Bligh reveals family's dark secret
AFTER two decades of estrangement from her father Bill, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has begun trying to better understand her roots - and the troubled, alcoholic dad who links her to the Rum Rebellion's infamous Governor William Bligh, ill-fated captain of the Bounty.
AFTER two decades of estrangement from her father Bill, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has begun trying to better understand her roots - and the troubled, alcoholic dad who links her to the Rum Rebellion's infamous Governor William Bligh, ill-fated captain of the Bounty.
Her quest is delicate. Several of Bill "Plugger" Bligh's children and grandchildren from his first marriage before he wed Anna's mother, Frances Tancred, have been distressed by the Premier acknowledging his chronic drinking, uneven parenting, and the financial stress that ensued. Anna's mother is also sensitive about the revisiting of painful chapters in the family's history.
Other relatives who spoke to The Weekend Australian are quietly proud of Anna Bligh, the Sunshine State's first female premier, for being brutally, if painfully, honest about growing up the eldest of four on the Gold Coast in a family that might have unravelled were it not for Anna's mother.
"Whatever Anna and the other kids have become is because of their own efforts and tenacity, and that of Fran," a relative said. "Her strongest feelings were about what her mother endured."
Her brother John says: "Anna saw the drunkenness, the alcoholism, the gambling and everything else. I think she realised that she had to look after herself and us. She took on a lot of responsibility and she was very young when she did it."
In several revealing interviews with The Weekend Australian Magazine, Anna Bligh, 47, talks about the depth of the estrangement. Although her father had stopped drinking in later years, his daughter still had nothing to do with him and decided not to visit him on his death bed at a Brisbane hospital.
She and her brother John also stayed away from his Bribie Island funeral, where square-dancing and RSL friends of Bill were unaware his daughter was a rising political star.
Bligh can laugh at her ancestry. Before she became Premier she jousted over water policy with Malcolm Turnbull, then a minister in the Howard government, while privately they joked about their shared history.
"Malcolm's great-great-great-great-grandfather was one of the people loyal to Bligh and defended him in the Rum Rebellion, and from then on, every Turnbull son -- every male child in the Turnbull family -- had Bligh in their name as a long tradition. We had this funny joke: 'I'm a real Bligh and you're not'."
Her two boys, Joe and Oliver, never laid eyes on their grandfather. Their surname is Francis because Anna refused to name them Bligh. Anna's husband, top public servant Greg Withers, never met his father-in-law.
Bill Bligh was 87 when he died in 2002. "These are really tough decisions in your life," Anna Bligh admits. "It's one of those funny things where the longer you leave it, the harder it gets for anyone to pick up the phone ... It's one of the lessons of life: you actually don't have forever."
While not expressing regret at leaving her father out of her life, she has been trying to understand him.
Shortly before Christmas she sought his World War II records from the National Archives of Australia, which include accounts of mishaps, high jinks, and how he was wounded in action in Borneo in 1945.
"I look back now that I'm a parent and contemplate the fact he had five children, and then had another four," she says. "It's a lot of pressure. He wasn't a man who talked about it very much, and certainly as I get older and understand how complex and difficult life can be, I've been a lot more understanding about why he might have found solace in alcohol."