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I just heard about the acquittal of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. Below is the quick piece on it that I wrote a couple of months ago, and as it appeared in the most recent edition of Left Curve. I don’t know what else to say, other than to sit with the moment. A moment heralded and marking the first time anyone has been brought to trial for a death in custody.*

… racism is the indispensible precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. – Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.

In 2004, Mulrunji Doomadgee died in police custody on Palm Island – Palm Island is part of Australia, situated off the northern coastline. Mulrunji had been arrested for “public nuisance,” that is, swearing. An hour after his arrest, he would be dead.

Protests ensued on the island, including the burning down of the police station and court house, after an initial coronial finding was released indicating that Mulrunji may have been beaten by police. In September of this year, a Coronial Inquiry found that the arresting officer, Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, had caused Mulrunji’s death. The coroner also accused police of failing to investigate his death fully, and found that Doomadgee should not have been arrested. The autopsy on Mulrunji’s body at Cairns’ Base Hospital found that the deceased’s liver was “almost cleaved in two.” The right side of his rib-cage showed fractures of four ribs “from the sixth to the ninth inclusively.”

On December 14th, 2006, the DPP announced - to a room emptied of Palm Island residents and Mulrunji’s family and friends - that no charges would be laid because, according to her, she acts “on the evidence and not emotion and my decisions have to based on evidence that would be admissible in a criminal trial” (emphasis added). That last remark about admissibility refers to the campaign by the police union to discredit witnesses, other Aborigines who had also been in jail at the time, as “drunks”. Those witnesses had testified that they heard Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley shouting “You want more Mr Doomadgee, you want more? Have you had enough Mr Doomadgee?”

Last week, one person was jailed for two years for assaulting police during the protests, and another three who had already been sentenced to 12 and 18 month ‘community correction orders,’ had their sentences increased to 14-15 months jailtime after an appeal by the Attorney-General against the “leniency” of the previous sentences. Riot police sent to quell the protests on Palm Island recently filed a suit seeking compensation for stress.

Those, in summary, are the events surrounding Mulrunji’s death, as they have been widely documented. They speak not only of the persistence of a lethal carceralism prominently directed toward indigenous peoples in Australia, but also of the values by which lives, testimony, proof and reason continue to be weighed in the postcolony. As one commentator noted, and I think that the sentencing of those involved in the subsequent riot bear this out, the legal result would likely have been quite different had the arresting officer been the one lying dead on the police cell floor after the “scuffle”.

Indeed, 2006 began with an emphatic illustration of the supplemental violence that enforces the postcolonial state’s monopoly on violence, particularly in those instances where representatives of that state, both official and colloquial, fail to enforce that monopoly in discrete scuffles. A fight on Cronulla beach in Sydney, between ‘off-duty’ lifeguards and beachgoers (who happened to be of ‘Middle Eastern background’), which resulted in the former coming off second-best, was followed by a pogrom and, subsequently, the enforcement of a lockdown of Cronulla and surrounding beaches. Not long after, as indigenous youth in the country town of Dubbo managed to send police packing, another lockdown was brought into force. (For more on these, see “Under The Beach, The Barbed Wire,” Mute 2:2, 2006).

But while this recourse to the ‘extraordinary’ violence of the lockdown suggests a new kind of mobilisation and social diffusion of techniques that are ordinarily used to control prisoners in jails, the events surrounding the death of Mulrunji speak to Australia’s ongoing history as a penal colony, and in ways that require a fundamental rethink of the processes by which indigeneity has been recognised in politics (including that of the Left) and economy (or oikos). For most of the last two hundred years, Palm Island was an internment camp for “troublesome” Aborigines. In that sense, residents on Palm Island fall outside the conditions according to which land rights can be claimed (an unbroken relation to the land) under Native Title laws, and outside the sense in which notions of indigenous authenticity are taken up by the tourist and other industries.

Just days and weeks prior to the DPP’s announcement, the film Ten Canoes had received a spate of awards. While not the first feature film with an entirely indigenous cast, it was nevertheless the first entirely spoken in an indigenous language and on indigenous lore. Undoubtedly, at a time when the Australian Government are legislating to make English language a condition of citizenship, Two Canoes emphatically disrupts the legal fiction that English is the ‘native language’ of Australia. And yet, at the same time, in stripping the narrative from any sense of a colonial encounter, including as that encounter is played out in the present, it risks slipping neatly into the genre of Australian films that smooth out conflicts for a liberal audience and are little more than adjuncts to the tourist industry. As Elizabeth Povinelli puts it in a broader discussion of multiculturalism:

Many Australians truly desire that indigenous subjects be treated considerately, justly, and with respect publicly, juridically, and personally. They are truly sorry when history once again reveals that liberalism’s goodwill has been perverted. They truly desire a form of society in which all people can have exactly what they want … if they deserve it. They do not feel good when they feel responsible for critical social conflict, pain, or trauma. This is, after all, a fantasy of liberal capitalist society, too simply put: convulsive competition purged of real conflict, social difference without social consequences. No more or less is asked of the Aboriginal subject, the subaltern subject, the minority subject - to provide a sensorium of cultural competition and difference without subjecting the liberal subject to the consuming winds of social conflict. (“The Cunning of Recognition: A Reply to Morris and Frow,” Critical Inquiry, 25:3, 1999).

Australia’s very recent history is marked by deaths in police custody or during police chases that have sparked riots: Redfern, Palm Island, Macquarie Fields. And, in the denunciation of the riots that has predictably followed each instance, the question of violence has become obscured behind the naturalisation and normalisation of state violence, even in its casual forms as the violence of the Cronulla pogrom or police beatings, no longer recognised as violence but at the same time, subtly or explicitly, assumed to be necessary and self-evident.

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* Careful readers, or those who haven’t been following the issues related in the above, would have noticed a discrepancy: at the time of writing the above, the DPP had refused to lay charges against the police officer. Very soon after, the Queensland Premier (I think it was) reversed that decision and proceeded with the laying of charges. In any case, the discrepancy does not seem, in the end, to have been a discrepancy.

ps. I might add that the trial was held in, and the jury drawn from Townsville - by which I mean, scene of things like this and this.