The pale green sea was so luminous and the plane was flying so close I could almost see the life in it - dugongs, giant turtles, whales. All around the Great Barrier Reef were moored small pristine islands. Then on the horizon, like a dark green wave, came Palm Island, home to one of Australia's largest aboriginal communities. Two and a half months earlier, on Nov. 19, 2004, a Palm Islander named Cameron Doomadgee had been arrested for drunkenly swearing at the island's white officer-in-charge, Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley. Forty minutes later, Doomadgee lay dead on a jail cell floor with a black eye, four broken ribs; his liver nearly severed in two. Senior Sergeant Hurley claimed his prisoner had tripped and fallen on a step. Two policemen from the mainland, close friends of Hurley, were sent to investigate. A week later, suspecting a whitewash, a mob burned down the police station and Hurley's residence.
I had agreed to write an article on the case, but almost immediately I realized that rectifying my own ignorance about aboriginal Australia would fill a book. Arriving on Palm Island was like coming upon a different country, an impoverished place of alcoholism, violence and early death. On the street where Doomadgee was arrested, every second house had broken windows, graffiti, small children playing around beer cans. I heard stories so casually told of stabbings and beatings between siblings, between lovers.
The people who told me these stories were descended from the survivors of "Wild Time," a period of frontier violence. And on Palm Island, history is omnipresent; the past seems to run almost in tandem with daily life. Settled in 1918, it was to be a kind of open-air jail for those Aborigines who had proved troublesome on the Australian mainland's regular reserves. Men and women were sent here - often in leg irons - for such misdemeanours as speaking their traditional languages or asking about wages. Cameron Doomadgee's family was detained on the island after his stepfather punched a missionary who had flogged his uncle to near death.
On my first day, I met Elizabeth Doomadgee, Cameron's elder sister, a devout, stately woman in her early 40s who was controlling - just - a steady rage. Elizabeth told me that other Palm Islanders had returned from the senior sergeant's custody with bruises. She said she had been praying for justice, for the truth to come out. Standing close to a fire, she had thought: "This is what hell must be like. This is what whoever killed Cameron will feel. Where they'll go. Just imagine how dry it will be. You'll want to drink and drink and drink."
Initially, Senior Sergeant Hurley seemed to me to be a cartoon "Deep North" copper, but he soon became a paradox. As a young officer, he had been posted to Thursday Island in Torres Strait, where, according to an aboriginal friend, Hurley realized he was a racist and decided to change his ways. On Thursday Island, he set up a sports club for local kids. He then continued working in a string of remote indigenous communities, along the way doing more volunteer work. Ironically, Hurley appeared to be a poster boy for racial harmony, once telling a reporter: "Reconciliation is ... going to take a lot of effort by all Australians. At the end of the day there are more similarities than differences between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Australians."
So, I wondered, how had a young idealistic cop transformed from his brother's keeper into his brother's killer? That was one question. And the other was: Why would a young police officer choose to work year-in, year-out in these devastated fringe communities of the Far North?
On Palm Island, I heard one old story that the Hurley case echoed in some uncanny way. In 1930, the island's superintendent, Robert Curry, became psychotic and, suspecting the other white staff were conspiring to have him fired, tried to kill them all. Curry, a Kurtz-like figure known to the Palm Islanders as "Boss" or "Uncle Boss," was a former army man, a veteran of the Great War who oversaw the settlement of the island throughout the 1920s. He introduced garden competitions, European dancing - so as to discourage traditional ceremonial dances - and a jazz band; those who failed to attend band practise could find themselves in jail. As one of the island's officials later noted, "Mr. Curry practically regarded this settlement as a child of his brain."
One night, Curry donned a long red bathing suit and a bullet belt and, with a gun in each hand, went on a rampage. First, he dynamited his own house with his drugged children inside, then he went out to shoot his enemies and burn down the settlement buildings: to kill the child of his brain. As the buildings burned, white staff gave a gun to a young aboriginal man, Peter Prior, and deputized him to shoot Curry. And then they hid.
Curry was perhaps as much a victim of the fetid, repressive atmosphere on Palm Island - an atmosphere he had helped to create - as anyone. And to a degree, so was Hurley. Police are often attracted to remote communities because it is the fastest way up the career ladder. But I began to wonder if you could step into such dysfunction and desperation and not be corrupted in some way? In a community of extreme violence, are you, too, forced to be violent? If you are despised - as the police on Palm Island are - might you not feel the need to be despicable?
It is striking to contrast the way the authorities of the day dealt with these two cases. Despite a coroner's September, 2006, finding that Hurley had lost his temper and fatally assaulted Doomadgee, he initially faced no charges. On the other hand, Peter Prior, who had been deputized to shoot the raging white superintendent, was charged with murder and locked up for six months. At trial, he was found not guilty, but a journalist told me that he interviewed a very elderly Prior and the Palm Islander started crying because he was scared to die: God said, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," and he had.
After two and a half years of legal wrangling, of front-page headlines and public outrage, Senior Sergeant Hurley was finally charged with manslaughter - making him the first Australian police officer charged over a death in custody. In court during June, 2007, Hurley's lawyers admitted that he was physically responsible for Cameron Doomadgee's death but claimed that the fatal injuries had been accidentally administered.
Hurley in the witness box - and in his police interviews - never gave a sign of regret or remorse. In fact, his supporters claimed, he was the victim in all this. Two metres tall (6 feet 7 inches), with stony features and hair parted down the centre, he looked like a man, if not from the First World War generation like Curry, then from the Second. He cut a figure from an era before black voting rights, before land rights, before reconciliation.
The day of the verdict, Elizabeth Doomadgee did not come to court. She had predicted the result. The all-white jury acquitted Hurley: although to many of us who watched the case, the verdict felt less like he was found "not guilty" and more like he was forgiven - and in forgiving him, people could forgive themselves.
Chloe Hooper is the author of Tall Man, reviewed above, and of a novel, A Child's Book of True Crime. She lives in Melbourne.