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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding Work, But Not Easy Going, June 25, 2009
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"Tall Man," by Chloe Hooper, is a rare bird, indeed, a non-fiction work of passion and power. It is set in Palm Island; an aboriginal settlement in the "Deep North" of Australia, and concerns the death in police custody of the 36-year old Aboriginal Cameron Doomadgee, who was arrested by a white police officer, Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, for swearing in his direction; was taken to the police lockup, and was dead 40 minutes later. Doomadgee, who was drunk at the time, had apparently been beaten to death. Hurley, a charismatic and popular cop who had chosen to spend most of his career in the aboriginal precincts that his coworkers wouldn't voluntarily go near, was always the chief suspect. But Hurley was fiercely protected by his own; apparently the thin blue line is universal. He was never convicted of the Aboriginal's death.
Author Hooper is the author of a highly praised 2002 novel, ("A Child's Book of True Crime") that was named a "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize. Excerpts from her award-winning investigation of the Doomadgee case have appeared in "The Observer," and "The Guardian Weekly." She lives in Melbourne, Australia, and was asked to write about the Doomadgee case by the pro bono lawyer who represented his family; she spent three years on it, researching the brutal history of Australia's whites, and its native population. Generations of white policymakers did their best to break up Aboriginal families, deprive them of work, and isolate them. The results can be seen only too clearly in Palm Island, colonized by children taken from their families and thrown into dormitories. Hopelessness, anger, violence, drunkenness, drug use, and sadism seem to characterize the community; not very pretty, and she brings it all to the table. This book brings to mind a grim New Zealand movie of some years back, Once Were Warriors, in its depiction of that island's aboriginal community (known as Maori), and its seething rage, drunkenness and violence.
"Tall Man" is an outstanding piece of work, but is surely depressing reading. In addition,it's not easy keeping all those aboriginal family names straight; I wished for a chart that helped identify them. Furthermore, most Americans don't know much about Australia; the few pictures given in the book that might help us, are printed on the same paper stock as the text, and are therefore of very poor quality. Then you've got to wander to the last page of the Acknowledgments in back to find their captions. Moreover, while I'm discussing pictures, the author frequently describes the Aborigines' "dream paintings" to us, several times to do with "the tall man." But these dream pictures have been gathered for exhibits in museums and art galleries all over the world, and their catalogs are surely available. And a cousin of mine, Osa Brown, put together a collection of these pictures in book form for a New York museum. So, pictures of these dream paintings can be found, and I believe they should have been included in the book, to allow readers to see what the writer was describing to us. I know I seem to be asking for more/better pictures a lot recently, but this is one book that really cries out for a photo gallery.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Frontier Justice, June 5, 2009
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Chloe Hooper combines gripping narrative with harrowing reportage to convey an act of violence in a land of stunning brutality. When an Aboriginal man dies in custody on an island off Australia's Queensland coast, the event becomes national news after a pathologist renders a flippant report and the white police want to write off the event, so the locals riot. It has been a long time since a book has moved me as deeply as this book does.
On Friday, November 19, 2004, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, at the end of his second year in the Aboriginal settlement at Palm Island, arrested Cameron Doomadgee for cursing at him and another officer. Doomadgee was drunk at ten in the morning. Forty minutes later, Doomadgee was dead, with injuries consistent with a massive car crash. Hooper tries to reconstruct those forty minutes, and the legal wrangling that lasts for nearly three years afterward.
In Hooper's heartrending language, Palm Island mixes the worst aspects of an Indian reservation, a penal colony, and Hell. Though Hooper conducts her reportage with the help of Doomadgee's family, her frankness creates a world of moral compromise, stunning melding of honorable and shameful traits, and a people wracked with generations of pain and abjection. There is enough in this book to stun and appall anybody of any social or political point of view.
Sergeant Hurley comes across one moment as a sterling lawman who builds bridges between white government and poor black Aborigines, then as an evasive, angry bigot. Cameron Doomadgee is a loving father and leader, and at the same time a chronic drunk with a brutal temper. The trial to see who was responsible for what drags out an entire province's buried racism as well as its higher ideals. Australian frontier justice is swift, sure, and unforgiving.
The story unfolds in a way comprehensible to world audiences. Comparisons to the Wild West and the American Civil War make the story of a crime on the far side of the planet feel as close as my own history. But this very clarity is also what makes this book such an impactful read. I can imagine having a beer with Chris Hurley, or a friendly dust-up with Cameron Doomadgee; and I can imagine having to choose sides when one dies in the other's custody.
Hooper unflinchingly depicts the story's participants as they are, with the glory and pain intact. In reading this, I was struck by one question: how different is this from America? Looking at suffering urban blacks or reservation Indians, and the way people who look like me deny that anguish while crushing those who dare rise up, I have to confess, maybe not much. But does that make the present culpable for the crimes of the past? I can't say.
This is a very important book. People of good conscience and confident values should read it, regardless of their politics or background. It is packed with harrowing truths and hard-eyed views of the highs and lows of human nature, a story that is as moving as it is terrifying, as uplifting as it is appalling. I couldn't put it down. I don't ordinarily advocate in reviews, but I will make an exception here: drop everything else and read this book, right away.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Crime Reporting that Reads Like Literature, May 9, 2009
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Chloe Hooper brings the news from Australia, and the news is not good: some people there, it seems, are as eager to believe any sort of ill deed and call it justice so long as it doesn't upset their idea of the social order. And other people are just as willing to tilt, Quixote-like, at the windmills of justice, and walk away all the more noble for their futility.
I'm loathe to give too much away, because this is a nonfiction book that reads as briskly as a police procedural, and with the urgency of scripture. But suffice it to say that the reader will come to know the workings of Aboriginal Australia, of the police who serve and harm there, of the history that continually undercuts the people who live there. The reader will be reminded, more than once, of things North American: the Trail of Tears, the destruction of the Arawaks on Hispaniola, the tyranny of state-as-parent.
In the end, the reader (this reader, anyway), will come to believe that the comparisons of Hooper's work to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song are well-made. This is crime reporting that reads like literature, and I'm excited to know that there are more books by Chloe Hooper yet to read.
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