Hooper’s compelling unfolding of narrative drives us into the midst of the Palm Island community with its mindless daily cycles of alcoholism, abusive violence and moral lassitude.
Nothing is reconciled , paradoxically these battered people are bonded in their survival of endemic self-destructiveness. Nobody is accountable, loud protestations of irresponsibility the daily call for police interventions, which then are rejected in adolescent rancour.
That police, too, inevitably step across the line into violence seems hardly unlikely, impotent in the apparent pointlessness in their role .This is the loud subtext to this case.
Hooper also interweaves strands of Tall Man mythology into the narrative, but these feel a vain hope to be able to make some cultural sense of a humanity out of control.
Myself, I could not ignore the sinking, horrible awareness of the reality of 1000 mornings, afternoons and nights of communities continuing to re-traumatize each other in parallel with this legal due process. I reached for Noel Pearson’s ” Up From The Mission “.(2011 Black Inc.)
Pearson’s strength and clarity of mind in his contemporaneous writings was passionately insightful, based in the necessity of leadership from within his people. Central to his vision of a bilingual and bicultural future was the reestablishment of regional tribal authority in the context of supportive twentieth century legislative authority. Removal of disempowering passive welfare status would encourage individual responsibility toward re-experiencing cultural demand sharing in a community enhancing shape. The past abuses could not be undone, but could be the impetus to rebuild over generations.
This more mature notion of self and reward would be a psychological hurdle for his people to be lead through, but meantime the stuff of ongoing prejudice.
Pearson’s Cape York Agenda was being established with the hellhole of Palm Island as the epitome of the alternative degenerative processes. His sophistication recognised the short-coming and misguidedness of colonial and missionary models, but also the reality that indigenous culture needed rehabilitation into the twentieth century, rather than a fantasy return to an untenable anachronism.
A real concern we are inevitably left with is for enough Malcolm X and Noel Pearson figureheads to continue to emerge, demonstrate and sustain leadership over the necessary generations.
nonfiction matters melbourne 
