Longest Joh
Sir Johannes "Joh" Bjelke-Petersen KCMG, (13 January 1911 – 23 April 2005),
New Zealand-born Australian politician, was the longest-serving and
longest-lived Premier of the state of Queensland. He held office from 1968 to
1987, a period that saw considerable economic development in the state. His
uncompromising conservatism (including his role within the downfall of the
Whitlam federal government), his political longevity, and his leadership of a
government that, in its latter years, was revealed to be institutionally
corrupt, made him one of the best-known political figures in twentieth-century
Australia.
Early life
Bjelke-Petersen was born in Dannevirke in the Southern Hawke's Bay region of New
Zealand, and lived in Waipukurau, a small town in Hawke's Bay. Bjelke-Petersen's
parents were both Danish immigrants, and his father, Carl, was a Lutheran
pastor. In 1913 the family left for Australia, moving to Kingaroy in
south-eastern Queensland and taking up dairy farming.
The young Johannes suffered from polio, leaving him with a life-long limp. The
family was poor, and Carl Bjelke-Petersen was frequently in poor health.
Johannes and his mother Maren worked on the farm. Imbued with the strongly
pietistic Lutheranism associated with the Danish immigrants of the area,
Johannes was somewhat resentful of both his father and elder brother, whose
sickliness and academic leanings meant that they left much of the work to him.
Biographer James Walter has suggested that this resentment would feed Johannes'
anti-intellectual tendencies in later life.
In 1933, Bjelke-Petersen began work on the family's newly-acquired second
property at land-clearing and peanut farming. His efforts eventually allowed him
to begin work as a contract land-clearer (using a tax deduction then allowable
to primary producers), and to acquire further capital which he invested in farm
equipment and natural resource exploration. He developed a technique for quickly
clearing scrub by connecting a heavy anchor chain between two bulldozers. By the
time he entered Parliament, he had built a thriving business.
Under sponsorship from Charles Adermann and Sir Frank Nicklin, he was elected as
Country Party member for Nanango in the Queensland Legislative Assembly in 1946
(from 1950 to 1987 he was member for Barambah). The Australian Labor Party (ALP)
had held power in Queensland since 1932 and Bjelke-Petersen spent eleven years
as an Opposition member.
