Palm Island, after 100 years of trauma, writes a new storyline

Born as a “coconut Alcatraz”, Palm Island has a traumatic history. Now its people are writing a new storyline.

TWAM 19 Sep 2015

They speak of a 100-year trauma here on Palm Island as though it were a living thing, an invisible spirit that builds upon itself and logjams in heart and head, a pain so real it keeps you busy, has you searching your whole life for better places to store it.

Put it in a can of beer. Put it in your fists. Put it in a prison diary. Put it in a dawn bush bash to the top of Mt Bentley. Put it in a class action against the state of Queensland. Put it in the coffin of your dad who died too young of heart disease. Put it in the earth. Put it in a play.

“Some part of your body has come in contact with Mulrunji’s abdomen so violently as to cleave his liver across his spine, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve missed it?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve just not noticed?”

“Yes.”

Sunset on Palm, a big soft orange gas ball ­falling from the sky over mainland Townsville, 65km over a turquoise sea filled with barracuda, red emperor, turtles and clams as big as footballs that make curries big enough to feed families of 40. Twenty-four hours to showtime.

“This man has an injury that is usually seen in head-on motor vehicle accidents and plane crashes … you have inflicted that injury, you say, accidentally, by falling upon this man?”

“Yes.”

“And you just missed it?”

“Yes.”

“You actually get up afterwards believing that you never contacted him at all?”

“Correct. But obviously some part of my person has touched some part of Mr Doomadgee.”

Two shirtless young boys ride a wild island horse bareback towards the island store. Three young men backflip in unison off the tall metal poles propping up the island jetty where the ferry from Townsville arrives and departs once a day. There was a time on this island when salivating American tabloid journalists would disembark on that jetty eager to explore “The Mission”, the wild-west town the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records deemed “the most violent place on Earth, outside a combat zone”.

A young island girl chalks a message on the town’s “Positive Message Board”: “When you are happy, life is happy”.

In the Bwgcolman Community School hall, Melbourne’s Ilbijerri Theatre Company runs through a tech rehearsal for Beautiful One Day, a “theatrical documentary” created by Palm Islanders from stories tracing a collective and morphing trauma that has existed here since 1918 when the Queensland Government established this tropical paradise as a reserve, “a coconut Alcatraz”, for Aborigines removed from the mainland for ­supposed infractions such as being “disruptive” or being born of mixed blood.

In 24 hours, the people of Palm Island will gather in this hall to watch a free “verbatim ­theatre” production tracing the story of how a dragged and dumped people from 40 different indigenous mainland language groups were forced to scrap and bleed and protest and work and fight their way toward a shared identity, the Bwgcolman, the “people from many tribes”.

Act Two, the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. Actress Jane Phegan speaks the verbatim court transcript words of a series of coroners, lawyers and investigators who questioned Senior ­Sergeant Chris Hurley over the 2004 death in custody of Mulrunji “Cameron” Doomadgee and the post-mortem report — cut above his right eye, bruising to head and jaw, four broken ribs, ruptured liver and portal vein — that sparked an island riot in which the local police station and Hurley’s home were burnt to the ground.

Actor Paul Dwyer speaks the verbatim ­transcript responses of Hurley, the officer charged with the assault and manslaughter of Doomadgee, later found not guilty. “I tried to lift him a couple of occasions. Like this, I’m going, ‘Get up Mr Doomadgee, get up’. I said, ‘Don’t start it again’, you know. Anyway, he was down there and, ah, he refused to get up.”

On stage, Jane Phegan catches eyes with a co-star, seated side of stage. It’s Kylie Doomadgee, Mulrunji’s niece. Jane weeps. This is not in the script. “Sorry,” she says, taking a moment. She wipes her eyes, returns to character.

“I’m looking directly at Kylie all through that scene,” she’ll explain later tonight in the car ride home from rehearsal. “You tune in to that for a moment and it hits you. You’re imagining the audience and you’re thinking about who’s gonna be in the audience tomorrow night. It’s all those people who are completely connected to these events. That’s when it gets to you and you think, ‘I can’t say these things out loud’.”

Kylie Doomadgee plays herself in the play. There’s no particular director. It has a hundred writers, every Palm Islander who lent their stories to it. Kylie added as much to the work as anyone, helped shape the piece with Ilbijerri artistic ­director Rachael Maza on the beach deck of Palm Island elder Aunty Maggie Blackley, the serene, motherly figure sitting beside Kylie.

“It breaks my heart to know that my uncle isn’t on Palm Island anymore,” Kylie says. “Because I liked being around him. I feel safe. I feel warm and at home, you know. And if he was still alive today, I’d be living underneath his roof.”

Rachael Maza steps outside the hall. A minute’s walk away is the hospital where her father, Bob, was born. “Just there,” she points. Her grandfather, Wagwun, one of the play’s inspirations, was removed from Palm in 1940 with his family for demanding award wages for workers. “All that history happened right here,” she says.

Inside, Rachael calls a post-rehearsal meeting on stage with her six-member cast. “Any notes?” she says. “Don’t forget your mics when you bow,” says stage manager Brock Brocklesby. The six members of the cast — Kylie, Rachael, Jane, Paul, Aunty Maggie and another born-and-bred Palm Islander, university medical student Harry Reuben — will remain on stage through the ­production, with performers falling in and out of stage lighting. But the audience will still see those out of light, explains Brock. “No picking your nose, no checking your earwax,” she says.

Kylie, a knockabout young mum and an ­acting natural with zero acting experience, laughs. “Faaarkin’ hell,” she chuckles. In June, she went to London to perform Beautiful One Day as part of the ­Origins Festival of First Nations. She worked hard on a posh Pommy accent. “Excuse me,” said a curious Londoner upon her arrival. “Are you an Aborigine?” With a voice straight out of the Oxford University library she replied with a skyward nose, “Yes I am you fine specimen.”

There’s talk of audience numbers. It’s a big weekend on Palm. The Bwgcolman Youth ­Festival has welcomed mainlanders to an island usually accessed by formal invitation only. The play is scheduled to coincide tomorrow night with a series of rap and reggae music acts in the Palm town sand quad. The play will also coincide with a highly anticipated North Queensland Cowboys rugby league match. The play is also a tough ask. Doomadgee’s death in custody is an unhealed wound for the 4000 residents of Palm. “I think we need some kind of warning before we begin that we are talking about some gritty and graphic stuff,” says Paul Dwyer.

Paul gives a rattling monologue through the play of life on Palm under the Aboriginals ­Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897: “No walking down Mango Avenue (that’s where the white people live). No sitting upstairs in the cinema (that’s where the white people sit). No cash economy on the island. No talking to young women during work time. No waving to your wife without permission. All natives returning from visits to the mainland must present to the hospital to be checked for venereal disease. No talking to a white person. No laughing or whistling after ­curfew. No traditional languages. No traditional ceremonies. No leaving the reserve without permission. Permission to visit the mainland. Permission to get married, to visit your girlfriend or boyfriend, your children in the dormitories. Permission to access wages or ­savings, to withdraw more than five pounds, to buy a sewing machine. Permission to go fishing.

“All punishments are public. Seven, 14, 21 days in prison, 5m x 4m cell, one small high window, meant for one prisoner, usually had four or five. Having your head shaved and being dressed in a hessian sack. Walking around with a rock on your head …”

The show is so powerful, in fact, that there were real concerns over staging it in the public open-air quad, with fears it would incite the kind of violent release seen in the 2004 riots. “Well, it doesn’t matter how many turn up,” says Aunty Maggie. “What matters is we’re here. We’re home.” She clears her throat. “Now, listen, Lexy Wotton wants to say something up on stage after the show. He’s got an announcement to make.”

Eyes light up. Heads turn. And the sun ­disappears into the sea.

This is Dee Street at dawn, where Mulrunji was picked up by police at 10.20am, November 19, 2004, carrying a bucket with a mud crab he was going to sell, a beer in his hand. This is the memorial of seven white rocks dedicated to the seven indigenous men who led the 1957 island worker’s strike demanding better wages, better meat, better housing. The strike leaders were removed at gunpoint, forcibly relocated along with their families. This is a painting of Lex ­Wotton in the town exhibition space, the image of a man made mythical by Palm Islanders in the wake of the 2004 riots.

This is Lex Wotton in the flesh, sitting at a table with his wife, Cecilia, beneath a sprawling tree, a stone’s throw from the police station that was burnt down by locals in 2004 after then-mayor Erykah Kyle relayed word from the State Coroner in the town square. “There was an accident somewhere around the cell,” Kyle said, shakily. “…There was a fall … compressive force on his body where four ribs were broken and that caused a rupture in his liver, and that caused, from that, a lot of bleeding.”

Shirtless, muscular, furious in red sunglasses, Lex took the microphone and addressed his ­people from many tribes. “That’s not an accident. That’s not an accident! Come on people. We all wanted this! We wanted to know! What, we accept this as an accident? I tell you people what I said, things gonna burn. I know. I’ve ­spoken to young people. We’ll decide when. I’m not gonna accept that. And I know a lot of people don’t. So let’s do something more than this.”

Lex shakes his head at the memory, neither impressed by his own actions nor ashamed. “The system developed me,” he says. “The ­government developed my profile, not me. But now I use that profile for the advantage of my people.” He served 20 months in prison for inciting the riot. “I don’t regret what happened. I put a spotlight on Palm Island. It made people take notice. I know there wasn’t much positive about Palm, and a lot of that was around myself, but what happened in Palm after 2004 has been a healing and an improvement. There’s a lot of guilt money being brought in to the island.” He looks to a new sea wall running across the waterfront. He looks to new school facilities, new community spaces.

Stalls are being set up in the town square for the youth festival. Locals have made wood-carved souvenirs and curry dishes to sell to guests. Mayor Alf Lacey waves at locals from his white four-wheel-drive, tells a group of kids to get along and help out at the ­festival. He’s building a new Palm Island. He wants to open up his people’s paradise. “Tourism,” he says. “We need to get people on the island. We got to create an economy here. Our local families are crying out for jobs. We need to bring people here to spend money here and have events like this that allow us to import visitors to spend locally.”

On the surface, Palm Island tourism seems obvious. It looks much the same as a famed neighbouring island, Orpheus, where Vivien Leigh and Elton John once stayed for their holidays. Break in the island’s wild horses and use them for trail rides up Mt Bentley in search of indigenous caves that locals say boast images from the earliest days of the island’s traditional Manbarra people to the passage of British fleets. Welcome international divers into the crystal waters in search of World War II Catalina flying boats wrecked offshore. A tourism mecca. But Mayor Lacey has some way to go. Tonight, well after many of the locals have enjoyed their six-mid-strength-beers bar limit at the pub, fights will spill into post-midnight streets, and a man will attack his partner brandishing a machete.

“We will soon celebrate 100 years of existence,” Lacey says. “We are the government’s product. For Queensland to happen, we had to be taken from our land. They’re all reaping the rewards of our grandparents being dumped here. It’s time we had that conversation. Where does Palm Island sit in the new Australia?”

In a dented red four-wheel-drive with no windscreen, diesel mechanic Ron Fogarty takes his pain 548m to the top of Mt Bentley. He drops the car into low gear and descends into a steep road cavity with a boulder in its centre that he skirts around by putting his car on an angle that almost rolls us. “Close one,” he laughs.

In 2013, Ron and his partner Astrid Bligh lost their nine-year-old son William; he died after a near-month-long fever that saw Astrid take him back and forth to medical facilities on Palm and the mainland. On February 23, William was transferred by medevac to Townsville Hospital. The following morning, Ron and Astrid were told he might have a staph infection; at 11.30am they were told he wouldn’t survive the day.

William’s death sparked calls for a review of Aboriginal and Islander health services. The ­coroner’s report said William had an “extensive infection” due to an undiagnosed melioidosis, an infectious disease that forensic pathologist Professor David Williams called “notoriously difficult to diagnose”. A Queensland Health review last year spotlighted a lack of training in tropical medicine on Palm, and a lack of formal guidelines for the referral and transfer of patients from Palm to Townsville; it found that proper processes were not followed by the rapid assessment team, with no notification given to the emergency department consultant about the severity of William’s condition.

“Just another little black child,” Ron says. He kills the engine. “I miss him so much,” he says, tears filling his eyes. He shakes his head, lights a smoke, drives up to the peak of Mt Bentley. He stands atop his welded car roof that concaves underfoot. Ron looks out across his majestic island home. Ron says if the boy only got nine years he’s glad he got nine years in paradise.

1pm dress rehearsal, six hours from showtime. A young local, Harry Reuben, is on stage delivering a thrilling monologue from the words of Peter Prior, who in 1930 was ordered by an overseer to catch and kill his white superintendent, Robert Curry, who had lost his mind, murdering his children, dynamiting his house, torching the school in an island rampage. “Peter Prior finds himself face to face with Curry. Curry raises his rifle, aims it at Peter, shoots but the gun misfires. Peter shoots back. Curry drops. Peter and the others help Curry to hospital but a few hours later he dies of his wounds. The police arrive and Peter Prior is arrested for murder. In court, the whites denied that Peter was acting under their orders. He was locked up for three months before he was finally acquitted.”

Harry’s been stumbling over his lines. He slaps his forehead when he fluffs a line, a medical student more accustomed to memorising body parts than stage beats. Harry wants to complete his studies and return to Palm with the skills to notice when a kid like William Bligh needs immediate attention. On his mind right now is the very recent death of his brother, John, from a heart-related illness. Cast members feared Harry wouldn’t be up to performing. “The thing that got me up here was honouring these sacred stories,” he says. “This community got me up here.”

In Act Two, Kylie Doomadgee steps to the front of the stage, speaking the words of her grandfather, David Bulsey, who publicly raged against a hole-riddled autopsy of Mulrunji ­Doomadgee. Kylie is naturally quiet and reserved but there is flame inside her, a blood rage that spills from her when she barks her grandfather’s verbatim words from 2004: “We want this man in prison. If I go and kill somebody like that they’ll fly me off to prison quick! Same as anybody else here … We don’t want any trouble on this island. Put him in prison! This is not good enough! I’m calling your report not good enough.”

She visibly shakes when she says these things. She walks outside for a smoke. “Well, it’s so ­personal for me, because of my uncle,” she says.

Cast and crew have a post-rehearsal meeting. The cast have concerns about being distracted by the presence of the people in the audience whose stories they are telling on stage. “If anyone is nervous about looking to people they know out there in the audience tonight, just look between the chairs,” says the stage veteran, Rachael Maza.

In the tea room, Rachael assesses her state of mind, hours before showtime: “Totally freaked out. We’ve only got one chance at this. This isn’t a theatre audience. A lot of these guys haven’t gone to the theatre. Are we gonna get it right?”

Across the road from the school hall, Aunty Maggie Blackley takes a quiet break at a table by a small bridge named in honour of her father, Tom Geia, a local councillor who fought tirelessly for equality on Palm. He died from heart complications in 1972, aged 46. “I come down here to talk to him,” Maggie says. “I talk to the air as though he’s here. He died so terribly young, but that was the way in those days.”

It was Tom who taught Maggie how to be “two-way strong”. Be strong in your family ­history, your own sacred Dreaming, but get that white man’s education, too. Two-way strong. “He showed me how to work on boats, and work the wood for his spears, but also how to stand up for this place and make it a better place to live on. He told me all the interconnecting stories. He told me how it’s all interwoven in this place.”

Robert Curry to Peter Prior to Mulrunji ­Doomadgee to Lex Wotton to Kylie Doomadgee to William Bligh. That’s what the play’s about. Cycles. With no appropriate place for the 100-year trauma to go it slipped into the ground, into the soil, where it stays, connecting to anyone who walks this land.

Aunty Maggie knows how this night will end. She has faith in this community. She has faith in this island. “I’m not worried,” she says.

She knows the plastic seats in the community hall will slowly be filled by her friends and family. She knows Kylie’s grandfather, David Bulsey, will be there, front and centre, nodding with pride when his granddaughter barks those rage-filled words from his past. She knows Lexy Wotton will be there, too. He’ll hop on stage and make his announcement to the audience about a ­Federal Court class action he’s leading on behalf of his Palm Island people against the state of Queensland on the grounds that the actions of police during the Palm Island riots were racially discriminatory. In a week, the school hall will be filled with lawyers hearing evidence of early morning house raids, guns to temples, kids ­wetting themselves as riot police stormed homes.

Aunty Maggie knows Harry will nail his lines tonight. She knows Rachael and Jane and Paul will show her people of many tribes a theatre they’ve never seen before, the true story of their lives on a place they never wanted to be, but a place they made home. “What can Palm Island be?” Maggie will ponder at the show’s end. “Because we never had the chance to ask.”

The crowd will hang on every word, even the four dogs in the audience will stay silent, and they’ll watch Kylie Doomadgee stand firm and composed and alone at the front of stage to give a closing monologue: “I’m going to take you to Palm Island. There’s a full moon, the sound of waves rolling on the shore, the smell of salty sea air. As you walk towards the jetty as the sun goes down, nothing but a cool soft sea breeze dances off your skin and up into the hills. Children are laughing and playing in the streets, such a peaceful place, noises of happy people. Tonight it’s still, but there’s always something bubbling underneath. Words unspoken, stories untold.

“Palm Island is not a place where we chose to live, and not a place where we were allowed to live the way we wanted. I sit on the jetty and let my mind get lost in the sunset. I think of all the things I’ve lost, and the things I still have. I am a woman, a proud Bwgcolman woman, from Palm Island, our home, forever always.”

The audience will rise to its feet for a long standing ovation. Lex Wotton will rush off to oversee the fireworks. Cast and crew and the wide-eyed audience will walk outside to watch explosions of pink and purple and red and gold fizz through the night sky. People will shed tears of joy. There’ll be laughter and there’ll be groups standing arm-in-arm, the people of many tribes, standing on the Palm Island earth, interwoven, connected. That’s how tonight will go.

Aunty Maggie smiles knowingly beside her father’s bridge.

“I’m not worried,” she says.

Beautiful One Day is at the Brisbane Festival, September 23-26. brisbanefestival.com.au