Dead Celebrity Alert

It was a strong heart, his doctor said, that allowed Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen to hang on for so long as the rest of his body failed.

But the end finally came at 6pm yesterday with Sir Joh, 94, dying surrounded by his family in a little hospital room in his home town of Kingaroy, about 250 kilometres north-west of Brisbane.

“So now an era has passed,” Ken Crooke, Sir Joh’s former press secretary, said outside the hospital. “A chapter in Australia’s and Queensland’s political history has closed. …

Not long before Sir Joh’s death, Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen remembered her husband, who spent a record 19 years as Queensland’s premier, as a loving grandfather and a man who had worked “very hard” in building his state.

She said it was “sad” that Sir Joh, a devout Lutheran, was deposed as premier in 1987 and that he later stood trial for perjury in the wake of the Fitzgerald inquiry into official corruption. But the high points still far outweighed the low. … Read full obituary

Filed under Government/Politics