The Delirium of the Brave

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
– W.B. Yeats

We post this excellent article by Elina Abou-Sleiman.

The Ghost of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen

For the citizens of a healthy democracy, history is an ode to victory, and Queensland is no different. ‘Progress’ her banner and slogan, history marches on, composing a comforting song of tyrants vanquished and gone. Occasionally however, one does encounter ghosts. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon, October 1830, when a military sentry spotted Captain Logan’s ghost standing by the southern bank of the Brisbane River. The Penal Commandant’s body lay some eighty kilometres away, mangled and face down in a shallow grave.[1] “Fellow prisoners, be exhilarated”, Moreton Bay convicts sang, “that all such monsters such a death may find.”[2]Almost two-hundred years and a few hundred metres from the site of Captain Logan’s last phantom return, some officers of the Queensland Police approached my friends and I. We were, in their words, ‘known protestors’, and access to the public vaccinations underway at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre would be prohibited to us. “The ghost of Bjelke-Petersen lives on” someone remarked, perhaps recognising something familiar in a politically discriminatory police force. Was this the same spectre that Dan O’Neill described as a ‘dense black cloud’, chasing Bjelke-Petersen from office in a scandal of corruption and malpractice?[3] “That cloud hasn’t lifted”, O’Neill wrote in 2019, “And it didn’t lift on the day they buried him with a State funeral. Even if it was a sunny Queensland day.”[4] 

But surely the view from Kingaroy was different. No doubt, for those who gathered to bid him farewell in April 2005, the sun was still shining on Bjelke-Petersen’s legacy. As Bob Katter proclaimed, Joh was Australia’s “great builder”, who “created out of virtually nothing” the nation’s three most profitable industries: coal, aluminium and tourism.[5] As Malcom Fraser and Mike Ahern agreed, Joh’s was “a period of unprecedented growth”[6] in which Queensland “advanced enormously”.[7] No longer was Brisbane a ‘lesser city’ and Queensland a ‘sleepy’ state.[8] Placing “Queensland on the world tourism map” Bjelke-Petersen “created a special environment” for business investment.[9] Bielke-Petersen was both “champion”[10] and “architect of modern Queensland”[11] and conduit of foreign capital: “We chose to invest in Queensland because of his leadership”, Singaporean businessman Robert Sng reflected.[12] In these endeavours, “There was little circumspection, only a drive to develop, modernise, make new”.[13] As for political opponents, Joh “brooked no challenge to his authority”[14]; he “stood up for law and order”[15]. Against “unruly” street marchers, former Police Commissioner Terry Lewis suggested, “the majority of Queenslanders backed Sir Joh’s stand… quite happy to be able to lawfully and peacefully go about their business”.[16] 

The historical perspective of the conservative establishment was perhaps best summarised in the Sunday Mail. Before Joh, an obituary read, “Queensland was a backwater, lagging behind most of Australia in social, community and economic development. Joh’s can-do philosophy encouraged the exploitation of the state’s untapped potential.”[17] Bjelke-Petersen is then described as “an uncomfortable democrat” who “simply did not understand” elements of democratic life such as protest.[18] The “eccentric” former Premier was thus “peculiarly susceptible” to corruption.[19] Evidently, cursory acknowledgement of Bjelke-Petersen’s “imperfections” need not infringe on heartfelt celebrations of his legacy. Thus was the balanced approach adopted by Labor Premier Peter Beattie, who showcased his working-class credentials in a speech at Labour Day the day before attending Joh’s State funeral. Speaking on his divisive predecessor, Beattie was diplomatic: While “Sir Joh built Queensland’s economic growth… I didn’t agree with him in the lack of accountability (and) I believe in the right to protest.”[20] Beattie affirmed this right on Labour Day, as his opening address was interrupted by Bernie Neville, an electricity worker fired by Bjelke-Petersen during the SEQEB dispute of 1985. “Let him have his say, it’s a democracy”[21], Beattie declared, “He has a right to protest, which is something he did not have (in the Bjelke-Petersen era).”[22] Bernie replied, “You are giving a state funeral to a man who crushed the trade union movement.”[23] For a moment, something radical fractured the established decorum. 

Saving face with a reference to democracy however, Beattie clearly grasped the crucial substance of popular arguments against Bjelke-Petersen. In mainstream liberal critiques, “The premier had an instinct for attacking progressive ideas, human rights and centrist notions in government.”[24] “His rule was typified by lots of things that were unacceptable to a democracy.”[25] For civil liberties lawyer Terry O’Gorman, the Fitzgerald Inquiry of 1987 “has already written his place in history and that is that he was the worst premier in respect of civil liberties and human rights.”[26] Arguably, Joh “ushered in a culture of corruption”.[27] As Phil Dickie elaborated, he “debauched any instrument of democracy that got in his way… Police were given extensive powers to spy on dissenters and to break up street marches, with the government turning a blind eye to police excesses.”[28] If this was the “dark passage”[29] in Queensland’s history however, it also produced the seeds of transformation. As Dickie concedes, “Brisbane flowered as a city” during this period, hosting first the Commonwealth Games and then Expo ‘88.[30] In more critical views this cultural awakening is not accredited to Bjelke-Petersen, but to an oppositional politics, manifested in music, theatre and art against the stifling conservatism of the establishment.[31] Regardless, both narratives ultimately arrive at the same destination: the “desirable locations”[32] to which Brisbane and Queensland became. 

In the liberal understanding, two decades of radical resistance were finally successful in the deliberations of the Fitzgerald Inquiry; a repressive regime collapsed and the progressive present was born. Outside of conservative circles, this remains the common analysis of Queensland’s history, typified in popular publications such as Bjelke Blues (2019) or Pig City (2004). The latter, a cultural “coming of age story” was put to stage in 2007 with the following description: “It’s about the trajectory from a repressive society to a city which regards itself now as the fastest-growing metropolis in the country.”[33] In Bjelke Blues, Bruce Dickson agrees, describing Brisbane’s ‘Boring then to vibrant now’ transition: from ‘cultural backwater’ to “cosmopolitan city… an enticing visitor destination”.[34] Overall, the collection offers a sustained polemic against Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland. Those were the “years of corruption and turmoil, of street demonstrations and violence and handcuffs”, of repression and resistance in the fight “to protect the basic structures of democracy… the infrastructure of a good and decent society”.[35] Thankfully, today “the world doesn’t ‘look just the same’” Andrea Baldwin writes, reworking the lyrics of The Who’s rock anthem.[36] After all, the Fitzgerald Inquiry uprooted Bjelke-Petersen alongside “the most corrupt and violent elements in the Queensland Police Force – now the Queensland Police Service.”[37] ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, The Who might disagree.

Despite their professed differences both liberals and conservatives agree on the fundamentals of Queensland’s history: this is a story victory, of the present defeating the past. Uniting the full spectrum of historical perspectives expressed in the mainstream is a common thread composed from the ideal, imperative or assumption of progress. The roles of rival actors may change: Joh is either the champion of progress or the embodiment of its antithesis, his opponents either the bearers of democracy or unruly disruption. Regardless, progress remains, consistently and explicitly linked to economic development or liberal democratic institutions and structures. In praising or critiquing Joh, both liberals and conservatives appeal to law and order and the restoration of the status quo. In the more critical view, the sanctity of the police, electoral democracy, and the Westminster system were tarnished, corrupted, undermined, or otherwise manipulated by Bjelke-Petersen, to be triumphantly restored in 1987. Unable to reconcile such ‘backwards’ democratic regressions with an undeniable capital expansion, centrists thus pose the “the dilemma of the Joh years: the economy boomed but the rule of law was trampled”.[38] Somehow, an ‘authoritarian’ government achieved “the development and maturation of this great state”.[39]  It seems Bjelke-Petersen is an overloaded symbol, inseparable in both the negative and positive from progress which is also synonymous with Queensland. 

If to conservatives Joh offered a vision of economic development ceaselessly expanding into the future, to the critical he remains an irreconcilable equivalent to a vanquished past. As Dan Fallon wrote in Bjelke Blues, “Now he was just a bogeyman left over from a pagan dark age”.[40] This bogeyman is invoked at any sign of apparent regression in Queensland. Whether political populism, corruption, the repression of protests or police violence, seemingly all disruptions to the veneer of democratic prosperity can be qualified as momentary returns to the Joh years, the resurrection of Bjelke-Petersen’s ghost. As Raymond Evans recognised however, bogeymen belong to fairy-tales:

… when you do an analysis of the world where you simply blame an individual, blame Bjelke-Petersen, you’re not really understanding it systemically … deep in the social, economic, political and cultural structure. Bjelke-Petersen was a manifestation of that. He wasn’t the cause of it.[41]

Behind the ghost of Bjelke-Petersen lies a larger spectre, connecting tyrants across time, from Moreton Bay’s Captain Logan to the forces of repression today. In the days leading up to Joh’s burial, when Bernie Neville and other workers threatened to disrupt the State funeral authorised by Peter Beattie, the champions of conservative Queensland retaliated. “It’s all water under the bridge what happened 20 years ago,” a Kingaroy local said, “It’s just rehashing the past”.[42] In other words, the protestors were “grumpy, pathetic people who have been left behind by time”.[43] But if progress is an endless march that leaves some of us behind, perhaps what is at stake is not so distant and irrelevant, but something much closer to the present.

Elina Abou Sleiman
21 Feb 2023

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[1] Raymond Evans, “Captain Logan’s Ghost,” in Radical Brisbane, ed. Carole Ferrier and Raymond Evans (Carlton North: The Vulgar Press, 2004), 19.

[2] Moreton Bay folk song.

[3] Dan O’Neill, “Bielke-Petersen and the Springbok Tour,” in Bielke Blues, ed. Edwina Shaw (Queensland: AndAlso Books, 2019), 42.

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Katter remembers Sir Joh’s Queensland,” Herbert River Express, April 26, 2005.

[6] Daryl Passmore and Mark Alexander, “Joh Dies – Legendary premier bows out, aged 94,” The Sunday Mail, April 24, 2005.

[7] “Sir Joh fought “vigorously” for Queensland: Fraser,” Associated Australian Press, April 24, 2005.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Barry Galton, “Joh’s lasting impact,” The Gold Coast Bulletin, February 16, 2005.

[10] Barrie Cassidy, “All Australians benefit from Sir Joh’s reign: Boswell,” ABC News, April 24, 2005.

[11] Steve Connolly, “Nats pay tribute to Joh’s legacy,” Australian Associated Press, April 23, 2005.

[12] Brian Williams, “Only Joh’s memory rotten,” The Courier Mail, April 23, 2005.

[13] Craig Johnston, “The best of times and the worst of times,” The Courier Mail, April 25, 2005.

[14] David Bentley, “One of a kind – The farm boy who put us on the map,” The Sunday Mail, April 24, 2005.

[15] Vince Lester quoted in, Mathew Condon, “A legacy sown in seeds of power,” The Courier Mail, April 30, 2005.

[16] Chris Griffith, Renee Viellaris and Stefanie Balogh, “Legacy will last, says Beattie,” The Courier Mail, April 25, 2005.

[17] “Farewell, Sir Joh,” The Sunday Mail, April 24, 2005.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Griffith, Viellaris and Balogh, “Legacy will last, says Beattie.”

[21] “Union anger at Beattie over Joh funeral,” Australian Associated Press, May 2, 2005.

[22] Tony Keim, Malcolm Cole and Margaret Wenham, “Victims of SEQEB dispute focus their rage on Beattie,” The Courier Mail, May 3, 2005.

[23] “Union anger at Beattie over Joh funeral.”

[24] “Sir Joh Bielke-Petersen: Populist Queensland politician whose career ended in scandal,” The Guardian, May 10, 2005.

[25] Terry White quoted in, Condon, “A legacy sown in seeds of power.”

[26] “Sir Joh’s civil rights legacy condemned,” ABC News, April 24, 2005.

[27] “Sir Joh was loathed and loved,” Australian Associated Press, April 24, 2005.

[28] Phil Dickie, “Death of a populist,” The Age, April 24, 2005.

[29] “Brisbane protest marks Sir Joh’s funeral,” ABC News, May 3, 2005.

[30] Dickie, “Death of a populist.”

[31] Liz Willis, “How Joh inspired a generation,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 25, 2005.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Martin Buzacott “A Pig of a theme,” The Courier Mail, July 7, 2007.

[34] Bruce Dickson, “Boring then to vibrant now: Planting the seeds for the Brisbane of today,” in Bielke Blues, ed. Edwina Shaw (Queensland: AndAlso Books, 2019), 100.

[35] Mathew Condon, “Foreword,” in Bielke Blues, ed. Edwina Shaw (Queensland: AndAlso Books, 2019), 8-9.

[36] Andrea Baldwin, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” in Bielke Blues, ed. Edwina Shaw (Queensland: AndAlso Books, 2019), 83.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Johnston, “The best of times and the worst of times.”

[39] Ibid.

[40] Dan Fallon, “Light a Candle for Joh,” in Bielke Blues, ed. Edwina Shaw (Queensland: AndAlso Books, 2019), 131.

[41] Raymond Evans, interviewed by Elina Abou-Sleiman, Brisbane, October 27, 2022.

[42] Jessica Lawrence, “Flo shrugs off ‘silly’ protest – Young Nats call faithful to converge on demo,” The Sunday Mail, May 1, 2005.

[43] Ibid.