A populist politician, crony capitalism, a police state… No, it’s not news out of the United States, but closer to home in revealing new documentary Joh: Last King of Queensland. Steve Newall revisits the controversial history.
Two decades on from his passing, and nearly four since his long reign as Queensland’s premier came to an abrupt end, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s unconventional career comes under the microscope in new Stan documentary Joh: Last King of Queensland.
His name and reputation may be increasingly consigned to history, but anyone wondering what makes this the right time to reexamine Bjelke-Petersen ought to consider the other populist autocrats on the rise throughout Western politics.
Like all such figures, echoes of Make America Great Again ripple throughout Sir Joh’s story—his class of politician always having seen fertile electoral ground in the fantasy of a return to better times. But, as the second Trump presidency proceeds, other similarities present themselves (as they do in Netflix’s Rob Ford doco Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem).
As with Trump. Sir Joh’s most ardent fans adored him as a religious man, a problem solver, a fixer. All the brutality? Just a bonus. As we see in Joh: Last King of Queensland, like most autocrats, Sir Joh forged an alliance with state police. He gave them free reign to attack protesters who were taking the streets in increasing frequency during his time as premier. On the receiving end? Trade unionists, civil libertarians, clergymen, and—most pleasing of all to conservatives watching news coverage of police beatings—young people aka hippies.
Protests and police brutality were abundant, but the tone was set relatively early in Sir Joh’s premiership. Like New Zealand a decade later, Queensland became a battleground in 1971 during a tour by the visiting South African Springbok rugby team. As protests became more heated, so did the policing response—and Sir Joh let them off the leash by declaring a month-long state of emergency, effectively giving free license to cops meting out disproportionate physical violence against those at protests, and indeed towards anything vaguely representing the counterculture.
Preferring cranes over culture, crony capitalism over compassion, Sir Joh cemented his rule of Queensland through gerrymandering electoral boundaries, webs of corruption, and populist rhetoric. Or rambling, as the case may be…
Last King of Queensland deploys an intriguing storytelling technique in the form of an empty room, reminiscent of a vacant debating chamber, and a suited Richard Roxburgh. The Australian acting icon’s long line of acclaimed appearances spans Chekhov to Beckett, Moulin Rouge! to Mission: Impossible II, and now adds another political figure—one who, as we see, also turns out to be a rival—to his 2010 and 2020 turns as former PM Bob Hawke.
Roxburgh’s Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen paces the stage, extending the oratorical style of the premier beyond the archival snippets seen elsewhere. It’s theatrical in nature, as is any politics that doesn’t play out behind closed doors, and feels like an even-handed amalgamation of Sir Joh’s mannerisms and halting filibustering, a substance-lite style of speechmaking.
The actor knew the importance of avoiding caricature, he told Variety. “I couldn’t do that and I didn’t want to do that because it also had to be measured. It had to be measured in the kind of humanity of him as well. You had to understand that he was a living, breathing human being. He might have had a lot of ideas that to all intents and purposes seemed hideous, despicable, awful. But inside that there was still a human being who had absolute faith in the righteousness of what he was doing. So, it’s about finding a path to that.”
Roxburgh’s presence is deployed strategically by documentary maker Kriv Stenders, who also directed the actor in his acclaimed turn in The Correspondent. In response to the history being chronicled, and its modern interpretations, Roxburgh monologues in Sir Joh’s classic cadence, the haughty and seemingly unimpeachable manner of his delivery as important as its often illusory substance—Sir Joh adept at keeping the wolves from the door seemingly through sheer will alone.
Stenders also makes use of a broad range of talking heads. Some are drawn from the political arena and era Sir Joh occupied, like John Howard and Bob Katter. Elsewhere, the doco features the accounts of The Australian’s investigative journalist Matthew Condon, author Andrew Stafford (Pig City), The Saints’ Ed Kuepper, and Lindy Morrison and Robert Forster, bandmates in The Go-Betweens (who Stenders also profiled in documentary fashion in 2017’s The Go-Betweens: Right Here).
As with Trump and other figures like him, Sir Joh’s brazen passion for power seems to dominate all other individual voices—sometimes collective voices. But thankfully, as Last King of Queensland shows, tyrants sow the seeds of their own downfall, and their collapse can come from the actions of just one person standing up for what’s right. Sir Joh’s fall from grace comes quickly onscreen, as it did in real life, and with his excesses and abuses of power firmly in mind.
There’s a lot to recommend about Joh: Last King of Queensland, not least of all in its new opportunity to better understand a man who shaped a state (and if he’d had his way, the country). And crucially, it doesn’t look away from his cruelty.
“Until I did the documentary,” Roxburgh also told Variety, “I wasn’t across the full measure of the kind of wholesale destruction of heritage, buildings and landscape, and all of the treatment of Indigenous people” under Sir Joh. “There was a lot of that was quite shocking to me.”
