Late in October 1970, Bjelke-Petersen was in trouble with his party. The Comalco share issue and a decision not to mine the coloured sands of Cooloola, north of Noosa, had undermined public confidence in the government.

Bjelke-Petersen's backbenchers planned to replace him with Mines Minister Ron Camm. But the plotters, led by speaker David Nicholson — no nonsense in the Queensland Legislative Assembly about the speaker being above politics — made a fatal mistake.

Four of them, including Nicholson and the colourful Russ Hinze, went to Bjelke-Petersen and told him they planned to move against him the next day. They thought they had the numbers: 16 to 10. They might have had — then.

By the next morning, Bjelke-Petersen had narrowed the margin. When the vote was taken, he claimed he had the proxy vote of minister Neville Hewitt, who was overseas. That produced a tie: 13 votes apiece. Bjelke-Petersen then voted for himself.

As it happened, he didn't have Hewitt's proxy. The wily premier had been unable to contact his minister and thought that, if he could not contact Hewitt, neither could his opponents.

No Queensland politician has aroused such passions as Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Even last year, when he celebrated his 90th birthday, he was praised and reviled.

But from 1970, when he prevailed in the party room, until 1987, Bjelke-Petersen dominated Queensland politics and played no small part in the destruction of a federal Labor government.

The master of mangled syntax, Bjelke-Petersen actually endeared himself to taciturn Queenslanders with his verbal eccentricity. Sometimes, his statements verged on self-parody.

For example, Bjelke-Petersen on finance: "Australia is bankrupt. It is even worse than that." Or on the worker: "The 40-hour week has given the opportunity to many to while away their time in hotels." Or, on fighting Labor: "My goodness, there's a deep responsibility."

Bombers beware . . . Insp Les Bardwell leads the police bomb squad onto the Brisbane Exhibition Ground before the Springbok-Queensland match on July 23, 1971.

His first great political success came less than a year after his party challenge. In the winter of 1971, Australia hosted a tour by the South African rugby team, the Springboks. The team, all white and overwhelmingly Afrikaner, was certain to attract protesters against apartheid.

At the time, the rugby headquarters at Ballymore was largely insecure; police commissioner Ray Whitrod realised his men could not stop protesters getting into the ground and disrupting the two matches planned for Ballymore, against Queensland and Australia.

Bjelke-Petersen's response was to invoke a state of emergency, just as Hanlon and Gair had done before him. This time, however, the object was not the unionists but "long-haired protesters".

Under the state of emergency, police powers were extended and the RNA Showground oval, with its better security, was acquired for the games. Bjelke-Petersen was opposed in cabinet, but his view prevailed.

The state of emergency also provoked a 24-hour strike by unions and some ugly protest clashes involving an unruly and undisciplined police force. But the games went ahead.

The government won two by-elections the next weekend, including a seat held by Labor for 56 years. Bjelke-Petersen had established himself successfully as a "law and order" politician.

Recently, Bjelke-Petersen acknowledged that his "political stocks soared" after the Springbok tour. He was commenting on the release of cabinet and other documents showing how his government had used the police special branch to spy on citizens at the time.

A former Queensland Police Union president, Ron Edington, said police regarded the special branch as a tool of the Bjelke-Petersen government. "Anybody that stood for the right to demonstrate or opposed the government went in the file," he said.

Three years after the Springbok tour, as Gough Whitlam's federal Labor government was becoming increasingly unruly and unpopular, an election reduced Labor to 11 members in the Queensland parliament. Bjelke-Petersen's power was unrivalled.

That year, too, Bjelke-Petersen appointed political nonentity Albert Patrick Field to replace deceased Labor senator Bert Milliner. Field's appointment enabled the Senate to block supply late in 1975, precipitating the dismissal of the Whitlam government by governor-general Sir John Kerr.

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