Australian Legal Geography and the Search for Postcolonial Space in Chloe Hooper's the Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island

This essay reviews Chloe Hooper’s non-fiction novel The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, a book about the 2004 death in custody of Cameron (who will hereafter be referred to as Mulrunji) Doomadgee on Palm Island in far north Queensland. After setting out the factual background to the death and its legal and political aftermath, I argue that The Tall Man is an original and important work that opens up the possibility for a space of Australian postcoloniality far more effectively than any of the legal proceedings surrounding the death did. I argue that the book can be described as a work of critical legal geography because it analyses the tensions between Australia’s north and south, and traces the laws and state policies that continue to reproduce places of racial tension and violence. I further argue that Hooper’s narrative provides an insightful depiction of the relation of white colonial patriarchy that is protected, reproduced and embodied by the Queensland police force.