Queensland in the early 1970s was, according to the narrator of Peter Carey's new novel, 'a police state run by men who never finished high school'. This intriguing throwaway remark turns out to be not much of an exaggeration. For twenty years from 1968, Queensland was controlled by the corrupt, gerrymandering state governor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, variously described as the Hillbilly Dictator, a 'bible-bashing bastard' and - by himself - as 'a bushfire raging out of control'. The son of a poor Danish Lutheran pastor, afflicted with a lifelong limp by childhood polio, Bjelke-Petersen sought divine guidance daily, accepted huge bribes, banned public protests, ignored endemic malfeasance in his police force and civil serv-ice, prevented the purchase of land by aborigine groups and claimed that Desmond Tutu was a witch doctor.

LRB 6 March 2008 | PDF Download