27. The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
I read this book in one sitting. Six hours or so without a break.
This is the Penguin description of the book: The Tall Man is the story of Palm Island, the tropical paradise where one morning Cameron Doomadgee swore at a policeman and forty minutes later lay dead in a watch-house cell. It is the story of that policeman, the tall, enigmatic Christopher Hurley who chose to work in some of the toughest and wildest places in Australia, and of the struggle to bring him to trial.
A few years back I spent two months visiting Johannesburg, with my soon to be South African husband. It was my first trip there, my first time in Africa. We stayed on a farm that lay beyond a township called Diepsloot. Most days we would take the car and drive into the centre of town. We would travel past long stretches of ramshackle housing and poverty into shiny Sandton. I found it difficult to process, one short car trip yet such prosperity and deprivation co-existing side-by-side. I used to think that Australia lacked those extremes, that somehow everything was even. Neater somehow. And The Tall Man brings home for me, yet again, how Australia isn’t like that at all. It’s just that the dysfunction that plagues indigenous communities in Queensland isn’t one short car trip away. It’s takes hours to drive that distance. A divided South and North. Out of sight out of mind.
Chloe Hooper’s investigates the circumstances surrounding the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004. SMH says this about the novel’s themes, The Tall Man explores…the uneasy relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, the legacy of our cruel history, the poverty and problems that beset many remote Aboriginal communities, the unequal application of justice — but at its heart is a compelling human story in which hasty passion and terrible chance propelled one man to defend his character and his profession and the other to a painful, untimely death.
The Tall Man makes for a compulsive, thought-provoking and intense read.
