Cameron Doomadgee, 36, died in a police cell shortly after being arrested November 19 for drunkenness. Angry residents burnt down the police buildings on the island November 26. The capitalist press headlined the eruption of anger as a “riot.” The state government in Queensland, run by the Labor Party, unleashed a massive police dragnet of the island.

Palm Island has a population of about 4,000, mainly Aborigines. The island was used for much of the last century as an internment camp for indigenous people forcibly removed from traditional lands across northern Australia.

Public meetings were held during the week after Doomadgee was found dead. He had been locked up an hour earlier for “causing a public nuisance.” The “findings” of an interim autopsy that absolved the cops of any wrongdoing detonated the explosion.

A post-mortem examination showed Doomadgee had four broken ribs and died from a punctured lung and ruptured spleen and liver. The government report backed the cops’ claim that a scuffle took place and Doomadgee fell accidentally, and that there was “no evidence” that his injuries had “resulted from a direct use of force.”

Two Aboriginal men in nearby cells at the time gave statements that they saw Doomadgee being punched and beaten by senior sergeant Chris Hurley. On November 23, four days after Doomadgee died, Hurley was removed from the island “for his own protection.”

Up to 300 residents vented their anger on the courthouse, police station, and barracks. They pelted the buildings with stones and then set them on fire, reducing them to smoking ruins. Eighteen local cops fled to the hospital and later left the island claiming to be “in fear of their lives.” Two cops were reportedly injured.

Queensland police counterattacked. Over that night and the next day, 80 armed cops, including the tactical response group, were flown in from nearby Townsville. The state school was taken over as their barracks and headquarters.

Tony Koch reported November 29 in The Australian how police “in full armour… burst into homes, held guns on people and forced children and women to lie face-down on the floor while they searched” for young Aboriginal residents on their list of supposed “ringleaders of the riot.” By daylight the next day, 12 men had been arrested.

Koch described “war-like scenes of vehicle loads of armed police” with “full gear—riot shields, balaclavas and helmets with face-masks, Glock pistol at the hip and a shotgun or semi-automatic rifle… arresting unarmed and unresisting Aborigines” and summarily “shipping them off to the mainland” without any due legal process.

Palm Island community leaders have complained about the heavy cop presence. The state government has floated the idea of stationing more police permanently on the island.

Queensland Labor premier Peter Beattie subsequently appealed for calm. He told reporters that the “community leaders of Palm Island have got to take charge and act responsibly to restore some order.” He blamed their “failure in leadership” for the events but made no mention of the long record of dispossession, institutionalized racism, and cop brutality under successive state governments.

Cops claimed “Redfern rioters” were among those involved in the Palm Island events. Last February a nine-hour pitched battle took place between Aboriginal protesters and riot police in Redfern, Sydney, over the killing by cops of Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey. A coroners’ court finding subsequently cleared the cops of any wrongdoing.

The Palm Island settlement became a government reserve for Aborigines in 1918 as the site offered the authorities a “natural prison” for indigenous people driven from their ancestral lands by the colonial frontier war of the 1800s. People from different clans and language groups were thrown together in what became a decades-long internment camp.

Racial segregation akin to South Africa’s apartheid system was institutionalized. Little or no education or health services were provided. Impoverished social conditions prevailed, and the Aboriginal inhabitants were denied basic civil rights until the 1970s. Only in 1984 did control pass over to an Aboriginal Council.

According to Senator Aden Ridgeway of the Australian Democrats, the only Aborigine in Parliament, “Indigenous people in this country are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than anyone else… Last year, 75 percent of deaths in custody of prisoners who were detained for no more than public order offences were indigenous Australians.” He denounced what he called “major race relations problems that are escalating.”

About 50 Aborigines and supporters rallied outside the north Queensland court in Townsville, November 29, as 18 people appeared over charges of rioting on Palm Island. A placard read: “Police Service: Murderers and Liars.” One protester told ABC News: “Racism is rife in the judicial system—the police, the bloody judges, the lawyers, everything—and the governments.”

In Brisbane, the Queensland capital, about 50 members of the indigenous community, including relatives of those arrested at Palm Island, met to plan future protests, including a December 11 national day of action. “The situation is getting worse,” said Aboriginal activist Sam Watson. “The system is hardening about Aboriginal people. Police officers use their shields and their blue uniforms as devices to bash, terrorize and kill Aboriginal people.”

Murrandoo Yanner, an activist for Black rights and a cousin of Cameron Doomadgee, was quoted in the December 1 Australian saying: “I don’t condone violence, but Black fellows are sick of violence being perpetrated against them by police and it all gets swept under the carpet.”

In the wake of the Palm Island events, another racist attack in southwestern Queensland on November 27 got national coverage.

A landowner and his son tied a noose around a Black teenager’s neck and dragged him through a river, then stripped him naked, bound his hands, and dragged him up the embankment. The youth suffered head and neck injuries. Another Black youth was tied to a tree and forced to watch. The men, 44 and 23 years old, claimed the two young people had been attempting to steal from their property. Aboriginal elder and Goolburri Regional Council chairman Bertie Button described the 45 minutes of sadistic torture as “Ku Klux Klan-style stuff.”  
 
 
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