A week ago I found myself in Northcote Library for 15 minutes waiting for Kim and not having any need to borrow anything I just aimlessly walked through the aisles in case any non-fiction caught my eye. I found “The Tall Man” laying flat on a shelf in a plastic bag with a sticker on the front which said “Take Me, I’m Free!” -and I did, though it required some explanation to the Librarian on the counter. Bookcrossing.com is a site which wants to “make the whole world a library” and started encouraging people to release books into the wild in 2001. I’m pretty sure Sian and Michael used this 2-3 years ago and it’s still bubbling along. It feels a little hollow when you’re the first recipient in line and you have suspicions that the librarian who engineered it didn’t even have the imagination to release it somewhere other than their workplace. Kim and I had both talked about buying this exact book only the day before but hadn’t because it was an expensive hardback.
The book describes an event in 2004 on Palm Island, a disfunctional aboriginal community in northern Queensland. A man was found dead in a police cell with internal injuries which suggested foulplay by the Senior Sergeant who had arrested him. As reducing the disproportionate number of aboriginal “deaths in custody” had been the focus of governments in recent years, this case received a lot of interest.
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The first few chapters describe a barbaric, alien society that was abhorrent to a sheltered city person like me. I would not last a week in any place that wife bashing, animal torture and payback crimes are a daily routine. It was awful to read about. The events around the death of Cameron Doomadgee were described in the first third of the book and the remainder was mostly about the court cases in which the same details were repeated again and again. It was wonderfully written, but by about 3/4 way I started wondering when the court room detail was going to end. Although Chloe Hooper did a fine job in not betraying her leanings, I felt the rapid windup of the book (within a page of the court case being over) was spiteful and in poor form, betraying all her earlier well-considered work, which Kim mentioned to me had been compared with Helen Garner. Apart from this, many similarities to Joe Cinque’s Consolation are there.
This book has been widely aclaimed and Hooper does a wonderful job in casting aside presumptions and trying to wring every last ounce of meaning from a collection of damaged or compromised people and some limited closed-rank testimony, without cooperation from the side of the Police. Like so many of the driven personalities involved in the case, her exhaustion after 3 years in the pursuit of justice and procedural change is palpable. There is a huge amount of passion in this work and more for that than for an engaging read (should have been 50 pages shorter) I give it 4.5 stars.