Landmark racial discrimination findings against Queensland police mark another dramatic twist in the life of Lex Wotton.

The plumber of Palm Island, who became the defining figure of a community uprising over a notorious death in custody, has spearheaded a successful class action that he hopes will forever change the public narrative around the events of 2004.

After the death of the man now known as Mulrunji, who became the 147th Indigenous death in police custody since 1990, it was Wotton that went to jail. He was found to have incited a riot over a perceived whitewash of the investigation.

Now it is Wotton, his claims of unlawful discrimination by police substantially upheld by the federal court, who calmly awaits a formal police apology to his community “so that it can move forward”.



“Over the years since the death in custody, you had two sides telling their story and one favoured by the wider public,” Wotton told Guardian Australia. “We don’t say the police are all bad but it was portrayed in that way in the sense of the Indigenous community uprising. It made us out to be not law-abiding citizens and that the police were in the right to do what they did.

“It took this particular case to turn things around in some sense, I suppose.”

Justice Debbie Mortimer found discriminatory treatment by police, including their disregard of what the Palm Island community would think about their investigation of Mulrunji’s death, was an “affront to the rule of law”.

The judge awarded Wotton and his family $220,000 in damages over the police response on Palm Island, with more rulings on damage claims by others to come.



The ruling for Wotton was in stark contrast to the recent fortunes of Chris Hurley, the white officer who was prosecuted then acquitted of causing the death of Mulrunji, known in life as Cameron Doomadgee.

Indigenous Australians march on Parliament House in Brisbane in June 2007 in response to the acquittal of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley of manslaughter charges over the death in custody of Palm Islander Mulrunji Doomadgee. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

Days earlier, Hurley was convicted of common assault in an unrelated court case that revealed he was set to end a troubled police career with medical retirement next year.

On Monday, Mortimer found police failure to initially treat Hurley as a suspect or to suspend him constituted unlawful discrimination. So too did sceptical treatment of Aboriginal witnesses by investigators, as well as the failure of any officer to properly defuse tensions on Palm Island during the riots.

Wotton said Hurley ought to retire, “because really, he brought shame upon the Queensland police in a big way”.

“He was a disgrace,” he said. “If the police union didn’t get behind him, we wouldn’t have the decision yesterday and three coronial inquests.

Palm Island resident Cameron Doomadgee, now known as Mulrunji, who died in the island’s watchhouse less than an hour after being arrested. Photograph: ABC TV

“It’s an indictment on the state of Queensland, in some sense, the appalling behaviour that our community [was subjected to]. So this is a just outcome that we received yesterday.”

Wotton said he hoped the case would alert “the wider public, whether you’re Indigenous or non-Indigenous” to the problem of institutional racism and set a precedent that would help other communities “in their particular struggle”.

“Everyone, black or white, has known that racism exists and this is one particular item of racism based on the police response and institutional racism,” he said.

“Hopefully this will shine a light on this particular area and get agencies and NGO agencies to look at how we clean it up so that we as a society can move forward.”

While Wotton was instrumental in the community uprising, he was very nearly not there at all.

On that fateful day of 26 November 2004, he was preparing to catch a plane to the mainland when he got a call from the Palm Island council chief executive.

A water seal had broken on the main street of Palm Island. The council plumber had caught the previous plane out and Wotton was the only other person on the island with expertise. Wotton gave advice then went to the airstrip. Fate struck again: he’d forgotten to pack the key for his car on the mainland. He set up a later flight and went and fixed the pipe in front of the police station.

Wotton noticed a community meeting nearby where a coroner’s report into the death of Mulrunji was being read out at a community meeting.

Mulrunji had been arrested a week earlier by Hurley for public nuisance after singing the Baha Men song Who Let the Dogs Out? as the officer drove past. The coroner found Mulrunji, 36, died from a ruptured liver after a watchhouse scuffle with Hurley, also 36.

The remains of the Palm Island police station after a riot in response to the death in police custody of Cameron Doomadgee, now known as Mulrunji. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

Wotton, his plumbing gear at the ready, took up tools again, this time at the police station at the centre of a riot of hundreds of people furious over the death.

“I grabbed a big wrench and then went and smashed up the place,” Wotton said. “That night I’m on television and I’m known right across the country and overseas. Some people rang up that knew of me and said, ‘I saw you here in Times Square [New York]’.”

The police station, courthouse and Hurley’s residence were burned to the ground.

Accused of being a ringleader in the riot, Wotton was hit with charges including inciting riot, the only one he was ultimately convicted for.

I grabbed a big wrench and went and smashed up the place. That night I’m on television and I’m known across the country Lex Wotton

Wotton in a media interview days before his arrest defended the uprising as a “crying out for help” from a community convinced Mulrunji’s death was no accident.

The circumstances of Wotton’s arrest made up part of the federal court claim. When he walked out of his house to meet arresting police, he was shot with a stun gun, allegedly without warning, after declining to follow an order to get on his knees. His daughter allegedly had a gun pointed at her head when police then entered his home. Some, but not all, of the claims were found to be substantiated.

Mortimer said she was satisfied officers would not have “forced their way into houses occupied by unarmed families ... pointing assault rifles at them and yelling at them to lie down” in a community that was not isolated and predominantly Aboriginal.

On bail after his arrest, Wotton attended a protest march, laid a floral tribute to Mulrunji on the steps of Townsville police headquarters and was declared a hero on the island, Mulrunji’s sister telling him: “You’re my warrior.”

Hurley, after various legal sagas including a coronial inquest finding he had killed Mulrunji with three punches, was tried for manslaughter and found not guilty in 2007.



A year later, Wotton was convicted of inciting riot. The verdict sparked protest rallies and benefit concerts across Australia and New Zealand.

While Wotton would be jailed as a symbol of Aboriginal resistance in a police brutality case that drew international attention, it was not his first stint.

Protesters against the jailing of Palm Island resident Lex Wotton march on Parliament House in Brisbane in November 2008. Photograph: Tony Phillips/AAP

His first was as a teenager, a matter of regret and personal reckoning. In 1986, Wotton was a 19-year-old with a drinking problem and a conviction for domestic violence against his girlfriend.

“I’m in a prison cell, doing a four-month stretch,” he says. “I get on my knees and pray and say, ‘God, this is not the life for me.’ I woke up and said I have to take a different direction so then I did.”

He got out of prison, broke off the relationship with his partner “because I didn’t want to be destructive to her” and quit drinking cold turkey. He looked for a trade and found the only available apprenticeship was in plumbing. He took it and went to work.

It made us out to be not law-abiding citizens and that the police were in the right to do what they did Lex Wotton

Nine years later Wotton rekindled his relationship with the woman who became his wife and life partner. They had four children. Wotton threw himself into his job, impressing a Townsville plumbing business owner who employed him. By 30, he was a councilor on the Palm Island Aboriginal Shire Council.

Although a teetotaller, Wotton campaigned against a strict alcohol ban as an infringement of residents’ rights, one he opposes to this day.

“It’s very intrusive when you’re on the mainland catching the ferry back to the island and 20 odd coppers pull up there and they’re rifling through stuff you’ve packed the night before, rifling through your groceries,” he said. “It’s very degrading. I’m sure you wouldn’t like it.”

Wotton quit council disillusioned but remained vocal in island politics, writing to newspaper editors and politicians. Such was the life change that preceded his second term behind bars.

Ironically for Wotton, his return to prison in 2008 represented “for me personally a bit of a break in some sense from all the attention that was heaped on me up until then from the wider public and the media”.

Weary of his newfound notoriety, he imposed virtual solitary confinement on himself for the first four months.

A child during a protest against the jailing of Wotton in Brisbane in November 2008. Photograph: Tony Phillips/AAP

Serving two years of a seven-year head sentence, Wotton says he ended up becoming a mentor of sorts on the inside.

“Young, black and white people used to come and have good talks and go away with a different impression,” he says. “You start talking about where you come from and the road you travelled and you try and give them a sense of direction and say, this is where you could be and this is where you were 20 years before.

“I was at their age and I made a decision that that wasn’t going to be the life for me and they can do the same. But the road’s not going to be easy.

“You’ve got to commit yourself. It’s just like alcohol. If you want to stay off alcohol, you have to make the right decisions every day.”

Wotton helped younger inmates out by writing letters for them. He helped one young inmate with a disability, unable to earn an income in prison but with an inheritance on the outside, obtain a $60 a week allowance by writing to his trustee.

“He got out and then bloody a couple of months later he was back in. I said, what’s wrong with you?”

Wotton knows of homeless Indigenous men committing minor offences to get sent to jail as a refuge from sleeping rough.

“I’ve actually seen and spoken to blokes like that where it’s just like a holiday retreat for some of them because they get the three meals a day, telly,” he says.

When he was granted parole, certain conditions were less than ideal for an Indigenous activist and former politician – namely, those forbidding him from freely speaking to the media or going to public meetings.

Prominent lawyers branded them a noxious attempt to muzzle a prominent Indigenous voice. Wotton fought them in the high court but lost.

In the years, since Wotton’s been presented the “Anthony Mundine Courage Award” at the National Indigenous Human Rights awards. He works for Palm Island council in water and sewerage maintenance, “getting out when I can to advocate”.

This year he’s met with the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders and been flown down to Brisbane at the expense of the Crime and corruption commission to address its public forum on publicising corruption complaints.

While on the latter trip, he took a detour to sit in on Hurley’s assault trial.

“I sat right behind him and I think he saw that I walked in,” Wotton says. “I wanted him to actually look at me and he wouldn’t look.”

And now Wotton has spearheaded an action that, 12 years after the fact, forced the justice system to acknowledge that Palm Island people were right to feel aggrieved for what police did in 2004.

Wotton says police would “probably say publicly they’ve learnt a lot” from the Mulrunji’s death, the riot and policing on Palm Island.

“They may have,” he says. “But the difference now is they wear their guns.”