Joh: Last King of Queensland

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- Ah, loud and clear. Very well done.

- He was almost the premier by accident,

certainly not a born politician.

- And we're meeting the man who's the longest serving

and certainly the most controversial premier

this country has ever known.

I'd like you to welcome from our Brisbane studio,

the Premier of Queensland, Mr. Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Give him a big welcome.

Thank you very much.

Who's Joh?

Do you really want to know?

Who's Joh?

- I don't think he was a grand master genius

that planned and plotted.

I think he was one of those guys that successfully bumbled.

- I think Joh was a force of nature.

He was... He was God.

And Joh, of course,

saw himself as being on a mission from God.

Joh is God.

To hell with that,

the trees and animals were our religion before Joh came.

- Joh was a very boring, mundane character.

- This may surprise you, but he had charisma.

He was a patriot.

I mean, he believed in Australia,

particularly the Queensland version of Australia.

Power-hungry.

Dictator.

- I think I respect him more than anybody else

I've ever met.

- I thought he was an absolute corrupt bastard.

- No, but he represented the mindset of the state.

He was a complete dead shit,

and the world is better off without him.

- The crazier things got, the vote went up.

- Well, he wasn't Rudolph Valentino

in the looks department.

He couldn't string three coherent words together,

but he was an innovator.

And a real country man.

Looking back, in many ways,

Joh wrote the playbook for Trump.

- It's like, well, he made no sense back then,

so how can you explain him now?

Joh was this crazy politician

who was in Parliament for 40 years

and Premier of Queensland for 19,

and he was called a Bible-bashing bastard.

The hillbilly dictator.

He spoke really strangely in press conferences,

but was a cunning old guy.

He tried to run for Prime Minister of Australia,

but lost.

He was accused of corruption but never convicted,

and apparently when he was voted out by his own team,

he locked himself in his office and wouldn't come out.

Good evening

on this historic day in Queensland politics.

There is absolute confusion, chaos and turmoil

in the government.

What we can say for certain is this.

The Premier, Sir Joh, is still Premier,

but isolated, and refuses to resign

to make way for the new regime

elected unanimously by National Party MPs today.

- Bjelke-Petersen had locked the doors.

He refuses to budge.

- Well, yes, he's still in his office

at the executive building.

He is a bitterly disappointed man.

- Joh was not accepting, could not accept,

he is not the king anymore.

The crown has been wrested off him.

You think this bothers me?

I'm Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Premier of Queensland,

servant of the people.

No, no, no.

What did Matthew say?

Verse seven, don't throw your pearls to pigs.

They'll tear you all to pieces.

You think I care with all your hullabaloo?

I've had prime ministers in here.

I've had presidents sitting right there.

I built this place. I built Queensland.

You want me, you know where I am, right here.

Old Joh the ghost.

- It's almost impossible to believe

that all of this actually happened,

and all began in Bethany.

- My grandfather chose the name Bethany

because it means a place of rest.

This is where he was coming back to recuperate

to start a new life here with my father.

He had to milk the cows,

help his mother milk the cows.

His father couldn't do manual work, so it fell onto him.

So he would help in the morning before he went to school,

and then in afternoon when he came home from school,

he'd have to go through the same process again.

- I think the hardship taught him to be self-reliant

from a very early age.

It just became part and parcel of who he was,

that he became a problem solver.

If something didn't work, he would have to fix it.

He was a doer.

- My grandfather being a pastor

wasn't paid a great deal of money

and thought his health might improve, but it didn't.

- In some ways he had a broken education,

but Dad was just too much needed on the property.

- Time and again, they've wondered this,

how come old Joh was so successful

when he left school so young?

They'd tie themselves up in riddles

time and time again over that one.

Well, I'm here to tell you,

there's more to learning on a farm

than any of your fancy places like Oxford University.

Mother used to say the proof's in the pudding.

The proof's in the pudding.

Well, I'm it.

- He had a chip on his shoulder to some degree.

He had a need to constantly prove himself,

not just to his past, but to his present.

- He's a social isolate, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke,

doesn't go to the pub, doesn't date girls, doesn't dance.

He would have actually conducted his own daily devotions,

so he would have actually read his Bible, prayed,

and then he would have gone out into the field

and basically hacked down the scrub for most of the day.

- Well, a lot of the area had just been opened up

then for selection.

It had to be cleared.

It was just handwork by axe, and it was very hard going.

There were no big machines when they all settled here.

That sort of came later, 20 years later.

- So it was in the early '30s

that he brought his first tractor.

- He went to the bank and wanted to buy

a 10-20 McCormick-Deering tractor.

Bank manager looked him up and down as much as to say,

"Well, where'd you get that silly idea from?"

But he prevailed.

They might've thought it was crazy at the time,

but he had a next-door neighbour or someone saying,

"I'll give you 20 pound to plough out 20 acres."

So ultimately, the people

who'd come to have a look at this tractor,

they all said to him,

"You're mad. You're going to go broke,"

were the ones that ultimately paid for the tractor.

- And the contract business started up

and I think he would work from sunup to sundown.

- In fact, I'm told, well, I know those old tractors

didn't have a generator and lights.

- So the next thing he devised was some headlights.

- So as he could plough into the night.

- There was a problem, he used to be able

to find a way to solve it.

I came up with this idea

of dragging a big anchor chain between two bulldozers,

and gee whiz, if they didn't come down right away

and stay down.

You could hear the dozers and the glorious crack and snap

of that brigalow a mile away.

Let me tell you, it was like music,

the Grey Wood and wattle flowers coming down.

If progress had a sound, that was it.

Nothing was more satisfying.