15 years on from the Palm Island Death in Custody

A PERSONAL REFLECTION BY megan woodward, queensland-BASED MEDIA STRINGER

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander READERS are warned that the following story references deceased persons.

This story has been published with the permission of Doomadgee family representatives

15 years ago, today I was sent to Palm Island, a small Aboriginal community off the coast of Townsville in north Queensland. Once listed as the most violent place outside a war zone by the Guinness Book of Records, it is a location that most Queenslander’s have an opinion about, but few have visited to get their own firsthand account of.

On the 19th of November 2004, I was a little under 5 weeks out from my 21st birthday and was working as a cadet radio journalist.

I’d been told all sorts of things about Palm Island, but I was incredibly excited to be offered the chance to jump on a three-seater plane and make a day trip to this tiny dot of land surrounded by the Great Barrier Reef.

The story I was following was a lovely one. I was to interview a young Aboriginal woman who was doing an apprenticeship on the island that would place her as the first female butcher from Palm. It was a feel-good story in a bad news world, destined to become a short current affairs piece for an afternoon radio program. 

After getting a lift in to town from the tiny coastal airstrip, I found the young future butcher and we yarned not far from the town jetty. Then she had a friend from the Council drive me back to the airstrip.

I was there for all of four hours tops, and while I can’t say the way of life on Palm didn’t confront and overwhelm me the first time I saw it, I didn’t have a bad thing to say about anyone I met on that brief, first visit. 

An elderly man was at the airstrip as I waited to return to the mainland. He looked at me and said, “There’s a funny feeling in the air today miss.”

What he felt, but neither of us could know, was a local Aboriginal man by the name of Cameron Doomadgee had died in a police cell that morning. Dead. In a police cell.

By the time I was back in the newsroom the following morning, ready to put together the piece on the female apprentice butcher, police had issued a statement saying a man had died in the Palm Island watch house. Investigations were pending. Needless to say, no fluffy program piece was put together that day. Unfortunately, the story on the young butcher never made it to air. To this day, ‘Good news’ and ‘Palm Island’ is still a struggle for mainstream media to connect together at times.

Cameron Doomadgee was 36 years old. He was a father. A husband. A friend. Through the many court proceedings and coronial inquests that followed his death, I learnt that he was also well-loved and highly regarded within the community. He was described by most as a happy go-lucky-man who was an incredibly skilled hunter.

On the morning of the 19th of November 2004, Cameron Doomadgee was arrested by Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley.

Court evidence tells us that Mr Doomadgee was causing a public nuisance. He was drunk and saying things like ʻwhy are you locking up your own peopleʼ to Police Liaison Officer Lloyd Bengaroo. Sergeant Hurley and his prisoner had what was described in court as a “scuffle” at the back of the police van when they arrived at the police station. They tripped up a small stair. Hurley fell on Doomadgee.

 An hour after being arrested – around 20 minutes after that trip up the stair – Cameron Doomadgee was dead at 36 years of age.

At the inquest into his death the watch house CCTV video from the cell was played. I watched him die. That video footage is as clear in my mind today as it was the day I watched it play out in a packed Townsville court room. It’s always made me uncomfortable that I was allowed to witness a man die. It felt so intrusive and unfair, that someone like me – with no personal connection to this man – could watch his final, painful, horrible moments on Earth, sitting alongside his wife and sisters.

One week after he died, on the 26th of November 2004, the initial autopsy results were read out by the local Palm Island Mayor to the community. Much has been made of whether it should have been publicly shared in the way it was. But that piece of paper told the truth, and before that, no-one knew how or why the man they now called Mulrunji was dead.

Other than a small bruise, there were no external obvious injuries to Mulrunji. But the autopsy report stated that his his liver had been cleaved in two. His spleen was ruptured. Ribs broken. A medical witness at the inquest months later testified that his insides resembled the victim of a high-speed crash.

The information about the level of internal injury was like lightning to a drought-stricken paddock that hadn’t seen rain in a decade.

Islanders rioted. Raw emotion. Fierce anger. Intense grief.

The police station was burnt down. The airspace was closed.

The Queensland Government declared a state of emergency and flew in dozens of members from the police riot squad.

The riot squad raids and arrests have recently been at the centre of a record $30 million class action settlement to the community of Palm Island, described by the Federal Court as a ‘racist police response’.

The focus of this death in custody has always landed on the riot and the court cases that dragged on for more than a decade. A lot of people have an opinion now on Palm Island – based on one horrible event that’s impacts the community to this day.

But as I do on the 19th of November every year, this year I won’t spend time thinking about the riots.

Today I am thinking of a man who died on one of the prettiest places in the world under the most horrific circumstances.

Today I think about the dead man’s son, who carried a cross bearing his father’s name through the unsealed roads of Palm Island on the day of the funeral, who later took his own life.

I think of Mr Doomadgee’s cell mate, Patrick Bramwell, who watched and heard everything in that cell on November 19, 2004. Mr Bramwell, who hung himself over three years after his friend’s death.

 I think of his sister, Elizabeth, who remains one of the staunchest advocates for her community.

 I think of the responsibility of law makers and law enforcers working in remote, rural and regional communities throughout Australia.

 And I think of the arresting officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. The man who sat in the witness box in 2007 and told the courtroom I was sitting in that he had come to terms with the fact he caused the death of Cameron Doomadgee. But that he had no intention to cause harm to him. The man who was acquitted by an all-white jury of the manslaughter and assault charges.

This event swallowed my life for nearly a decade and has left an indelible mark on my personal and professional life since. Lived it, breathed, felt it. Made friends, made enemies, made me who I am today. Good has come from that day. But I’m not sure I’ll ever figure out how to stop stinging, hot, angry tears prick the corner of my eyes whenever I think of the yarn.

It’s hard not feel some weird personal synergy on the 15th anniversary of the death in custody.

Today, 15 years on, I’m a little under 5 weeks out from my 36th birthday.

15 years ago, today, Cameron Doomadgee and Chris Hurley were both 36.

As a 21-year-old just starting my career in the media, 36 felt old, established. Adult. I realise now with such searing clarity, at 36 their lives were just beginning. Life at 36 is just getting to the good bits – creating, planning, growing, building, learning – living.

Today Chris Hurley is 51. Today Cameron Doomadgee is dead.