and the roots of brutal chaos in the Palm Island community. Her stunning account goes to the heart of a struggle for power, revenge, and justice. Told in luminous detail, Tall Man is as urgent as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Executioner's Song. It is the story of two worlds clashing -- and a haunting moral puzzle that no reader will forget.… (more)
User reviews
And without wishing to sound facile - I think the audience will tend to see things in black and white.
Probably the "white" audience won't even read
Some would say that Chloe falls into the chardonnay sipping - bleeding hearts liberal mob of thought.
I think she does her very best to avoid that stereotype. But I think she would also recognise that it will inevitably be applied.
Many of the chardonnay mob (and I include myself in that number) will "pass" on reading the book - because, honestly - do I feel any better at the end of it than I did at the beginning? Do I understand the problems better? Do I have a sense of hope? No.
Some would say that Hooper, being white, could never begin to represent blackfellas point of view properly.
You're damned if you're white - you're damned if you're black.
I choose to be white damned.
Or do I? Do we have a choice?
Here is an example of Hooper's thoughts:
"Do the things that draw a missionary to savage places also attract a cop? Does the cop get the same rush from lawlessness that missionaries get from the Godless? Wild places prove who you are, slough off every comfort of a nice house on a nice strett with a nice God-fearing family. Maybe some cops use the blue inform the way the missionary does the crucifix."
So are police the new missionaries? I don't know many cops. Do they do it from a sense of social justice? Why do they valiantly leap into territory the rest of us would fear to tread? Because what would happen if no-one picked up the chalice perhaps???
Here's another thought Chloe quotes from Orwell :
" When a white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy... For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives", and so in very crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to it."
I don't believe that Hurley was a tyrant but perhaps he was wearing a mask i.e we're not all perfect but you have to be perfect if you're a policeman.
Hooper believes that the "war between police and Indigenous Australians is a false battleground".
I'm not quite sure what she means by this and would like to explore these thoughts further.
Does she mean that the real battleground is the family? Alcohol abuse?
It is such a complex problem.
I certainly don't have the answers but I know I don't like what I see and I am ashamed that we haven't found a solution to these problems yet.
This book doesn't give any answers - but it doesn't let me forget. Perhaps that's the best we can do in some circumstances - bear witness.
We stopped reading fairly often to reflect on how the book illuminated or was illuminated by our own experiences, connections to Paula Shaw's recently pubished [Sev en Seasons in Aurukun], , the fabulous 'You can't handle the truth!' speech by the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men. We noticed the preponderance of Catholics in the story. We ruminated on the validity or otherwise of the north-south divide (northerners dealing with harsh realities, southerners sitting comfortably in judgement) as a way of understanding the world. Terrible subject, terrific book.
In trying to better understand the indigenous peoples, Hooper examines their mythologies & history as well as issues of race relations beginning with the first white settlers there. She interacts with members of the community on Palm Island, and also, in an attempt to better understand Chris Hurley (who never would agree to an interview with her), she travels to other places where he worked with indigenous peoples to get their stories. Hurley, it seemed, was well liked by these people, considering that he was a white man -- he was active in the local community, developing programs and overseeing their welfare in many cases, and was the only policeman that even the most vocal activist for Aboriginal peoples' rights would let into his home. So what happened? Hooper rightly wonders if Hurley is doing a Colonel Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) here -- in staving off "savagery," does he become a "savage" himself? At the same time, Hooper does understand that the police are often fighting an uphill battle, not only on Palm Island, but in other indigenous settlements against alcoholism, beatings, sex crimes, and other crimes.
Tall Man is a phenomenal book, very well written. It's not just cold, standoffish journalism, but a more personal story of two worlds, both of which she works hard to make the reader aware. Ultimately, the reader has to make up his or her mind as to what really happened, but you will not be able to stop reading once you start.
I can very highly recommend this book, especially to people who are interested in Australian indigenous peoples and their myths and history. It's also a very excellent look at the sad and tragic history of race relations between the indigenous people who've lived there for thousands of years and the white people who came after. Excellent book.
I felt wrung out after finishing this book, but I am very glad I read it.
Whilst I'm very very glad I finally did, reading THE TALL MAN was not a pleasant, easy or necessarily an ultimately satisfying task. Not, I hasten to add because of the standard of the writing, but because there's is no resolution to the mess that is Palm Island and the death of Cameron Doomadgee in particular, and white-Australia's relationship with the Indigenous People in general.
But then there are some very unpleasant, unbelievable and just flat out unsatisfactory and unacceptable aspects to the story of Palm Island and death of Doomadgee. (For some reason I still can't seem to get out of my head the fact that when Australia did the last census report - 2006 - Palm Island was "forgotten". How the hell do you "forget" an entire community? Just to add insult to injury it's a community that many many indigenous people were forcibly moved to.... it beggars belief).
There are aspects to the way that this community was setup, works and lives which are confrontational, and there are aspects to the death of Doomadgee and to the subsequent investigation, inquest and trials which just don't do a lot to give you much faith in justice, or even in the truth being paramount. THE TALL MAN delivers this story in a matter-of-fact, restrained, observant and respectful manner. There's no sensationalisation of the events, it's up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.
It's a book that had to be written, and it really is a book that should be read.
45 minutes later Cameron Doomadgee is dead, his liver cleaved in two as
Before I had gone far, I knew what the outcome was going to be. Be it Australia, The United States, Africa or Europe, the problem is the same. Book needs to be read. But more importantly,