Anzacs land on Gallipoli peninsula April 25, 1915 (Australian War Museum)

As Australian authors go, Sydney Loch is an undeservedly forgotten figure. A Wikipedia search  redirects to his slightly more famous wife Joice NanKivell Loch. She was also an author but is mostly forgotten despite being Australia’s most decorated woman.

Nankivell Loch and her husband helped 15,000 Greeks escape Turkish persecution in the anarchic days of the 1920s. They were in Greece  volunteering with Quaker Famine Relief worldwide amid a war where both sides indulged in ethnic cleansing. It was not Sydney Loch’s first encounter of the Turks as an enemy;, he served at Gallipoli as a runner for the Australian army before falling seriously ill. It was his remarkable tale of life at the front that made his name though no-one knew it at the time.

Loch was an Englishman who left his country because of unrequited love. The woman he loved was five years older than him and lived at his home in London. He was shocked when he found out she was having an affair with his father. He left the country in disgust and came to Australia. Loch  eventually became a grazier in Gippsland. He signed up in 1914 and after months of training in the shadow of the Egyptian pyramids,  he landed in Gallipoli on April 25, 1915.  He survived four months before being wracked by typhoid fever which gave him  polyneuritis. He almost died in hospital in Alexandria and was eventually shipped home to Melbourne.

It was during his long convalescence he wrote his memoir of the campaign which he published as the “The Straits Impregnable”.  Loch wrote about the shortage of shells and the poor food. Death was matter-of-fact, life in the trenches was boring, and moving between was dangerous.  No-one cared about the war.

Loch pulled no punches with his grim descriptions of how people lived and died in the trenches. Australian war censorship was among the strictest in the world, but remarkably Loch’s book avoided the censor’s wrath despite being a no-holds barred account of the war.  The credit for its initial publication goes to publisher Harry Champion of Collins St, Melbourne.  Champion immediate saw the manuscript as an important document to counteract the jingoism of war promoters to show the true horror of the battlefield.

As a memoir, Loch’s book was required to be submitted to military censors, a requirement laid down by the 1915 wartime Rules for Censors. A factual account could also run foul of the War Precautions Act which forbade material likely to discourage enlistment, already a hot topic as Prime Minister Billy Hughes considered conscription to boost troop numbers. Champion’s solution was to publish the book as a fictional novel.  The author’s name was changed to Sydney de Loghe while the book’s main character was changed to “Lake”. Several other key dramatis personae were also thinly disguised. Brigadier-General Walker became General Runner, Colonel Johnston became Jackson, Adjutant Miles became Yards and war correspondent Captain Charles Bean   became Captain Carrot.

The subterfuge was necessary because Gallipoli was such a fiasco. For months General Hamilton hid the poor progress and extent of the casualties and was determined the truth of the campaign would never reach the press. It wasn’t until English journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Australian Keith Murdoch got involved that Hamilton’s dirty secret got out.  Murdoch carried Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter (which he re-wrote from memory after it was confiscated) to Cabinet minister in London and Hamilton was recalled in October. The campaign was soon called off and its most successful operation was its flawless withdrawal in December.  By then there was half a million dead, roughly equal in number between Allied and Turkish forces.

As Collins predicted, Loch’s published work stunned the Australian public when it came out in June the following year.  While the Anzac legend had already started by 1916, Australians had little access to the truth of what happened in the Turkish campaign. The Straits Impregnable was also critically acclaimed, among those was Melbourne reviewer Joice NanKivell who asked to meet the author.  The book sold out in a couple of months and Champion wet his lips as he considered a second edition. It was here he made his major blunder.

Champion was at pains to point out the events of the book were real, for political reasons.  Hughes had called for a referendum on conscription in October 1916.  Universal military training for Australian men aged 18 to 60 had been compulsory since 1911. The referendums, if carried, would have extended this requirement to service overseas. The referendum, as was another in 1917, narrowly defeated after a bitter campaign. But that was too late for Champion, Loch and The Straits Impregnible.

Champion added a preliminary note on the first page of the second edition where no one could miss it. It read “This book written in Australia, Egypt and Gallipoli, is true”.  Someone sent the book and its provocative preliminary note to Victoria’s military censor Major LF Armstrong. Armstrong was furious and demanded the book be withdrawn from sale. He also threatened Champion’s publishing house with legal action for breaching the War Precautions Act.

Champion didn’t give in straight away. He hired lawyer and friend Maurice Blackburn to negotiate with the censor’s office. Blackburn achieved a compromise; the book would be withdrawn but allowed to be published at a later date, if Loch writing as de Loghe would pen a series of pro-war articles and promote enlistment. Loch was in anguish over losing the revenue from the book but agreed to the compromise. The book was withdrawn and Loch worked on the pro-war articles. It over 12 months for Loch to summon the energy to write them and they were eventually published as a pamphlet called One Crowded Hour, A Call to Arms shortly before the war ended in 1918.  It contains lines Loch must have hated writing: “You are mad, you men who will not go. There is no man in those armies who is not living at the top of his life.”

If this was of dubious literary merit, there was no doubting the calibre of The Impregnible Straits.  Miles Franklin, a friend of Champion’s wife, saw it as an insight into the mindset of Australian soldiers and why they accepted the senselessness of Gallipoli without much complaint. She sold the British rights to Sir John Murray’s publishing house and they were published in 1917 with the provocative note included. Despite the parlous state of the war at the time,  British censors did not take exception. Murray would establish a life-long friendship with Loch and NanKivell Loch and published their later adventures in Ireland, Russia and Quaker refugee camps in Greece.

In 1927,  two successful books emerged that were critical of the war, Rupert Graves “Goodbye to all That” and Erich Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Murray tried to cash in with another edition of Loch’s book (still under the name of de Loghe). Murray wanted Loch to include a chapter on his adventures in the Russian-Polish and Greek-Turkish wars but he never got around to it. The project was eventually shelved by World War II.

In that war Loch and his wife rescued a thousand Jews in Bucharest and led Polish refugees to Cyprus and Palestine. They returned to Greece after the war and Loch died in 1954. Nankivell Loch died in 1982, aged 95.  In 2006 a museum opened in their honour in Greece and it wasn’t until a year after that, that Loch’s book was rediscovered in Australia. Susanna and Jake de Vries included the book with a biography of Loch under the title To Hell and Back. After 91 years. the banned account of Gallipoli by Sydney Loch was finally out in the open in its home country.

Of the four States participating in the agreement-New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia – only NSW has not completed its milestone to publicly release a protocol for referring projects to the new Independent Expert Scientific Committee (IESC). The issue is that the NSW and Commonwealth Governments have not agreed on NSW’s draft protocol. The report said it remained unclear how NSW would decide which projects to refer to the IESC for advice outside of land it has identified as ‘Strategic Agricultural Land’.

This delay may defer the provision of NSW project applications to the IESC for advice until the protocol is published and will also affect the period to which the benchmark to refer all project applications to the IESC for advice before amending legislation, regulations and guidelines applies. Queensland, however remains on track having signed the National Partnership on February 14, 2012 (under the Bligh Government) thanks to a one-off $18 million payment from the Federal Government.

Despite complaints from the Newman Government about duplication of regulatory bodies, the new government endorsed the protocol for project referral on October 1 2012. The protocol requires Queensland government officers to refer a proposal if it is deemed a ‘project application’ (that is, it requires an Environmental Impact Statement) and it is ‘likely’ to have a ‘significant impact on water resources’.  However as of October 2012 Queensland has not referred any projects to the IESC, though the Commonwealth has referred several Queensland projects.

The aim of the IESC is to give Australian governments solid scientific advice on the potential effects of CSG and large coal mining developments on water resources. On November 27 last year, federal environment and water minister Tony Burke announced its creation as a statutory body under amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.  The six-person committee’s role is advisory only and it has no responsibility for issuing approvals for projects or recommending whether a project should or should not be approved.

At the time, Tony Burke said the Committee was created to provide advice on coal seam gas proposals and large coal mining developments. ”The work of this committee will give communities reason to be confident that future decisions about coal seam gas and large coal mining development are informed by the best possible science,” Burke said.

Releasing its first report this month, the COAG Reform Council chair former Victorian premier John Brumby said CSG mining was a contentious issue. ”Coal seam gas mining has an important role to play in Australia’s future energy security and economic development,” Brumby said. ”This agreement aims to improve the community’s confidence in decisions on coal seam gas and large coal mining development by informing those decisions with substantially improved science and independent expert advice.” Brumby said in the five years to 2010-11, CSG production increased from 2% to 11% of Australia’s total gas production.  ”Coal seam gas is an important source of natural gas that has the potential to strengthen Australia’s long-term energy security and to further expand energy exports to meet growing global demand for energy,” he said.

The report found Australia’s CSG reserves that have been identified as profitably extractable have been increasing in recent years up to around 35 000 petajoules (PJ) .Estimates suggest a further 65,000 PJ could become economically viable in the future and there are even larger estimates of inferred (122 000 PJ) and potential (259 000 PJ) CSG resources. The report said the community was concerned about potential environmental impacts of new developments including the volume of water produced as a by-product of CSG extraction and possible contamination of fresh water aquifers.

It identified three priority areas to strengthen decision making:

1. more closely identifying potential and actual impacts on water resources, and avoid or minimise significant impacts through a transparent process that builds public confidence

2 substantially improving governments’ collective scientific understanding of the actual and potential effects of CSG and coal mining developments on water resources

3 ensuring the best scientific information and expertise underpins all relevant regulatory processes and decisions.

The Surat Basin is one of the priority areas identified for bioregional assessment. The report says the bioregional assessments would analyse the ecology, hydrology and geology of an area to assess the potential risks to water resources as a result of the impacts of coal seam gas or large coal mining  developments.“These assessments will provide advice to governments about the water related resources and risks on a region-wide, rather than project specific basis,” the report said.

The National Partnership program will provide $50m over three financial years with 50% going to the states and 25% each to according to the relative distribution of coal production and CSG projects.

Commonwealth-referred Queensland projects under consideration by IESC are:

Stanmore ‘The Range’ Open Cut Coal Mine – being considered

Newland Coal Extension Project – being considered

Arrow Bowen Gas Project – advice provided

Santos Future Gas Supply Area Project – advice provided

Middlemount Coal Mine – advice provided

Anglo Coal (Foxleigh) Pty Ltd—Foxleigh Coal Mine Extension – being considered

Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd—Alpha Coal Project—Mine and Rail Development - advice provided

Aquila Resources Ltd—Blackwater Washpool Coal – being considered

Adani Resources Ltd—Carmichael Coal Mine and Rail Project – being considered

AMCI (Alpha) Pty Ltd—South Galilee Coal Project – being considered

Taroom Coal Project, Surat Basin – advice provided

Collingwood Coal Project, Surat Basin – advice provided

Codrilla Coal Mine, south east of Moranbah – advice provided

Sonoma Coal Mine Expansion, Collinsville – being considered

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Following in the footsteps of such unlikely musical superstars as Jerry Springer and Roy Keane, the life and times of Margaret Thatcher has finally been set to music. The theatres of regional Britain are currently packing them in with a tour of “Thatcher – The Musical!” the life and times of the country’s most controversial 20th century Prime Minister set to music and comedy. It features an all-singing, all-dancing cast of ten women who croon their way to such standards as The Cabinet Shuffle, The Grocers Daughter and The Thatcher Anthem.

The musical is the brainchild of the Wolverhampton-based women’s company Foursight Theatre and documents Thatcher’s rise from young girl to international stateswoman. The cast play eight different Maggies; the Grocer’s Daughter, Twinset Maggie, Power Suit Maggie, Military Maggie, Britannia Maggie, Sacrificial Maggie, Broken Maggie and Diva Maggie, and also take turns as the men in her life husband Dennis, Ronald Reagan, Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine. The musical ends with the line of Diva Maggie “”I am the iron in your bloodstream, I’m in your DNA!”.

The last one reminds us of the Iron Lady, a moniker that dates to 1976. Then leader of the Opposition, she made her famous “Britain Awake” speech at Kensington Town Hall where she attacked the Soviet Union. In the speech she said “The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet politburo don’t have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.” The Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Red Star picked up the speech and called her the “Iron Lady”. The label was popularised by Radio Moscow and Thatcher herself quickly saw its advantages.

Thatcher was always steeped in politics. Born in 1925, she was the daughter of a grocer and Methodist lay preacher Alfred Roberts who was an independent councillor and mayor with Liberal sympathies. She was educated at Oxford where she graduated in chemistry in 1947. She was elected president of the student Conservative Association at Oxford and made herself known to the leadership of her party at the time of its General Election defeat of 1945. She worked as a research chemist at J Lyons and co where she was a member of the team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream.

In the early 1950s she ran and lost elections in the strong Labour seat of Dartford though she did considerably cut the majority both times. She also won national publicity as the youngest female candidate in the country. There she met a local businessman Denis Thatcher. They married in 1951 and had twins, Mark and Carol, two years later. Denis had a successful career in the oil industry and became a director of Castrol. He funded his wife’s training as a lawyer, specialising in taxation. Finally she found a safe Tory seat in London and was elected to Parliament in 1959 as MP for Finchley.

Two years later Harold Macmillan appointed her Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Pensions, a position she held until Labour won the 1964 election. In opposition, she was a Ted Heath supporter and was  rewarded with a role in the shadow cabinet in 1967. When Heath won power in 1970, Thatcher was appointed Education secretary and was charged with reducing the budget. Her immediate decision to abolish free milk for 7 to 11 year olds in state schools led to the cry of “Mrs. Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”. Despite protests from Labour councils, Thatcher got her way and the cuts saved £14m a year.

Heath lost to Harold Wilson again in 1974 and Thatcher was named shadow environment secretary. After he lost a second election later that year, the party held a leadership ballot. Thatcher surprisingly pipped Heath’s preferred successor William Whitelaw to become Britain’s first female party leader. Thatcher slowly won over the party to her views and sat back and watched as the Labour government unravelled, finally collapsing after the widespread strikes in the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent, a Shakespearean label popularised by the Sun, which backed Thatcher.

The Conservative Party won the 1979 election with a margin of 44 seats. Thatcher had a mandate for change but her first two years in office weren’t easy with unemployment remaining stubbornly high and economic improvement slow. Bobby Sands led an IRA hunger strike in the Maze Prison in 1981 in which he and 9 others starved to death. Despite criticism by the European Commission of Human Rights and the Irish Government, Thatcher maintained a public hardline attitude saying “Crime is crime is crime. It is not political.” Behind the scenes however, her Ulster Secretary James Prior negotiated a package of concessions with the surviving Maze prisoners.

Domestically, Thatcher increased interest rates and VAT. But with an election looming and defeat likely, salvation came for Thatcher with the Falklands War. The Argentinean junta, looking to deflect attention from their own domestic woes invaded the South Atlantic islands in April 1982. Riding a wave of nationalist sentiment, Thatcher launched a naval task force to reclaim the islands.

Aided by a Labour split, Thatcher won the 1983 election in a landslide increasing her majority by 100 seats. Her next term was marked by battles against the union movement. The National Union of Mineworkers launched a massive strike in 1984 to protest proposals to close a large number of mines. Thatcher was ready for them. She insisted that coal stocks were built up to avoid politically sensitive electricity cuts. She increased police powers and rushed anti-union laws through parliament. Political commentator Brian Walden described the miners’ strike as “a civil war without guns“. Eventually she wore down the miners, split their leadership and forced them to concede defeat after a year of picketing.

The IRA came back to haunt Thatcher in October 1984. The Prime Minister was staying at the Brighton Grand Hotel on the eve of both her 59th birthday and the annual Conservative Party conference. The IRA detonated two large bombs in the hotel at 3am, one of which tore through her bathroom barely two minutes after she had used it. She and husband Denis escaped injury, but five others including a Tory MP were killed and many were injured. The following day the IRA responsibility with the chilling message “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Thatcher went on to speak to the conference as scheduled at 9:30am that morning to great acclaim.

Economically, Thatcher maintained her fervent belief in the power of the markets. She started to sell off the large state utilities and council homes to their residents. She abolished the large city councils including the Greater London Council as these were all controlled by Labour. With the country in the middle of an economic boom, she had another comfortable election victory in 1987 with a slightly reduced majority. Towards the end of her regime, the chemist in her returned as she started to champion environmental issues. She began to discuss the issues of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain. At the 1988 conference she told the party “No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy- with full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full”.

But with the economy stalling again, her popularity declined. She fell out with her foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe and Chancellor Nigel Lawson over their desire to force EU monetary union. In 1990, her idea t0 replace local government rates by the deeply unpopular “poll tax” proved to be her biggest mistake. With interest rates running at 15%, Howe resigned and precipitated a party leadership ballot. Michael Heseltine ran against her but the first ballot was inconclusive. Before the second ballot, Thatcher decided to resign. She supported John Major as her successor who went on to retain power in 1992.

That same year, she was appointed to the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher. She continued to have a high public profile and spoke out on many issues of the day. She famously supported Pinochet during his incarceration in London in 1998. By then Labour had finally ended the Tory stranglehold on power by moving to the middle of the political spectrum. When Margaret Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday in 2005, her old colleague Geoffrey Howe said ”Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible”.  It’s a notion embraced by the final scene in Thatcher the Musical:  Diva Maggie, played by Lorna Laidlaw, emerges to perform a nightmarish, swivelled-eyed song: “we are all Thatcherites now”.

By coincidence it filtered back to the top of the pile as the media baron made a rare return to his native land last week. As he appeared at the Melbourne gig, he was greeted by a protester wearing a mask of Murdoch as the devil. The image of Murdoch as Satan won’t bother a Catholic/wee free 82-year-old whose gods are money and power but the protester was not the first nor last to imagine him as evil incarnate.

Forbes ranks Murdoch as only the 91^st wealthiest person in the world though the 26^th most powerful person. In this category Forbes tucks him in one spot ahead of Jeff Bezos of Amazon and one behind Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Yet it hard to imagine similar hatred against Bezos or Zuckerberg. Despite a silver spoon upbringing, Murdoch has always been an outsider. He is also a different era to the two Americans that have built international empires in his wake and his modus operandi has always been blatantly ‘my way or the highway’.

Only 200 pages in, Shawcross’s book has a gripping read following Murdoch’s footsteps, from out of the giant shadow of his father Keith and into the world of international communications. Murdoch snr was one of the most important people in Australia in the first half of the 20th century. In 1915 young Keith’s reports from Turkey to the Australian Prime Minister precipitated the end of the Gallipoli campaign. He grew as an editor in the 1920s under the tutelage of British press baron Viscount Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth.

Harmsworth showed Murdoch snr the importance of keeping a paper lively, a virtue Keith passed on to Rupert. Keith Murdoch was a hugely influential managing editor but at his death in 1952 aged 63 he only owned two newspapers: the Adelaide News and the Brisbane Courier-Mail. The titles passed to his only son. Young Rupert was still at Oxford University but already well mentored in the successful ways of newspapers by Harmsworth through his father: explain, simplify, clarify.

His mother Dame Elizabeth was immensely powerful in her own way and it was the widow’s recommendation they should sell the Courier-Mail when the Herald and Weekly Times came calling. Still overseas, Rupert acquiesced but was furious and was determined to build up what was left of his inheritance quickly. The Adelaide News was the minor paper in town compared to the Advertiser. But Murdoch’s inexhaustible energy pumped it up.

Never with much time for “elites”, Murdoch delighted in stoking up the News’s anti-authoritarian voice. But in conservative Adelaide, the News never strayed too far from accepted opinions. Murdoch was left-wing at Oxford and had a strong interest in Communism and a bust of Lenin in his dorm room. But once established as a newspaper owner, instinctive love of the ways of capitalism grabbed him by the throat. Even more than his managing editor father, Rupert became obsessed by the bottom line. He learned quickly how to pick winning politicians and then back them all the way.

Murdoch was more than just an astute proprietor; he had great knowledge of all area of his business. Often he and his senior managers would put out the paper when journalists went on strike. He impressed the printers in London when he climbed onto a machine and found the bar that would fold the pages to ensure the presses could run in tabloid format. Murdoch had inexhaustible energy and would run his business by telephone, constantly looking for deals to expand his footprint. His specialty was purchasing loss-making operations and turning them around.

He quickly outgrew Adelaide and brought his racy tabloid format to Perth before breaking into the Sydney market. Fairfax’s boss Rupert “Rags” Henderson preferred to sell a down-at-heels Mirror to Murdoch in 1960 ahead of more established rivals (to the chagrin of his Fairfax board). Murdoch seized the chance to buy in to Australian’s premier market-place. He could not immediately break into Sydney television but his Adelaide station was making plenty of money.

In the late 1960s, Murdoch was already looking toward the UK and USA.  He bought the News of the World after a protracted battle with Robert Maxwell and later The Sun. The News of the Screws was already a product of the gutter before Murdoch bought it, but the Dirty Digger (as the unforgiving British establishment called him) took it that step further.  While his papers were successful, he and especially his second wife Anna Torv, hated London. Anna was the intended victim of a kidnapping and the wife of an employee died in her stead. They were more anxious than ever to get a foothold in the US.

Murdoch started with two papers in San Antonio, Texas. The papers performed solidly though Texans were slow to appreciate Murdoch’s formula for success: exaggerated headlines, a lively style and infatuation with sex and crime. But it worked better once he got his foothold into New York through The Post,  the third paper in the US’s biggest city behind the News and the Times. But the summer of 1977 and the long-running Son of Sam saga, gave Murdoch the chance to dominate news. The powers-that-be and his rivals detested Murdoch’s hyped story-at-all-costs but he couldn’t care less. What did they know, they were just elitists or “pipe smoking journalist academics” and he was giving the people what they wanted. Murdoch’s power in his native land grew as his international interests expanded. He could even afford a loss-leader: The Australian.

Founded in 1964, the Australian was unique as a national paper in a country with deep metropolitan divisions. Its early years quickly established itself as a serious force and under editor Adrian Deamer an important part of the national political conversation. But Deamer was too independent for Murdoch. Deamer was good (and Murdoch grouchily acknowledged him as the paper’s best editor 20 years later), but he was too far removed from Murdoch’s growing conservatism and was sacked. Murdoch wanted editors who knew how to implement his formula, not set a path for social revolution.

Though he supported Whitlam in 1972, Murdoch was actively plotting against him three years later. Malcolm Fraser was the beneficiary (just as New York Mayor Ed Koch was two years later) of Murdoch political largesse. As a US watcher of that Koch election put it, “When the New York Times gives its support you’ll be lucky to get an editorial but when Murdoch supports you, you get the whole paper”.

Murdoch was gaining the reputation of a king-maker, something that prospective kings would quickly learn to take into account in their dealings with him. Australia is now small potatoes in Murdoch’s global reach but he remains the dominant figure in the local landscape.  The Greens may call Murdoch’s News Ltd hate media, but Prime Minister-in-waiting Tony Abbott was in the IPA audience last week listening to the Sun King. In 2011, former News Ltd editor Bruce Guthrie suggested Murdoch has let it be known within his organisation that Australia needed a change of government and his editors were simply doing his bidding. Guthrie had a spectacular falling out with Murdoch and is likely biased but he makes a good point about the extent of his company’s power: “Given News controls about 70 per cent of Australian newspapers, which, in turn, feed talkback radio and evening news bulletins, that’s a fight most politicians want to avoid.”

At the IPA dinner, Abbott called Murdoch  ”probably the Australian who has most shaped the world”.  Abbott was on less firmer ground when he said Murdoch’s opinionated but broad-minded publications had “borne his ideals but never his fingerprints”.  “He’s influenced them but he’s never dictated to them”, Abbott claimed. The point is, over the years Murdoch hasn’t had to dictate to his editors. With a few courageous exceptions like Deamer and Guthrie aside, most of them have known exactly what to do to keep their job.

Latham was never a fan of Rudd, but he was right the former Prime Minister always had a healthy dose of whatever it takes, hidden only slightly behind his very thin skin. A few days ago he used the bravura of a St Patrick’s Day speech to make an Ides of March declaration “I will challenge…”.  The pause that came before the rest: “…any of the Liberals present to claim to have a greater Irish heritage than me” hid the real punchline: It was Gillard’s job he was challenging for.  But just as Rudd’s Irishness is fake, today he proved he was no Cassius either.  After consulting his backers, he realised he didn’t have the numbers again and decided not to contest the ballot.  In a media statement, Rudd painted his decision as “honouring his word” not to challenge.

And so Gillard won her third ballot as leader, the two unopposed ballots sandwiching her one direct victory over Rudd last year. Television screens which boasted ‘non-stop coverage of the Labor leadership’ fixed on the sombre Prime Minister as she faced the Canberra press gallery after the vote. Over the constant whirring and clicking from photographers, Gillard said she would make a statement but would not take questions today, because “there is very much work to do”.

Gillard thanked the caucus for its continued support. She accepted it as Prime Minister and Labor leader, not because she sought office for its own sake, but to help Australia meet it challenges. Gillard repeated they had a lot of work to do to ensure “jobs and opportunity” and to ensure they were “getting ready for the future”.

Gillard outlined the Government’s purpose: implementing the NBN, rolling out Disability Care, fighting cost of living pressures, and above all increasing access to “world class education”.   Gillard said the leadership battle was settled in the most conclusive way possible. “It has ended now.” Gillard said they would be getting on with the job “in a few minutes” and handed over to deputy PM, Wayne Swan, also re-elected unopposed.

Swan said there was strong support for the PM in the party room. “This Prime Minister is a tough leader, and a leader who is a great champion for our country and for the reforms that are required to create future prosperity,” Swan said.  “Today’s result does end these matters once and for all.”  Swan like his boss, ended with the promise to get back to work. After all, he has a budget to prepare.

Expect this mantra of “work” to be used a lot in the coming months as Labor clears the decks for the September election. But don’t expect the press gallery to pay any notice. Joe Hildebrand set the tone for things to come with a vicious attack on Gillard’s regime, outing himself as a Rudd supporter in the process: “For an electrifying few hours this week there was the tantalising prospect that Labor was not hurtling towards certain oblivion and there was a chance, however remote, that it might actually win the next election on the back of a resurgent Kevin Rudd.”

Hildebrand was right about the disaster of Rudd’s panicked overthrow in 2010 for which Labor is repenting at leisure. But putting Rudd back in now would be beyond panic. Electoral defeat in 2013 is still the likely outcome for either leader, given the polls and the contempt of the press gallery. Yet today’s events only show how much Rudd is still detested in the party for his overwhelming ego and his chronic failures to consult as leader.

Conroy proposed five reforms to deal with issues raised in both inquiries.  They were:  a beefed-up press standards model for print and online news media, the introduction of a Public Interest Test for mergers and acquisitions policed for diversity by a Public Interest Media Advocate (PIMA), upgrading the ABC and SBS charters for online and digital activities, allocating the sixth free-to-air channel to community television and offering a rebate for more Australian content.

Conroy proposed three other reforms to be sent to parliamentary committee: The abolition of the 75% local reach rule, on-air reporting of ACMA regulation breaches and whether ACMA should consider news program supply agreements when determining if someone is in control of a commercial television broadcasting service.

University professor and media policy commentator Terry Flew calls the reforms low key and a “ very cautious, and in many ways piecemeal” response to the two inquiries. “It has probably not modernised media laws sufficiently to ‘tackle the challenges of the future’, although it does make some overdue changes to existing law,” Flew said.

But the Australian media that will be subject to the change saw it very differently.  For them, the five proposals were nothing less than an assault on freedom of speech. The Sydney Telegraph put Conroy in a rogues gallery of dictators likening him to Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim, Mugabe and Ahmadinejad. News Ltd group editorial director Campbell Reid defended the Telegraph’s chutzpah as a “provocative tabloid presentation of an incredibly provocative act by a Government.”  The Telegraph later issued an “apology” for printing a picture of Conroy dressed as Stalin. The apology was to Stalin who although “a despicable and evil tyrant who was responsible for the death of many millions,” he at least was “upfront” in his efforts to control the media.

This notion of control was picked up by many of the Tele’s News stablemates. Without a scrap of evidence, the Herald Sun turned Conroy’s package into “a deplorable assault on freedom of speech.”  This glossed over the assaults on freedom of speech practiced by the company that owns half the Australian media landscape.

James Paterson expressed the view of his bosses at The Australian to reveal the laws’ real purpose: to punish and rein in the federal government’s critics in the media. News Ltd boss Kim Williams said the proposals were “government sanctioned journalism”  and “dangerous policy” while the PIMA would be an “unnecessary novel creation”. Fairfax boss Greg Hyland was more measured but still saw the PIMA as a bridge too far.

No wonder Conroy took to the airwaves to describe Williams’ reaction as “hysterical”. He quoted at length from both inquiries from submissions which went to the heart of News Ltd’s huge penetration in the Australian market – something no-one from News was willing to admit was an issue. Conroy admitted the public interest test was contentious but said News and Fairfax had 86% of the market, “one of the most concentrated media sectors in the world.”

However in many respects the battle is irrelevant. Conroy has joined the bald Williams in fighting over a comb. Only a few media commentators like Alan Kohler understood the pointlessness of the struggle. He says regulating for diversity and complaint handling is irrelevant and unnecessary in a world that is quickly moving past the monoliths of print and broadcasting.

“Rebuilding trust with customers and keeping it is the greatest of all the challenges facing the media in the digital age, and dealing properly with complaints is an important part of doing that,” Kohler said. “The pity of it is that the PIMA and the complaints handling body will probably just be another set of slow, clanking bureaucracies that serve only to highlight the contempt that much of the media have for their customers.”

Waterford and the River Suir

The fourth and final siege came in the warm summer of 1922. While the weather was glorious, it was an ugly time for Ireland which cut itself to pieces in a murderous civil war. The new Free State government besieged Waterford in its campaign to defeat the rebels in the aftermath of the divisive treaty with Lloyd George’s government in Westminster. The odds were stacked against the rebels. The Free State army had British artillery and the support of the powerful organs of the church, the press and the industrial barons. However, the defenders did have military expertise as the majority of the IRA’s officers supported the anti-Treaty forces. It was the south of Ireland which bore the brunt of the conflict and Waterford’s turn began on 18 July.

A West Waterford man named Pax Whelan led the Anti-Treaty forces in the city. They were poorly organised and content to wait for the attack. No attempt was made to secure the heights above the city north of the river at Mount Misery. Anti-Treaty forces were instructed to operate independently in their own areas leading to slipshod communication and there was no overall plan. By contrast, the Free Staters were much better prepared, led by former American cavalry officer Colonel John T. Prout and assisted by two local men Paddy Paul and James McGrath. Paul was a gunnery officer in WW1 and then joined the IRA as brigadier of East Waterford. Paul knew his enemy well. He and Whelan  worked together during the War of Independence and leading the only attack on British forces in Waterford: the unsuccessful ambush at Pickardstown near Tramore in January 1921.

At the end of that war,  the new government in Dublin struggled to enforce its authority and on 22 May 1922 they sent Paul with orders to take command of Waterford and secure the barracks. He was promptly arrested by anti-Treaty forces and suffered injuries. Paul managed to escape from the Infirmary Hospital dressed as a nun. He fled back to Dublin to plot the re-capture of Waterford.

By 18 July he was back on Mount Misery overlooking the attack of his native city. It would not be easy. All approach roads were mined. The rebels were reinforced by volunteers from Cork and Kerry and had seized the barracks and fortified Ballybricken jail. They set up outposts in shops and hotels along the quay, as well as the post office and Reginald’s Tower. They also opened the spans on the road and rail bridges across the Suir. They outnumbered their opponents with 700 defenders in the city facing 550 Free State troops, many of whom had served in the British army. But the Free Staters had power on their side: two artillery pieces including an 18 pounder placed over the railway station and one lighter calibre piece. The 18 pounder was initially hamstrung as it faced rapid fire from the quays and a sniper on Ballybricken hill but would eventually prove to be a devastating difference.

All businesses in the city closed down except for the Tramore railway which operated continuously through the four days of the siege. Most townsfolk took advantage of the sunny weather to evacuate to the seaside until the fall of the city. At 6:45pm on Tuesday 18 July the attack began in brilliant sunshine. Paul’s first shell landed near his own home near Brewery House in Newgate St. His mother was working in the kitchen and narrowly avoided injury. But the majority of shells found their mark landing in Barrack St or near the jail.

The guns blazed away for four or five hours on the first night. The eerie silence that followed was shattered again at 6am the following morning as the guns opened up in excellent visibility. There were many direct hits on the barracks and the jail on top of the hill. Whelan moved his sharpshooters to Bilberry cliffs west of the quay and they managed to keep the attackers pinned down. The defenders inflicted heavy casualties from accurate machine gun fire from the post office on the quay under the command of Ballybricken chemist Pierce Power. But the shelling continued all day.

During a lull in the fire, Prout moved his major artillery piece onto the bridge but was prevented from using it by persistent gunfire from across the river. Prout had to come up with an alternative plan. The following night 150 men led by Captain Ned O’Brien moved east down the Rosslare railway to Giles Quay under the cover of darkness. O’Brien’s day job was a journalist for the Waterford News but now he was making the news not reporting it (he would later be killed on patrol in the city). His forces commandeered boats moored at the quay and rowed to the opposite shore where they encountered no resistance.  The back door to the city was wide open.

At Newtown school, they ambushed a motorised Anti-Treaty patrol. The attackers quickly captured the car and locked the occupants in the boot. They bypassed a rebel garrison in the park and found a prominent local Unionist known as “Lame” Dobbyn. Dobbyn was anxious to see the Republicans defeated and he gave the intruders the key of the Country Club on the strategic corner of the Mall and the Quay opposite Reginald’s Tower. The men entered the back of the building and overpowered a sleeping garrison stationed there. They had secured a vital corner of the city without firing a shot.

At 7:45am the next morning, the intruders opened fire on the Tower across the road and also raked the Mall and the Quays with machine gun fire. The surprise allowed Prout to secure the artillery on the bridge. Its gunfire from close range made the Quay untenable. The republicans retreated to Ballybricken. When a direct hit exploded in the magazine of the artillery barracks that evening, the area had to be evacuated. The end was near.

Whelan gathered his Dungarvan, Cork and Kerry units to escape to the west leaving Jerry Cronin in charge of a small band to defend the city. Cronin’s men retreated to Ballybricken Hill to fight the final battle for Waterford. At 11:50am on Friday 21 July 1922, shellfire breached the jail walls. After some bitter hand-to-hand fighting, Cronin’s forces surrendered. The fourth siege of Waterford was over.

The rebels were dispatched to Kilkenny and Newbridge jails, none of them taking up the offer to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government and join the Free State army. Prout spent the weekend in an open car with Paul and McGrath touring the city. The two local men pointed out Republicans who had escaped arrest.

Waterford was secure but the civil war dragged on for another year in West Munster. On 24 May 1923 anti-Treaty leaders issued unceremonious orders to “dump arms”. The civil war was over. By its end 3,000 people were dead, and 21,000 prisoners were in jails and internment camps. The war left a legacy of bitterness that infected the Irish polity for decades to come.

(this post was originally posted on the old Woolly Days on 29 December 2008)

His death yesterday aged 58 unleashed a wave of international tributes and a flood of emotion in Venezuela. His deputy Nicolas Maduro, who is favoured to win a new election in 30 days, spoke of “the immense pain of this historic tragedy.” Maduro called on Venezuelans to show love, respect and tranquility,  ”We ask our people to channel this pain into peace,” Maduro said.

Whatever the pain, Chavez leaves an immense void Maduro will find hard to fill. Chavez has dominated Venezuelan politics for over 20 years and became a major world political figure.  Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was the second of six sons of schoolteachers in the town of Sabaneta in the Western state of Barinas. Older brother Adán Chávez Frías is now the governor of that state. At 17, Hugo Chavez joined the Venezuelan academy of Military Sciences where he achieved Master’s degrees in military science and engineering. Chavez remained in the army and gradually worked his way through the ranks to become lieutenant colonel.

While a student, he developed his key philosophy: Bolivarianism, named for the greatest of South America’s generals and fellow Venezuelan Simon Bolivar. Bolivar proclaimed Venezuelan independence from Spain in 1810 and fought running battles with the Spanish over the next 11 years before becoming president of the original republic of Colombia (now Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela).   Chavez saw Bolivarianism as promoting the unification of Latin America. As president he changed the constitution and name of the country in 1999 to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Chavez first came to national prominence in 1992. Venezuela was undergoing a crisis under neo-liberal president Carlos Andres Perez then serving his second term. Venezuela’s economic stability was under threat when the Arab countries raised their oil production quotas to aid the collapse of the oil revenue-dependent Soviet Union. Prices plummeted and Perez introduced austerity measures. Chavez and fellow officer Francisco Arias Cardenas founded the MBR-200 (Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionaro 200) which plotted to overthrow the government. The coup of February 4, 1992 failed. Chavez only had the loyalty of 10% of the armed forces and failed to take the national TV station. Perez eluded capture and Chavez eventually surrendered. He went to prison but many poor Venezuelans saw him as a victim who had stood up against government corruption. Perez was ousted in 1993 and Chavez was pardoned by new president Rafael Caldera in 1994.

In 1998 Chavez campaigned for the presidency and gained significant support from Venezuela’s two largest banks. He won the election with 56% of the popular vote. He immediately got to work on road building, housing construction and mass vaccination. He also halted privatisations of the national social security system, the aluminium industry and the oil sector. He lobbied OPEC to reduce production to increase revenues. He was re-elected with an increased majority in 2000.

In 2002 his reform of the state oil company began a military coup. He was replaced and arrested. This sparked massive pro-Chavez protests and condemnation from the rest of South America. Chavez was restored to the leadership in triumph two days later. Only then did the US condemn the coup. British broadsheet The Observer reported the coup was linked to three senior US government officials, national security adviser Elliot Abrams, special envoy Otto Reich and intelligence chief John Negroponte.

Internal opposition to Chavez remained fierce. In 2004, Sumate (Spanish for “Join in”), a shadowy volunteer civil association funded by the US State Department, collected millions of signatures and activated the 1999 Constitution’s presidential recall provision. Chavez survived this with a 60% ‘no’ vote against the measure.

Chavez continued to use Venezuela’s increasing oil revenues to focus on expanding social programs. Economic activity also picked up markedly, reaching double-digit growth in 2004. He forged links with Argentina’s president Kirchner, China’s Hu, Cuba’s Castro and Iran’s Ahmadinejad. He ordered US troops and Christian missions out of Venezuela in 2005 and gave away almost seven thousand square kilometres of land to Amazonian tribes. He denounced US foreign policy but was the first leader to offer assistance to America after Cyclone Katrina. He told AP, “We place at the disposition of the people of the United States in the event of shortages: we have drinking water, food, we can provide fuel”. His offer was turned down.

Chavez was comfortably re-elected in December 2006 and he set up a commission to review the 1999 constitution. His referendum to include socially progressive reforms was  narrowly defeated but he won another referendum to change the law to allow him to run again in 2012. Despite the downturn in the Venezuelan economy and the increase in crime, he won again comfortably in that election.

Chavez remained deeply unpopular in elite US circles to the very end. The Atlantic announced the  death of a “controversial socialist revolutionary who rose to become president of Venezuela on failed promises of elevating the poor.” The New York Times was more nuanced but still judged his legacy as “a governing structure revolving around a single willful, mercurial personality.”  Meanwhile president Obama carefully avoided praising Chavez while promising to develop a “constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government”.

Writing in Crikey today, Guy Rundle said the simplistic reporting of Chavez in the west was based on the disjuncture between rich and poor countries that prompted Chavez’s election in the first place. “The con job of global neoliberalism, the promise, after the collapse of communism, that playing by the rules of a market-based global system, other countries could join the First World club,” Rundle said.  Nicolas Maduro now faces the formidable challenge of steering Venezuela through Chavez’s considerable and complex legacy.

Joh by Peter Gillan (Creative Commons)

But given the way he was catapulted into power by then premier Joh-Bjelke Petersen and what I’ve recently learned about the 1971 Springbok tour, it was no surprise to hear Condon reveals details of how politics and police were complicit in creating a ‘law and order’ model for Queensland.

Condon said Bjelke-Petersen told Police Union president Ron Edington during a secret meeting he would support their claim in the industrial court if they would back him up.  Condon’s tale reminds me of a much earlier book which was about the early years of Bjelke-Peterson’s rule, “Joh” by Hugh Lunn. (Note: the rest of this post is an update on an earlier piece I wrote on the old Woolly Days in 2007.)

Johannes Bjelke-Petersen (“Joh” to friends and foes alike) was Queensland’s longest serving Premier and one of the most controversial yet fascinating Australian politicians of the twentieth century. He was backward, uneducated, socially inept and often unintelligible but he crafted out a long-term premiership that promoted the power of industry under the cloak of law and order.

Joh was born in the small New Zealand North Island town of Dannevirke in 1911, the second son of Danish Lutheran pastor Carl George Bjelke-Petersen and his wife Maren. The Bjelke-Petersens moved to Queensland for health reasons and settled in Kingaroy in the South Burnett region. They bought a scrub-filled property they named “Bethany” and began to clear the land. Aged nine, young Joh was struck down with polio which left one leg a centimetre shorter than the other.

Despite his illness, Joh did farm chores every day before and after school. He left school aged 13 to work full time on the farm and he was driven by the desire to pay off the bank debt on the family farm. His father put the family deeper into debt by buying a second farm to feed their herd of dairy cows. It was Joh’s job to drive the cows to and from the second property. He also enjoyed reading the bible and struck up a friendship with a local Lutheran pastor who allowed Joh to take the Kingaroy service whenever he was away.

Joh heard that peanuts would grow well in the sandy soils. He overcame his father’s scepticism and cleared the second property to plant peanuts. Without bulldozers, Joh used teams of horses to pull the timber down. He lived in a cow bail on the property where the only furniture was a bed, a meat safe and a box for bread. The frugal cow bail would be his home for the next 15 years. Joh worked from dawn to dusk every day except Sunday and spent his evenings reading books about self-made men like Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison.

In 1933, aged 22, Joh talked his bank manager into a loan for a tractor. Soon he was well on top of his own work and hired his services out to his neighbour farmers. During the four month peanut harvesting season, Joh’s team would work all the local properties starting at dawn and finishing at 11pm under floodlights. By the war in 1939, Joh was harvesting peanuts in a big way. His polio made him unfit for service and he continued to work the land. He moved into the plant equipment business and bought bulldozers to clear the bush. By 1949 he was rich enough to learn to fly. He bought his own plane which gave him great mobility for his business and eventually his political career.

The young entrepreneur was courted by the Country Party and was elected to Kingaroy Shire Council in 1946. The following year he stood for the vacant Country party state seat of Nanango. Joh was elected, aged 36, and he joined a parliament that had being dominated by Labor for a generation. Joh appeared in the House as a fundamentalist, and in Lunn’s word a “blinkered, Calvinistic and rural” politician. He was jeered by the Government but he handled himself well and promoted the ideas of hard work, anti-unionism and an opposition to state control socialism.

In 1952, the now 40 year old confirmed bachelor finally married. His bride was a Florence Gilmour of Brisbane, the private secretary of the Main Roads Commissioner. Flo had a difficult job to house train Joh but the pair’s talents were in harmony. Her administrative skills balanced Joh’s political nous and they became a formidable team as they began to search for oil.

Politically, the non-drinking, non-smoking Joh remained an outsider, even within his own party. In the 1957 state election Labor imploded due to the DLP split and the Country Party swept to power with Joh firmly on the back bench. In 1963 Premier Frank Nicklin surprisingly chose him to be minister for works and housing. It was a shock because Joh had once heckled Nicklin for increasing road transport fees. But Nicklin now noted Joh possessed a wide knowledge of “Queensland and its requirements”. In 1968 Nicklin retired and the popular Jack Pizzey was unanimously anointed his successor. New Police Minister Bjelke-Petersen surprisingly won the contest for deputy leader over more fancied opponents. But with Pizzey expected to lead for the next decade, no one made much of this victory.

Barely six months into his reign, Jack Pizzey died suddenly. Joh was elected unopposed as Country party leader and heir apparent to the premiership. Liberal coalition leader and caretaker Premier Gordon Chalk said he, not Joh, should have the top job. But the partners voted along party lines and Joh was elected premier 26 votes to 19. His first act was a reading from the Bible on George St during a Bible readathon.

His elevation to the top job finally made him a figure of public interest. The newspapers scrutinised his share holdings in oil and in mining company Comalco which suggested he had done well from government decisions. Joh refused to divest his shares. ABC reporter Allen Callaghan led the media pack against Joh and his party began to launch a challenge to his rule. In 1970 Joh stared down a party room revolt and needed his own casting vote to avoid the sack.

Things began to turn around in 1971 when Joh appointed the poacher as gamekeeper. Allen Callaghan became his new press secretary and his immediate task was to stop the media from seeing Joh as an inept country bumpkin. He seized the opportunity presented by the Springboks Tour. The Springboks arrived in the context of widespread condemnation of South Africa’s racial policies and their games caused riots in the southern cities.

Under advice from Callaghan, Joh declared a state of emergency which allowed them to commandeer the RNA venue (and outlaw labour strikes) and gave the police unlimited powers to arrest without warrant. The Trade Hall strikes against the Powers were condemned by the public for disruption of services and hundreds of protesters were baton-charged by police on Wickham Terrace. Callaghan successfully framed the debate as a law and order issue and made Joh look a strong leader. Callaghan also taught Joh the basics of television. Sometimes he would stand behind Joh and give him signals when he was going off-beam.

Joh won the propaganda battle and easily retained power in the 1972 State election with the help of the weighting of country votes known as the “bjelkemander”. Despite that win, the Country Party knew they needed to make inroads in the metropolitan areas to guarantee continued success. In 1973 they merged with the Queensland DLP and later renamed the new entity the National Party (based on the successful NZ party of that name).

In 1972, Gough Whitlam won the Federal election, Labor’s first time in office since 1949. Joh became Whitlam’s most implacable opponent attacking the government on every conceivable issue. In 1974 the Whitlam government was one short of a senate majority and tried to remove an opponent. They made DLP senator (and former Queensland Labor Premier) Vince Gair ambassador to Ireland so that one extra seat would be contested at the election that Labor was likely to win. But Joh got wind of his plan and put in place a ruse (the “night of the long prawns“) to declare the election writs before Gair could formally resign. The result was that Gair’s seat was not contested and Labor would not gain the majority. The delighted opposition asked Whitlam in parliament whether he had ever “been taken for a ride” by the pilot Bjelke-Petersen. Whitlam responded by calling a double dissolution election of both houses.

That election did not resolve the impasse and Labor won only four of ten Queensland Senate seats. Joh turned his attention to the 1974 State election and he criss-crossed Queensland by plane to make his winning point. Labor was virtually wiped out and the Nationals vote jumped ten percent, winning some city seats. Joh was at the height of his powers. Now he could concentrate on delivering a knock-out blow to Whitlam.

The deadlocked Senate situation changed in 1975 when Labor senator Bertie Millner died at his desk in Brisbane. The political convention was that Millner’s Senate seat would go to the next man on the Labor ticket, Dr Mal Colston (a man who would later enter into Labor infamy as a ‘turncoat’). Bjelke-Petersen announced publicly he wanted Labor to put up three nominations and state parliament would choose the man it wanted. Labor refused. The Coalition began a smear campaign against Colston suggesting he was the prime candidate in a 1962 arson case.

Joh’s office then found an unlikely candidate. He was Albert Field, 64, disaffected ALP member and president of the Federated Furnishing Trade Union. Joh nominated Field as the Senate candidate despite the strenuous objections of Labor. Field was pilloried by the southern media and ostracised by Labor. Questioned about the Senate appointment, Whitlam described Joh as a “bible-bashing bastard”. Whitlam had gone too far. Insulting the church on TV was not a good look and there was an inevitable backlash. With the Senate refusing budget supply, Governor-General John Kerr sacked Whitlam’s Government in November 1975.

Joh had seen off his nemesis but back in state politics, Joh had to ride out the storm caused by the police heavy-handed tactics in destroying a hippie commune at Cedar Bay north of Cairns. He was also troubled by the long-running inquiry that followed. Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod resigned in protest saying Queensland was becoming a police state. Whitrod was also furious at the promotion of unknown Terry Lewis to deputy commissioner over many more senior officers.

Lunn’s book “Joh” was published in 1978 which was the year Lewis replaced Whitrod.
It also misses out on the excesses of the 1980s era. Joh trampled on civil liberties, encouraged police corruption and as his hubris grew, he destroyed John Howard’s hopes of winning power in 1987 with his ill-judged ‘Joh for Canberra’ crusade. That same year, the ABC 4 Corners episode “The Moonlight State” began to bring the corruption into the public record. The Fitzgerald Inquiry released its findings in 1989 and implicated senior members of Joh’s government. Joh was eventually forced to resign. He avoided prison for perjury at the Inquiry due to a deadlocked jury whose foreman was a member of the National Party. He died in 2005 and was buried at the family property “Bethany” after a state funeral organised by Labor Premier Peter Beattie who was arrested by Joh’s police back in 1971. He remains a decisive and divisive figure in state politics and like his trial, the jury remains split on his legacy.

As it happens, I was in Brisbane last Sunday, the day of the talk, so accepted the invite. I was intrigued that the Queensland Police Force (now renamed as Qld Police Service) would host a session on what was clearly not one of their finest hours. The man who emailed me the invite was Barry Krosch  a name I was unfamiliar with. Krosch, I would later find out was a former police officer who spend nine years in the special branch and later assisted the Fitzgerald Inquiry which blew the lid on Queensland’s political and police corruption during the 70s and 80s.

Now retired to Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s town of Kingaroy, he is doing his masters at Griffith Uni on the study of the special branch. It was he who organised the many speakers on the day at the Police Museum and gave his own insights to special branch activities, though he was not in the force at the time of the riots. Krosch spoke about their interactions with ASIO and shared examples of their filing system which bordered on the obsessive –  the Springbok tour was called “Operation SATOUR” and filed under “5K” for ‘visits and ships’ not to be confused with ‘7K’ which catalogued those deemed ‘mentally unbalanced and cranks’.

Those that came along to the Museum to hear Krosch and others weren’t cranks but they probably weren’t a typical police audience either.  The MC on the day was Brisbane News Ltd boss David Fagan. I am not the biggest fan of Fagan nor his flagship product the Courier-Mail but he was a smooth and perfect host on the day. Fagan noted the subject under discussion had a very profound effect on Queensland politics for two decades. It strengthened the power of a vulnerable new Premier who could “barely string a sentence together” under the badge of law and order with “unfortunate consequences” while it radicalised a generation on the left. One later speaker – Terry O’Gorman – would  tell us how that radicalisation occurred.  Another radical from the era, the now-journalism professor Alan Knight, gave his eye-witness account as well as outlining the failures of the media to expose what happened, earning the Courier-Mail the title of Brisbane’s Pravda.

But it was Krosch’s thesis supervisor Professor Mark Finnane who opened the session with a wider political context for the 1971 riots. The riots did not magically appear from nowhere, Finnane argued, but were rather a continuation of major political ideas and conflicts affecting sport across Australia and the world. By the 1960s, the South African apartheid system was fully fledged and an increasingly obvious anomaly in post-colonial Africa. The world pressure was intense and found voice in South Africa’s exclusion from the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth in 1962 and the Tokyo Olympics two years later. They were also suspended from FIFA in 1964 though not formally kicked out until after the 1976 Soweto riots.

But the British codes of rugby and cricket held out. Teams from Australia toured South Africa and when the South Africans came to Australia they were confronted by protests wherever they went. When the Springboks came in 1971, thousands marched against them in Melbourne and Sydney. Conservative governments in Canberra and the states hated the ‘leftist tendencies’ of the protesters but it was Joh who opposed with ‘special fervour’, as Finnane put it.

Lawyer and Australian Council for Civil Liberties president Terry O’Gorman took the story onwards from this point. O’Gorman now sees Joh’s actions as an abuse of power compounded by Australia’s lack of a Bill of Rights. But the protests did not register  immediately to him at the time. O’Gorman was a deeply Catholic and conservative young man and was studying law at the University of Queensland, oblivious to the left-wing protests going on around him. He was not involved on that Thursday, July 22 when police charged on the protestors outside the Springboks’ motel at Tower Mill. With the aid of agent provocateurs in the mob, the crowd was sent fleeing down the hill resulting in many serious injuries.

A day later O’Gorman heard the stories of students involved. Reformist police boss Ray Whitrod had tried to keep order but many zealous country officers equated protesters as commies and disobeyed him. O’Gorman immediately realised there was a disconnect between what he was learning about the principles of law and the lack of theoretical restraint in the police upholding those laws. He agreed to join the legal observer group on the day of the game.

The day remains etched in his memory with its fearful tension and excessive use of force. O’Gorman became of one of those that Fagan said were radicalised by the riots and a fierce opponent of the regime. He would have his revenge by cross-questioning Joh at the Fitzgerald Inquiry to devastating results. But O’Gorman wasn’t thinking about 1971 or 1989 when he concluded his talk, but rather could it happen again. The G20 meeting in Brisbane next year and the Commonwealth Games in 2018 will be tests of whether governments cloak themselves in law and order and whether police again equate protests with terrorism, he said. “It behoves us to ensure all voices are heard, including protest voices, just as police do their difficult job of protecting heads of state.”