lip lit: chloe hooper – the tall man

There are a great number of novels in existence that dramatically change you as you read them. Even so, they are hard to find amongst the gargantuan pile of mediocre, self-important and dismally crafted literature that sits stagnant on bookshelves everywhere. Then, if one of these treasures is discovered its praises are usually sung with such vigour and enthusiasm that an injustice is done to the work; the propaganda shines too brightly and detracts for the actual majesty of the novel and its content.

In saying this, I wish to note (a little smugly) that Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man is indescribably brilliant and is possibly one of the greatest non-fiction novels ever written. EVER.

Now, I should probably explain why this is the case (and it is the case).

In this novel, Hooper describes the events surrounding the death of an Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, while in the custody of the Palm Island Police Department in 2004. The author also offers extensive details of the social and cultural pain, which followed the consequential trial of blamed Senior Sergeant, Chris Hurley. This story is tragic to say the least and Doomadgee’s death acts as a point of central gravity in which countless other similarly devastating anthologies orbit.

And thus, the brilliance and importance held within the pages of The Tall Man: it is not simply the story of Doomadgee, nor purely that of his family and community. Rather, it is a narrative of an entire physical and spiritual culture of oppression, sorrow and lamentation, which often escapes the attention of the mainstream.

As a white middle-class Australian myself, I have been guilty of shying away from depictions of the Aboriginal people’s plight in the past. I chose to be an arsehole rather than inform myself on the subject. I kept the history – our history – at arms length. For this, I am genuinely regretful and sorry. Thankfully, this novel changed my perspective entirely.

As we follow Hooper through the North, into the Doomadgee region and Burketown, an ill-omened insight is given into horrors eerily close to the back door of white Australia; things we should be aware of and care about but somehow do not. Hooper engages the reader on a humanistic level, drawing us in with poetic and oddly ominous observations:

‘Travelling to Palm Island is like a sequence from a dream: the pale green sea seems so luminous and so fecund, and the plane flies so close to it, you see seals, and what might be dugongs and giant turtles. As the plane turns to land the island unfolds. The mountains meet the palm-lined shore, which meets the coral reef. But step from the plane into the hot, still day and you notice something is not right. The besser-block air shelter is decorated with a collection of fourth-graders’ projects on safe and unsafe behaviour: ‘I feel safe when I’m not being hunted’, one project reads.’

While descriptive and enthralling, Hooper’s prose seems written with a steady and restrained hand. The details of Doomadgee’s death are unpleasant and the conditions on Palm Island shocking, yet Hooper holds back gruesome specifics, alluding to horrors rather than revealing them completely. The tone of the novel is neutral and the stark facts of this story are woven through the text in a brilliantly subtle way. This creates a space for empathy—toward the Doomadgee family and the Palm Island community—as we never feel overwhelmed by images that could so easily be off-putting and emotionally draining.

Reading this novel, one becomes entranced; you begin to feel pain with the people contained in its pages rather than for them. It is only after this has occurred that Hooper allows the wider picture (the stolen generation, poverty, racial injustice and segregation) to crystalise. She avoids what too often arises in the retelling of indigenous history- the reader does not feel directly guilty nor do they themselves feel blamed. Instead, one simply feels stunned and even fused with the hard edges of this story without any resistance.

Admittedly, aspects of the novel do shock and cause considerable anguish. The reader is confounded by stories relating to the larger Palm Island community; of people deaf from ‘untreated ear infections’ and woman who had not ‘until adulthood tasted milk that hadn’t been watered down’. Despite Hooper’s gentle hand, the statistics and historical information included in the novel (Between one-in-three, and one-in-ten Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families before the seventies. Individuals of Aboriginal descent were not granted citizenship until 1967) remain undiluted.

However, this startling material is not offered through offensive imagery or with unreserved brutality. There is a superb balance in the book between total disclosure and careful control with which Hooper affects the reader without being rough or provoking. Instead, one feels acutely absorbed, slightly distressed and perhaps even morbidly fascinated.

Before becoming Hooper’s second novel, The Tall Man existed as a series of magazine articles. Perhaps this explains the novel’s measured, cognisant and reasonable temperature. There is not a single page that does not reveal deep sadness, hold breathtakingly constructed prose, or genuinely inform and despite the prospectively dry subject matter, this novel transports the reader to a place where ‘history is so omnipresent, it seems to run parallel to daily life’. One can almost feel the dry heat of the far north radiating from the text, almost smell the plumes of petrol and booze and hear the Doomadgee family’ sun dignified cries of mourning. The reader cannot help feeling a passionate involvement with the case; the lump that rises in one’s throat is involuntary, as is the bitter taste of injustice.

There are a great number of novels in existence that cause physical responses and emotional shifts that resonate through the rest of your life. Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man is undeniably one of them and all Australians bare a responsibility to read it.

By Jessica-Kate Owen

(Image credit: 1)