Who let the dogs out?
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Melissa Lucashenko
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Melissa Lucashenko's biography and other articles by this writer
Willy is a young Palm Island boy, full of life and with more than a fair serve of natural chutzpah. His grandmother, Aunty M, whose house I'm camped in, tells me he's good at maths as well as footy. Willy wants to play for the Cowboys when he grows up, and for most of my stay on his island is glued to the PlayStation, selecting teams, taking passes, tackling. His triumphant yell comes every 10 minutes, "And he's through!" (In Willy's Bwlkman accent, "through" comes out as a cross between "sroo" and "truu".)
I quiz him. Adult attention is a gift at the age of 10, even in the guise of interrogation.
"You wanna be rich when you grow up Willy? Or you wanna be poor?"
"Poor ... no! Rich."
"You wanna be rich, you go to university, eh?"
"I'm gonna play for Cowboys."
"Oh, OK. You do that. But you wanna be rich, you go to university."
Understand, please, that by "rich" I don't mean rich rich. I am merely asking if Willy wants to own a decent car, become somebody with a job; a man living in the same house from one season to the next. (A house, perhaps, that has an actual lounge for sitting on, rather than beds banked up in the lounge room to accommodate myriad homeless relations.) Blackfella rich. And I doubt very much that Willy knows, at 10 years old, what a university is.
Willy's grandmother notices this small exchange of ours. The next day she nods towards her grandson, who is again on the PlayStation, dodging down the wing with an opponent in hot pursuit, not yet through.
"You should take Willy with you when you go. Put him in school down south."
I smile, unsure how to respond. Is it child removal if the family wants it? And what about my own mildly disabled son? Could either of them cope with the other? Could I?
"What you reckon, Willy? Wanna come down south and go to school?"
"Nah, I wanna play football." Futboll.
"Do both."
Sometime between the monumental task of finding someone with petrol to take me to the airport and retrieving my mobile phone from an errant teenager, the half-idea fades away. My friend and I fly back to Townsville, and the next day I'm home again in northern NSW.
THREE AND A HALF THOUSAND PEOPLE LIVE ON GREATER PALM ISLAND, off Townsville, the vast majority Aboriginal. Once the island was the sole preserve of its traditional owners, a clan of the Wulkurakaba. Now, as a result of the Queensland Government policies of containment and removal since 1918, 48 different tribes have descendants on the island. After seven generations of forced imports from elsewhere across Queensland, a tenuous pan-island identity has formed. These Palm Islanders call themselves "Bwlkman". Teachers and the few other professionals on the island are mainly whites – but I saw no whites, other than police, during my stay. The Bwlkman are the road workers, the single parents, the council staff, the school students, the unemployed and one or two business owners.
The Bwlkman and the whites live together on an island of great natural beauty, where dense eucalypt forests dotted with pandanus and mangoes grow down steep rocky slopes to meet the tourist-brochure sea. I recall a North Queensland Murri woman telling me years ago that Palm was under threat from developers, that it was a most beautiful tropical island, "paradise". At the time, I ignorantly put this claim down to small-town pride, but I was wrong. After all, less than a kilometre from Greater Palm sits its geographic sister, Orpheus Island, an international tourist resort, where you can pay, at minimum, $1100 for a single room per night. Where: "To find yourself, you must first of all lose yourself. And if you must lose yourself, what better place than amidst the world's greatest natural wonder – the Great Barrier Reef. This is Orpheus.A coral fringed island resort within its own national park. An exclusive, sophisticated hideaway for those seeking intimate experiences in a natural, relaxed retreat." The Orpheus website urges the cashed-up visitor not to miss its "fly for free offer". All meals included. You don't say.
So I was wrong. Palm is indeed physically stunning in the way that Port Douglas and Vanuatu and Fiji are. As the seven-seater plane descends to the tiny airstrip at Butler Bay, only a single trashed house alerts the outsider that there is anything much amiss on Palm. The Besser-block terminal is clean and decorated with children's bright posters telling the public what makes them "feel safe" and "feel unsafe". Even the graffiti on the Ladies' and Men's toilet signs – "Sluts" and "Cats" respectively – seems more a teenage boast than a serious social affront.
As we drive the 10 minutes around to the main settlement, my mouth falls open at the sheer loveliness of the landscape.
There are some dead cars littering the yards, true, and some mangy dogs ("pink panthers") that might well wish themselves dead, but this is the case in many small Australian settlements, and throughout most of the Pacific for that matter. Squint hard while you gaze upon Palm Island and you could easily think yourself in Suva, Nuku'alofa or Vava'u: in a pretty, sleepy, poverty-stricken place of dark people, coconut trees and not enough jobs to go around. Fail to squint, though, and you might notice another story going on, one of racist exclusion, huge levels of interpersonal violence and the recent death in police custody of an innocuous, well-liked local man.
ALTHOUGH THIS IS NOT AN ESSAY ABOUT THE DEATH OF MULRUNJI DOOMADGEE, it is still important to note the facts of his story. Doomadgee was 36 when he died in November 2004. In death, he joins the more than 130 Aborigines who have died in custody since the 1988 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (www.hreoc.gov.au).
On the day of his death, Doomadgee had been working. He set out early, as he regularly did, and went fishing for mudcrabs, which he then sold for tobacco and beer money. In one of many small sour ironies surrounding his death, Doomadgee had his own small business, an evolvement touted, perhaps accurately, as the coming salvation of our indigenous economy.
When the police drove past him, Doomadgee was sitting alone drinking by the roadside, singing Who Let the Dogs Out. It is easy to imagine what happened next though, of course, we will never be entirely sure. It is certainly easy to imagine how the police might have got their backs up, "dogs" being Bwlkman-speak for "cops", and it is certainly a fact, not imagination, that Doomadgee was arrested as a public nuisance. He had been drinking steadily for some time, and his blood alcohol read .29 – almost six times the legal driving limit. (In a clear recognition that watchhouses are extremely dangerous places for Aborigines, the royal commission had strongly recommended that police custody be used only as a last resort for those accused of public drunkenness. But there is no diversionary facility for drunks on Palm Island, the largest remote Aboriginal community in Australia.)
When Doomadgee's partner went to the police station that afternoon to check on him and take him some food, she was told to return the next day. "They [police] wouldn't look at us, they looked past us, over our heads," Tracy Twaddle recalled. "I knew something was wrong because he didn't answer when we called out, outside the cell."
When the family did return, Doomadgee was dead. Four of his ribs were broken, one fatally puncturing his liver. "He must have died in agony," said family spokesman Brad Foster. Foster later argued that, as an ex-footballer, he had seen many injuries happen through on-field collisions of big heavy men, and that he had never seen any damage nearly as serious as Doomadgee sustained allegedly from a fall on concrete after "a scuffle".
A coronial investigation began shortly after the death, with the involvement of the Criminal Misconduct Commission. One week later, on November 26, the chair of the Palm Island council, Erykah Kyle, was forced to announce to an angry crowd of about 200 people gathered outside the council offices that Doomadgee's death had been ruled an accident. He had "fallen on concrete" while in police custody. His four broken ribs and punctured liver might have been related, somehow, to a car accident he had been in several days before his arrest. The police on Palm were seemingly so divorced from the residents that the crowd's incandescent anger over this ruling took them by surprise. Public order evaporated.
The police fled, some of them shirtless and in bare feet, as stones flew. One black man chucked a petrol bomb that burnt the police station and police residence to the ground. Extra police were radioed for from Townsville. Knowing this, some Bwlkman drove to the airstrip and blockaded it with their cars, forcing the plane load of reinforcements to return to the mainland. Not that the Australian state would be denied – six helicopters were sent instead, complete with white cops in riot gear. Palm Island briefly became an Arnie movie. Nineteen rioters were arrested. White teachers and health workers fled on the first available plane out and black residents locked themselves inside their homes as police began a program of raiding black houses "looking for drugs". Invariably, they found nothing, but left in their wake terrified kids and seething locals.
Bwlkman were furious about the arrests, the police raids and the sudden intrusion into their lives, as well as about Doomadgee's death. Bradley Foster, the Doomadgee family spokesman, told how, a month after the death in custody, police intimidation was continuing on the island: "On December 31 my younger brother was sitting at home here. Three car loads of coppers rocked up in full-body riot gear with masks on, with two plain-clothes police. They smashed the front and back doors and walked straight into the house. There were six kids asleep in the lounge room who were disturbed by what happened ... That kind of behaviour hasn't stopped yet ... There are 30 or 40 coppers on the island and it makes you wonder what they're still doing here."
AUNTIE M, SPEAKING MID-JANUARY: "I'M SCARED TO GO OUTSIDE, YOU KNOW. The police are all here, dressed up in thick clothes like they need in some foreign country. Why are they here? We don't have guns or anything. We don't want them here – we're not like that. Bin Laden not here. I'm scared of them ...They drive round slow, you know, round the streets. ("Cruising" offers someone else at the dining table.) Yes, that's it – cruising ... they come past my house. ‘Good morning, Mrs Foster'. I say good morning. How they know my name? I never told them my name ... and they say the police put guns to young X's head ... little kid ...Willy there. I asked Willy, ‘What was he doing when they did that?', and he said he was just playing football."
I am reluctant to ask too many intrusive questions about such an upsetting incident. In the end, I'm not sure whether it was 10-year-old Willy himself, or another kid his size. It hardly matters – Willy, and his peers, and indeed every Palm Islander, must have known that same day that the incident had occurred. Such events take on a life of their own and in the retelling quickly become legendary.
Bin Laden is not on Palm Island and is probably not yet to be found in the ranks of Aborigines in mainland Australia, either. But one clear result of the Doomadgee death can be seen at the airport terminal, in the children's posters portraying their lives. On two of the posters, lists of "things that make me feel safe" had once, surprisingly, included police. Someone – perhaps Shania or Tanealle in grade three, but I think more likely not – has scratched out "police", replacing the word with a fat public smear of Aboriginal dissent.