The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island

The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
First edition
Author Chloe Hooper
Country Australia
Language English
Subject Non-fiction
Published 2008 (Hamish Hamilton)
Media type Print (Hardback)
Pages 276
Awards Davitt Award
ISBN 9780241015377
OCLC 247035554

The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island is a 2008 book by Chloe Hooper. It is about the events surrounding the death in custody of Aboriginal Australian man, Cameron Doomadgee. It won numerous awards and was shortlisted for many others in 2009.

Publication history

  • 2006, The Tall Man: Inside Palm Island's heart of darkness appearing in The Monthly, pages 34–53, Australia, March 2006, Schwartz Publishing ISSN 1832-3421
  • 2008, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (277 pages), Australia, Hamish Hamilton ISBN 9780241015377, hardcover
  • 2009, Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee (258 pages), USA, Scribner ISBN 9781416561590, hardback

Reception

The New York Times reviewing The Tall Man wrote "Hooper travels to remote settlements and reaches into prehistory in her effort to penetrate this fractured story, learning of song lines, of Hairy Man and Tall Man spirits (Hurley, at 6-foot-7, evokes the latter). And though there is no resolution, she makes of it all an extraordinary whole. “I had wanted to know more about my country,” she says at the end of the book, “and now I did — now I knew more than I wanted to.”"

The Guardian noted "The Tall Man has already drawn comparisons with some of the best of that often derided genre, true crime, and it fully deserves the attention. Like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and, more recently, Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder, this gracefully nuanced book is as much about the world in which a death takes place as the nature of the death itself." and The Sydney Morning Herald found it "a thoughtful, perceptive examination of an important Australian tragedy."

The Tall Man has also been reviewed by The Daily Telegraph, the Indigenous Law Bulletin, The Globe and Mail, the Australian Book Review and Kirkus Reviews.

Awards