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Chloe Hooper. Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee. New York. Scribner. 2009. x + 258 pages. $24. ISBN 978-1- 4165-6159-0
A haunting snapshot of postcolonial Australia, Tall Man meticulously chronicles the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody and its aftermath. In taut prose and compressed form, investigative journalist Chloe Hooper uncovers the complex forces that tragically converged in 2004 on Palm Island, off Queensland's northern coast.
Home to one of Australia's largest Aboriginal communities, Palm Island embodies Australia's tainted racial legacy. Early touted as a tourist Eden, between 1918 and the late 1960s the island became a "tropical gulag." Most of its current inhabitants descend from those sent there, including hundreds of Aborigines guilty of minor grievances (e.g., performing indigenous rites) and innumerable children of the "stolen generation."
Mirroring...