Authors: Matthew Condon
It paid tribute to Sir Joh’s ‘can-do philosophy’ and how he encouraged ‘the exploitation of the state’s untapped potential’.
‘Politically and socially, Joh’s legacy is not so rich,’ it continued. ‘His self-belief and his impatience with contrary views made him an uncomfortable democrat. He inherited a disgraceful gerrymander and refined it to the unfair benefit of the National Party. His impatience with accepted processes and his need to wield absolute control made him peculiarly susceptible to cronyism and to the sort of corruption that ultimately destroyed his government and battered his reputation.’
It concluded, however, that Joh was ‘a man for his times and a true colossus of Queensland politics’.
Then Premier Peter Beattie afforded Bjelke-Petersen a state funeral. ‘There will be people who love him, and people who hate him but the fact is if you look at the total equation and you take the negative and the positive, he did a lot of good for this state,’ Beattie said.
The funeral was slated for Tuesday 3 May, in the Kingaroy Town Hall. The vast bulk of Beattie’s ALP Cabinet refused to attend the event. Former police commissioner Terry Lewis’s wife, Hazel, refused to confirm their attendance. ‘We do have some commitments this week,’ she told the
Courier-Mail
. ‘It’s a long way and I think there’d be many important people up there. We really don’t have to discuss our business with anyone.’ (In fact, according to Lewis’s diary, he telephoned Lady Flo on Friday 29 April, and ‘extended our sympathy and reasons for not going to attend funeral; mainly media; countless phone calls and flowers; only one nasty one was female from ABC’.)
The funeral itself was broadcast live on local commercial television. Prime Minister at the time, John Howard, and a myriad of other national and state politicians, celebrities and friends filled the hall for the service. That morning Lewis took his dog Prince for a walk and did a load of washing.
He later watched the funeral on television. ‘Large crowd; impressive ceremony,’ he wrote in his diary.
In Kingaroy, Lewis’s long-time mentor, friend, and the man who facilitated his rise to the top of the Queensland Police Force – and all the attendant benefits and honours that that entailed – was laid to rest.
Over in Winton Street, Stafford Heights, Lewis had a rookworst sandwich for lunch then spent the afternoon ironing ‘7 articles of clothing plus tablecloths’.
Dear Little Girl
In late September 2009, Hazel Lewis’s long battle with health complications ended. She died in Brisbane’s Prince Charles Hospital in the city’s north after battling stress-induced diabetes for many years. She was 77.
For some years Terry and Hazel had been living in a house in Winton Street, Stafford Heights, north of the Brisbane CBD. Lewis says one of his sons won a Mater Prize home and two cars, and sold the prize home to give his parents some finances for a house. Eventually Hazel Lewis found the bargain in Stafford Heights, run down as it was.
Over the years, the Lewis’s enjoyed their grandchildren, and Terry often kept busy with little jobs around the homes of his children. He was devoted to Hazel who, as she had done for their entire married lives, held the family together. Their little black and white pet terrier, Prince, was a great comfort to Hazel, and used to kiss her goodnight. In her final months, Hazel would say to her husband that she’d be alright ‘if I could breathe’.
Her funeral service was held at the church the Lewis family once regularly attended – St Brigid’s Catholic Church at Red Hill, not far from 12 Garfield Drive – and was attended by more than 100 people. Lewis delivered an emotional eulogy and said his ‘dear little girl’ would have been overwhelmed at the number of people in attendance. He said that his wife had been renowned for her ‘goodwill, kindly feelings and warm affections’.
‘She had been ill for several years, but her heart and health were broken by the events of 22 years ago,’ Lewis added, referring to the start of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. ‘She was my first girlfriend and my only wife. I never imagined her dying before me – it was the only thing she did wrong. I’ll miss her every minute.’
On such a sombre occasion, in the great red-brick edifice of St Brigid’s, Lewis continued to defend the Queensland Police. ‘I’ve said it publicly before and I’ll say it to the day I die – 95 per cent were the finest, 4 per cent were average and 1 per cent were a pain in the posterior.’
Later, the family and mourners headed over to Gambaro’s Restaurant in Caxton Street, a short walk from the old police depot on Petrie Terrace, to reminisce.
Hindsight
As the decades rolled on, and the big and powerful of the Queensland Police Force of the 1960s and 1970s became old men, many of those mates continued to stay in touch. Brisbane-based Ron Edington, the former outspoken head of the Queensland Police Union in the early 1970s, spoke regularly with Tony Murphy who had settled at Robina on the Gold Coast.
‘Well, Murphy … rings me up quite regularly, you know, cause he’s on a walker now, he can’t walk … and he reckons his memory’s gone. Well, I’ve trapped him that many times, you know, caught him off-guard,’ Edington jokes. He then offers an example of how he has tried to catch his old friend out. ‘Remember the time you went down there, Tony, to try and get that old sheila for abortion and you parked the car outside and the old fellow came along? You had the fellow sitting in the back of the van, taking the photographs of the women going in to be aborted?’
‘“Oh, yeah, yeah,” he comes back, perfect. [But] he reckons he couldn’t remember anything. Old Joh [Bjelke-Petersen] did the same. Old Joh said, “I can’t remember that.” He said that all the bloody way through his evidence.
‘I tell you, he [Murphy] was that smart, he waited long enough … to build [his house] … built it on the lakes … Robina, he reckons it’s a bloody palace. He held onto it all the time before he was game to show his hand, you know … he was just hanging off, hanging off and he waited all that time and what did it bring him? He can’t go out, he’s got bad back problems. Keeps on telling me that his memory’s gone.
‘I think he still has some fear that something might come up one bloody day, something’s going to happen to him, he’s had these many years of bad memory, he can’t remember … but I bet if he had a tin of fucking money hidden somewhere he’d fucking remember where that was.
‘I’ve got a great mind to look into, to assess all these bastards. I always keep friendly with them … that was always through the job I used to do, even if I thought they were my greatest fucking enemy, I’d still, you know, piss in their pocket.’
Lewis, too, has reassessed Murphy. ‘I can’t believe them not getting Murphy. I really, I just can’t,’ he says. ‘You can hypothesise anything I suppose. Murphy went to work in the Licensing Branch. Why he did that – well I would never have done that over my dead body – I would sooner have gone back to uniform and done traffic duty or any bloody thing.’
Lewis points out that Jack Herbert had given evidence at the inquiry acknowledging that nobody who ever went into the Licensing Branch refused his invitation to be a part of The Joke. ‘Murphy would have been the sub-inspector in charge in those days [Murphy was in the branch from 1966 to 1971] … Herbert I think, by then, would either have been senior detective constable or detective sergeant and Murphy would have been senior to him … so you could hardly leave him [Murphy] out of the picture, I would have thought,’ says Lewis.
‘I mean, this is probably ridiculous, but he’d [Murphy had] been there [for] four years, so obviously he and Herbert would have been very close, one way or another.’
Lewis says he never took a cent of corrupt money. ‘I was offered six pound by a fellow living with a prostitute at Hamilton [in the 1950s] … and I put a report in on that and that went to the Crown Law office and [I] never ever got it back,’ he says. ‘I’m not saying people didn’t give me things. I had bloody grog sent to me and I had bloody food and casket tickets from time to time from people I had done things for and dinner from somebody who I’d done something for, nothing unlawful, they’d ring up and ask you could you expedite something or give them some advice or whatever.
‘I had more grog and more food than you could, for 11 years … I needn’t have gone home … I could have eaten out every bloody lunch and every dinner.’
Did he ever hear of the corrupt system known as The Joke?
‘I never heard The Joke come up,’ he says. ‘I never, ever thought anything other than the Licensing Branch [was] a mob of bastards who had been getting a quid, but what are we going to do about it now?’
Did he ever consider that Tony Murphy’s almost constant contact with him while he was in prison was anything other than the deeds of a concerned friend?
‘I don’t know what he said to me when he’d come. But one could hypothesise, I suppose, that he was coming to make sure I wasn’t going to change my mind, if you like, and say, “Oh yes, I knew Murphy was a crook”, or some bloody thing,’ Lewis says.
Was it a fraudulent friendship?
‘Oh, for a long time apparently,’ Lewis reflects. ‘Yet I still say … I thought he was a bloody good detective. He was an effective one, if you like. But you could argue that … was he effective? He put a lot of bad people out of business. And might have left a few people going in business …’
Lewis still mentions the members of the public who approach him when he’s doing his shopping or getting a haircut. ‘I haven’t had one person come and abuse me, not one,’ Lewis says.
Still, the issue of Herbert’s betrayal of their friendship still puzzles him. ‘I don’t think I was naive; I think I … was a fairly worldly bloke, I just never suspected him of being a crook,’ Lewis says. ‘I mean, if I’d suspected him as a crook and I was getting a quid out of him, I would hope I wasn’t so stupid as to be publicly seen with him [or] let him into my home and to go to places where I knew he’d be. I’m sure that any, well not any, but most intelligent corrupt top officials over the years have arranged to have the money delivered to them in the Bahamas, or something.’
For years after Hazel’s death, Lewis continued to live at the Stafford Heights address. The two-level cream-brick house, with a twin garage and rock garden, radiated untouched Brisbane suburbia circa 1970s. It was the same inside, beyond the flyscreen – a spacious dining and lounge room, large, stuffed couches and armchairs, sideboards laden with framed photographs and memorabilia. On a shelf under the coffee table was a display of creamy coloured seashells. Vases were filled with plastic flowers and antimacassars were draped across the backs of the lounge chairs. In the lounge room, too, were large ledgers and albums that celebrated Lewis’s police career.
Downstairs, Lewis used a corner room as his office. It too, was crowded with memorabilia from his days as a Knight of the Realm and as the Queensland police commissioner, shelves heavy with mementos and framed photographs of his family. There were police hats from all over the world, and a shelf of dusty spirit bottles.
In the corner was Lewis’s desk. On it was a typewriter, pens, papers, a diary and a telephone. It was here he made notes, filed newspaper clippings, wrote letters, phoned friends and allies, and checked the voluminous documents kept in cardboard boxes in his garage and in a small storeroom behind his office. It was in the storeroom that he kept the full transcript of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, bound in red folders and prickled with hundreds of post-it notes. Here, Lewis submerged himself in the past to try and bring back, from the deep, proof of his innocence.
But outside, over in the city, the 21st century was in full swing.
If Lewis ever went to visit his old beats, when, as a member of the Consorting Squad in the 1950s he would check out the wooden cathouses of South Brisbane or the rough hotels along Stanley Street with their sawdust and menace, he would have found a boulevard of world-class art galleries and restaurants, the place still a hive of human movement – not sex and fights, but drama, culture and the spontaneous play of children at South Bank.
In the Treasury Building he would have discovered a casino in full bloom, and poker machines singing their peculiar song in pubs and clubs not only in Brisbane but throughout the entire state. Up at Petrie Terrace, where he trained in that stormy summer of 1948 and into 1949, before he was inducted into the police force, he would have seen not a training paddock and a cadet sleeping quarters, but supermarkets, cinemas, bottle shops and eateries, the old police radio shack a popular steak house.
As Lewis sifted through the past to clear his name, sex shops dotted throughout the suburbs, escort services and brothels were alive and well, and late at night you could take in stages of strippers in a club beneath Jo-Jo’s restaurant in the heart of the city.
Brisbane was multifaceted and multicultural. It had moved beyond having, as its own little streak of exotic cuisine, the Lotus Room Chinese restaurant or the Playboy Club at Petrie Bight, where, in the 1960s, you could find men who liked to dress as women after dark. Gone was the infamous National Hotel. Gone was the illegal casino at 142 Wickham Street, now a massage house. Brisbane was now out and proud with a strong local gay and lesbian community. Books that criticised the government were no longer shredded. Street marches and protests were permitted.
The Gold Coast, which Lewis and his wife Hazel had so loved to visit each year over the Christmas holiday period, had lived up to its heathen potential, and was now a phantasmagoria of nightclubs and sex for sale. Drugs, fraud and youth violence flourished in the midst of the natural beauty of the coast.