‘The Trumpian model’: Richard Roxburgh takes on Australia’s most provocative politician

Working on the documentary Joh: The Last King of Queensland was, director and co-writer Kriv Stenders says, “like going back in a time machine, reliving my childhood and my early adult life”.

Trawling through reams and reams of archival footage – news clips, interviews, amateur films of political protests in Brisbane during Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s near-20-year reign as premier, “I was finding footage of Brisbane in the ’60s and ’70s and into the ’80s, stuff I vividly remember. I wouldn’t call it therapeutic, but it was a strange feeling going back in time and reliving that part of my life.”

Stenders and I were students together at the University of Queensland in the mid-1980s, a time when the cronyism and corruption and coercion of Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party-led government seemed immovable. The police force was an instrument of his rule, used to intimidate anyone who didn’t fit Bjelke-Petersen’s narrow view of what an “an ordinary, decent citizen” might look like (homosexuals, people of colour, creative types and the Left in general were all fair game). Laws and political boundaries were rewritten to further his dominance and agenda, democracy and civil liberties trampled under jackbooted foot.

Richard Roxburgh portrays Bjelke-Petersen in the documentary.Credit: Stan

On the upside, the Queensland economy boomed, driven by coal mining and clear felling of native forest and migration north from other states (the abolition of death duties was a major drawcard).

And there were enough who bought into the myth of the maverick peanut farmer from Kingaroy, who left school at 14, as some kind of political and economic savant that a campaign to have him installed as the Coalition’s man in Canberra – “Joh for PM” – had serious traction for long enough to cruel John Howard’s tilt in 1987 and hand the Lodge back to Bob Hawke.

Does any of this sound familiar, even if you know nothing about Bjelke-Petersen? Stenders thinks it should.

“The reason I wanted to do this film was the elephant in the room, which is the relevance of the story now, the prescience of it,” he says. “The playbook that Joh played from is very much the same one Netanyahu is using, that Trump’s using, that various populist leaders around the world are drawing from. So it just felt like a really timely documentary, and the right time to go back and look at Joh’s legacy and work out what’s changed and what hasn’t.”

Director and co-writer Kriv Stenders conducts an interview for the film. Credit: Stan

One of the most shocking things about the Bjelke-Petersen era – for those of us who experienced it firsthand, at any rate – is how little the rest of the country knew about what was going on, at least until Chris Masters’ The Moonlight State report for Four Corners and the subsequent Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption blew the lid off it all.

Richard Roxburgh grew up at the same time, in rural NSW, but had little sense of the man he would go on to play in Stenders’ film. “I was a long way away from it, so I guess we were shielded from it,” he says.

Former Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen in 1987.Credit: Fairfax Media

Of course, he did come to understand the craziness of that time. But for many others, it has faded, or simply never been spoken of – and given the current state of the world, that’s far from ideal.

“You’ll speak to a 30-year-old who has never heard of Joh Bjelke-Peterson, and so I think this is really important, because there is so much of the Trumpian model, a kind of pre-echo of many of the conditions that we’re seeing now – the ever-revolving door of crackdowns and their growth over time, the way one quietly leads to another, which quietly leads to another,” says Roxburgh. “And you end up in a state where anybody who felt slightly different either had to be prepared to have their heads staved in with batons, or to just get on the highway and head out of there.”

Richard Roxburgh has added another real-life Australian character to his resume: Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Roxburgh has become something of a go-to man for portrayals of men from recent Australian history.

“I’ve got a theory that he’s going to play every famous Australian before he dies,” jokes Stenders, who recently directed him in The Correspondent, his film about journalist Peter Greste, who spent more than a year in an Egyptian prison.

He’s played Bob Hawke (twice), crooked copper Roger Rogerson (also twice), Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in Australia, composer Percy Grainger, Bali bombing investigator Graham Ashton and more. Is there anyone left for you to do?

“I’ve done it,” he says, unequivocally. “That’s it now.”

You don’t fancy playing Tony Abbott, perhaps?

“You know, I wouldn’t mind having a crack,” he admits, despite his better judgment. “I can feel my mum rolling in her grave at the idea that I played Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but I think she would really respond to the documentary.”

Former prime minister John Howard is interviewed for the documentary Joh: The Last King of Queensland.

His Bjelke-Petersen is not a full-on immersion in character. It’s more an impression. He roams the stage of an empty theatre, dressed in an ill-fitting beige suit, ruminating on his life and times and – to his mind – unjust downfall in that halting, stuttering, circumlocutory way of his. He gets the voice spot on.

“It’s all based around the idea of Joh’s final hours in office, where he actually barricaded himself in like Hitler in his bunker,” explains Stenders.

The monologues were written by novelist Matthew Condon, using a mix of Hansard transcripts, television interviews, and news reports. “They’re not verbatim,” says Stenders. “They’re a fusion of a number of sources.”

There are interviews, too, many with critics of Bjelke-Petersen, who died in 2005 aged 94, and the deeply entrenched corruption that flourished under his reign (though he faced court, he was not convicted, after his trial ended in a hung jury). But there are also those who speak in his defence – former Brisbane Lord Mayor Sally-Anne Atkinson, Nationals leader David Littleproud, independent MP Bob Katter – and who all insist, to paraphrase Bjelke-Petersen, “there’s nothing to see here” when it comes to those pesky claims of wrongdoing.

Though there’s balance, Stenders feels the film is “pretty unequivocal” in terms of being a cautionary tale.

“Joh did some pretty provocative and divisive things that are undeniable,” he says. “He was complicit in a corrupt government, I think that’s undeniable. But at the same time, I didn’t want to paint him – as I think a lot of people did back then, and I did myself – as a fool, as a clown, as an idiot. Joh used that country bumpkin thing very much as a mask, as a facade. And he hid behind that, he used it to his advantage.”

People like Bjelke-Petersen may not have much by way of schooling, says Stenders, “but these guys are actually super smart. They’ve got a ferocious kind of intelligence and a rat cunning and a strategic mind. And I realised that Joh wasn’t the clown I thought he was, that he was actually a very skillful, albeit deceitful, leader.

“The film is trying to unpack and look at his legacy, look at the way he operated, look at the way he constructed himself as a politician. To change power, you first need to understand it.”

Revealed – Joh: The Last King of Queensland is now streaming on Stan.

Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.