title: Dickie Moore (actor)

text: Moore was married three times. His first marriage was from 1948 to 1954 to Pat Dempsey. The couple had one child, Kevin Moore. His second marriage was in 1959 to Eleanor Donhowe Fitzpatrick. His third and final marriage was in 1988 to Jane Powell, to whom he remained married until his death in 2015.


title: Dickie Moore (actor)

text: In 1984, Moore published "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (But Don't Have Sex or Take the Car)", a book about his and others' experiences as child actors. Moore owned a public relations firm, Dick Moore and Associates. Founded in 1966, it existed for 44 years. From 1988 until his death in 2015 Moore was married to the actress Jane Powell. The two met when Moore interviewed Powell for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". The couple lived in Manhattan and Wilton, Connecticut.


title: Dickie Moore (actor)

text: Moore died at a hospice in Wilton, Connecticut on September 7, 2015, five days before his 90th birthday. He was later cremated and his ashes returned to his family.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: The Night of the Iguana is a 1964 American drama film directed by John Huston, based on the 1961 play of the same name by Tennessee Williams. It stars Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: The film won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography. Actress Grayson Hall received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress, and Cyril Delevanti received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In addition to Delevanti's nomination at the Golden Globes, Ava Gardner also received a Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama nomination. Both the picture and its director, John Huston, likewise received Golden Globe nominations.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: "The Night of the Iguana" drew considerable attention for its on-set drama because Burton would bring his soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth Taylor to the location set.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: The preface to the story shows Episcopal clergyman T. Lawrence Shannon having a "nervous breakdown" after being ostracized by his congregation and defrocked for having an inappropriate relationship with a "very young Sunday school teacher."


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: Two years later, Shannon, now a tour guide for the bottom-of-the-barrel Texas company Blake's Tours, is taking a group of Baptist schoolteachers by bus to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The group's brittle leader is Miss Judith Fellowes, whose 16-year-old niece Charlotte Goodall tries to seduce Shannon. Meanwhile, Fellowes accuses Shannon of trying to seduce Charlotte and declares that she will ruin him.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: While approaching the group's hotel in the bus, Shannon suddenly veers off and recklessly drives the terrified passengers to a cheap Costa Verde hotel in Mismaloya, then removes the distributor cap from the engine. Shannon assumes that the hotel is run by an old friend named Fred, but the man had died recently and the hotel is now run by Fred's widow, the bawdy and flamboyant Maxine Faulk. Shannon convinces Maxine to allow the tour group to stay at the hotel, believing that they will be unable to reach a phone or escape.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: Another new arrival at the hotel is Hannah Jelkes, a beautiful and chaste itinerant painter from Nantucket who is traveling with her elderly poet grandfather Nonno. They have run out of money, but Shannon convinces Maxine to let them have a room. Over a long night, Shannon battles his weaknesses for both flesh and alcohol, Miss Fellowes' niece continues to make trouble for him and he is "at the end of his rope," similar to how an iguana is kept tied by Maxine's cabana boys. Shannon suffers a breakdown, the cabana boys truss him in a hammock and Hannah ministers to him there with poppy-seed tea and frank spiritual counsel. Shannon frees the iguana from its rope.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: Hannah's grandfather delivers the final version of the poem that he has been laboring to finish, about having heart in a corrupt world, and then dies. The characters try to resolve their confused lives, with Shannon and Maxine deciding to run the hotel together, although Maxine had offered to walk away and let Hannah run the hotel with Shannon. Hannah walks away from her last chance at love.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: James Garner claimed that he was originally offered the role played by Richard Burton but he declined because "it was just too Tennessee Williams for me."


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: In September 1963, Huston, Lyon and Burton, accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor, arrived at Puerto Vallarta—a "remote little fishing village"—for principal photography, which lasted 72 days. Huston liked the area's fishing so much that he bought a $30,000 house "in a cottage colony eight miles outside town."


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: By March 1964, months before the film's release, gossip about the film's production was widespread. Huston received a Writers Guild of America award for advancing "the literature of the motion picture through the years." At the award dinner, Allan Sherman performed a song to the tune of "Streets of Laredo" with lyrics that included, "They were down there to film "The Night of the Iguana" / With a star-studded cast and a technical crew. / They did things at night midst the flora and fauna / That no self-respecting iguana would do."


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: The film grossed $12 million worldwide at the box office, earning $4.5 million in U.S. theatrical rentals It was the 10th highest-grossing film of 1964.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: "Time" magazine's reviewer wrote, "Huston and company put together a picture that excites the senses, persuades the mind, and even occasionally speaks to the spirit—one of the best movies ever made from a Tennessee Williams play."


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: Since difficulty of communication between individuals seems to be one of the sadder of human misfortunes that Tennessee Williams is writing about in his play, "The Night of the Iguana", it is ironical that the film John Huston has made from it has difficulty in communicating, too. At least, it has difficulty in communicating precisely what it is that is so barren and poignant about the people it brings to a tourist hotel run by a sensual American woman on the west coast of Mexico. And because it does have difficulty—because it doesn't really make you see what is so helpless and hopeless about them—it fails to generate the sympathy and the personal compassion that might make their suffering meaningful.


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: Crowther was particularly critical of Burton's performance: "Mr. Burton is spectacularly gross, a figure of wild disarrangement, but without a shred of real sincerity. You see a pot-bellied scarecrow flapping erratically. And in his ridiculous early fumbling with the Lolitaish Sue Lyon (whose acting is painfully awkward), he is farcical when he isn't grotesque."


title: The Night of the Iguana (film)

text: A statue of John Huston stands in Puerto Vallarta, celebrating the film's role in making the area a popular destination.


title: Bebo

text: Bebo ( ) was an American social networking website that originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013 and relaunched in February 2021. The site relaunched several times after its bankruptcy with a number of short-lived offerings, including instant messaging and video streaming, until its acquisition by Amazon in July 2019 when it was shut down. It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after. By May 2022, it had been once again shutdown, without having ever left beta testing.


title: Bebo

text: Bebo was founded by husband-and-wife team Michael and Xochi Birch in January 2005 at their home in San Francisco. The website name was bought by the founders, and the backronym "Blog Early, Blog Often" was invented to answer the question of what the name meant.


title: Bebo

text: The website, at the height of its popularity, overtook Myspace to become the most widely used social networking website in the United Kingdom, eventually registering at least 10.7 million unique users.


title: Bebo

text: Bebo's popularity saw it sold to AOL in March 2008 for $850 million, with the Birches' combined 70% stake yielding a profit of $595 million from the deal. The BBC later described the AOL purchase of Bebo as "one of the worst deals ever made in the dotcom era", and it cost the then-CEO of AOL, Randy Falco, his job.


title: Bebo

text: On April 7, 2010, AOL announced that it would either sell the website or shut it down; this was mainly due to the falling numbers of unique users moving to rival site Facebook. AOL said that Bebo could not compete with other social networking sites in its current state and that the company could not commit to taking on the massive task to keep Bebo in the social network race. It has been reported that AOL's finances were struggling.


title: Bebo

text: The National Space Agency of Ukraine's RT-70 radio telescope sent 501 messages chosen by Bebo users, called A Message From Earth, toward planet Gliese 581c. Sent on 9 October 2008, it will arrive in the spring of 2028.


title: Bebo

text: On February 17, 2011, Bebo launched a brand-new design. This consisted of a new, more modern header and home page, as well as a new profile layout option. Users could also see who had visited their profiles (a feature which could be changed in settings). In April 2011, Bebo added a new notification system, similar to Facebook's - a feature which had been much-requested in feedback. It notified users of new inbox messages, lifestream activity and more.


title: Bebo

text: On January 30, 2012, access to Bebo became unavailable for 36 hours, resuming normal service during the early hours of February 1, 2012. A Bebo spokesperson told TechCrunch that the site was down due to "a technical clusterfuck". Adam Levin, CEO of Bebo and Criterion Capital Partners, stated that they were trying to release some new features which caused the site to crash. No data was lost as a result of the outage. The crash triggered a belief that Bebo was gone for good, so that the hashtag #bebomemories trended worldwide on Twitter.


title: Bebo

text: In May 2013, the company voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; however, Burke Capital Corporation receiver has clarified that Bebo remains "healthy" and "operating" and that the company was using its May 9 Chapter 11 filing in Los Angeles to "restructure some operational inefficiencies and other arrangements that are burdensome." Many analysts have questioned the value proposition that Bebo could offer users and do not fault CCP.


title: Bebo

text: On July 1, 2013, Michael and Xochi Birch, the original founders, purchased the social network back from Criterion Capital Partners (CCP) for $1 million.


title: Bebo

text: On August 6, 2013, messages were posted on Bebo.com informing users that the site would be down for maintenance from August 7, 2013. On August 7, 2013, a video featuring Michael announcing his plan for the new Bebo was placed on the front page of the site. The video informed users that the site would be taken down while the Bebo team developed the new product. Many believed that this would be normal maintenance; however, it was revealed that the site would be closed for a few months. The announcement also stated that all user content had been deleted, but users' blog posts and images would be retrievable in downloadable format should members opt in to receive this. However, members who submitted emails still have not retrieved profile data (pictures, blogs, etc.).


title: Bebo

text: In April 2014, Bebo founder Michael Birch took to Bebo in a tongue-in-cheek video to promote the re-launch of Bebo with the slogan, "Probably Not for Boring People". The relaunch video emphasized Bebo's history in which it included its then-most popular feature: the white board.


title: Bebo

text: Bebo relaunched on January 7, 2015; announced with the new Bebo was a messenger app called Bebo Blab which was available on Google Play and Apple App stores. The app massed 3.9 million users in just one year. After two years of its re-launch Bebo Blab shut down, as users weren't returning to the platform to watch archived streams on replay. Birch wrote:


title: Bebo

text: "Blab was great in many ways, but it wasn’t going to be an everyday thing for millions. So we’re kicking down the sandcastle, and re-building it as an ‘always on’ place to hang with friends."


title: Bebo

text: As of April 19, 2018, the site offers a multi-feature Twitch streaming software (similar to Open Broadcaster Software or XSplit). This closed down in October 2018 to focus on tournament software.


title: Bebo

text: In July 2019, Amazon, through their subsidiary Twitch Interactive, acquired Bebo for US$25 million after outbidding Discord.


title: Bebo

text: In early 2021, the Bebo.com webpage began to display a series of messages suggesting a new relaunch of Bebo was imminent. In an interview on February 3, founder Michael Birch described his plan to relaunch the social networking website with a focus on individual profiles, rather than the news feed that had become ubiquitous throughout the rest of social media.


title: Bebo

text: As of May 2022, Bebo has been shutdown again, never having left its private beta-testing phase, with the website now displaying a quote by founder Michael Birch, about the attempts of resurrecting Bebo. Birch states "Who knows", in response to if Bebo would ever be relaunched again.


title: Bebo

text: Users received a personal profile page where they would post blogs, photographs, music, videos, and questionnaires, which other users may answer. Additionally, users could add others as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.


title: Bebo

text: Each Bebo user received a profile, which included two specific modules: a comment section where other users could leave a message and a list of the user's friends. Users could select from many more modules to add. By default, when an account was created, the profile was private, which limited access to friends. The user could select the "Public Profile" option so the profile would be visible to any other members. Profiles could be personalized by a design template that became the background of the user's profile, known as a skin. Profiles also included multiple-choice quizzes; polls for their friends to vote in and comment on; photo albums allowing users 96 images per album; blogs with a comments section; a list of bands of which the user was a fan; and a list of groups that the user was a member of. A "Video Box" could also be added, either hot-linked from YouTube or copied from a Bebo media content provider's page.


title: Bebo

text: Bebo runs on servers running the Resin Server and uses the Oracle Database system. It is estimated that Bebo had somewhere between 5000 and 8000 Phantom4 servers provided by Rackable Systems and has over 100 TB of disk space across all of their servers.


title: Bebo

text: Announced on the November 13, 2007, Bebo's Open Media Platform is a platform for companies to distribute content to the Bebo community. Content providers can bring their media player to Bebo, and monetize the advertising within it. Each content provider has a specialised page designed for video which showcases any Adobe Flash video content at the top of the profile. Many networks are signed up for the service, including CBS, Sky, Ustream.tv, BBC and Last.fm.


title: Bebo

text: Bebo joined OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web. It announced plans for a developers platform and said it will make a further platform announcement. Bebo's Open Application Platform was launched in early December 2007 with just over fifty applications and is now host to hundreds.


title: Bebo

text: On May 21, 2008, some users in New Zealand were temporarily given full access to other users' accounts. Bebo network engineers traced the error to a misconfigured proxy server in an Internet service provider (ISP) in New Zealand, which was later corrected. The ISP seemed to be interfering with its cache, thereby causing some of its customers to receive cached cookies and details from other users, likely because the ISP used dynamic IP addresses.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: (born April 18, 1974), is a Puerto Rican singer and actress. She was married to former professional boxer Oscar De La Hoya. She is the granddaughter of influential poet and one-time Secretary General of the pro-independence Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Juan Antonio Corretjer.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: Corretjer was born on April 18, 1974, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Jesús Francisco Corretjer and Milagros Maldonado. Her paternal grandfather was poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer Montes, with her paternal great-great grandfather Antoni Corretjer Caire originally from Pineda de Mar, Province of Barcelona, Spain


title: Millie Corretjer

text: At the age of 15, Corretjer hosted the Puerto Rican television show "La Ola Nueva" (""The New Wave"").


title: Millie Corretjer

text: In 1995, she released the album "Sola" (""Alone""), which sent three of her songs to the "Billboard" lists. The album featured Spanish versions of Selena songs, "Where Did the Feeling Go?", which was called "Donde te has ido amor", and "Only Love", called "Solo tu", and received a nomination for a Lo Nuestro Award for Best New Artist.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: Her third album, 1999's "Amar es un Juego", earned her a gold album in Puerto Rico; her song "De Hoy en Adelante" (""From Today On"") ranked number one on the "Billboard" charts for more than six weeks.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: Corretjer and her music became well known in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil (where she lived for six months) and other Latin American countries, as well as in the United States.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: Corretjer re-took her singing career in 2020, recording a video of one of her new songs, called "Si yo Fuera Tu" ("If I Were You") by herself and by using an iPhone.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: In 2000, Oscar De La Hoya recorded his first music album. In the studio, while trying to record songs for his album, he was finding it difficult to sing with more passion. To demonstrate passionate singing, his producer Rudy Perez showed him "Una Voz en el Alma", one of Corretjer's music videos from the previous album, which he had produced. De La Hoya asked for the name of the singer in the video, and the producer replied that she was a singer and actress named Millie Corretjer, who had previously worked with him.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: De La Hoya asked that Corretjer be the model in his next music video. After meeting each other on an EMI convention in Texas, the two fell in love and began dating. They were married on October 5, 2001, in a secret ceremony in San Juan. They split in 2016.


title: Millie Corretjer

text: Corretjer made an appearance in De La Hoya's video "Para Que", and years later he did the same for Corretjer's video "En Cuerpo y Alma".


title: Millie Corretjer

text: Corretjer has three children, a son, Oscar Gabriel De La Hoya (born December 29, 2005) and two daughters, Nina Lauren Nenitte De La Hoya (born December 29, 2007) and Victoria Lauren Rose De La Hoya (born January 14, 2014). She also has three former stepchildren through De La Hoya, all from his previous relationships: two ex-stepsons, Jacob De La Hoya (born February 18, 1998) and Devon De La Hoya (born November 30, 1998), and an ex- stepdaughter, Atiana Cecilia De La Hoya (born March 29, 1999).


title: Godfall

text: Godfall is an action role-playing game developed by Counterplay Games and published by Gearbox Publishing. The game was released on PlayStation 5 and Windows on November 12, 2020. The game was also released for the PlayStation 4 on August 10, 2021. An enhanced version of the game containing all downloadable content up to that point, titled "Godfall: Ultimate Edition", was released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on April 7, 2022.


title: Godfall

text: The game is set in a high fantasy setting, split into the realms of Earth, Water, Air, where players take the role of one of the last exalted Knight's Order to prevent a major apocalyptic event. The player has 5 weapon classes to select from, based on which of their armor sets, Valorplates, they equip. These weapon classes include the longsword, dual blades, polearm, two handed war hammer and the two handed great sword. Additional Valorplates and Augments can be equipped to customize how this character class plays out. It supports single player and up to three players in cooperative mode. The game is described as a "looter-slasher" being based on the loot shooter concept of completing missions and gaining better loot for further quests, the focus of the combat is on melee attacks rather than ranged ones.


title: Godfall

text: The game was developed by Counterplay Games, a 75-person studio in California with several developers that had worked on other loot shooters such as "Destiny 2", their prior game being "Duelyst". Counterplay engaged with Kowloon Nights to gain funding to help develop "Godfall" by September 2018 as a triple-A title, and avoid some of the struggles they had with funding "Duelyst" through a Kickstarter campaign.


title: Godfall

text: The game's world was inspired by "The Stormlight Archive", "The First Law" and the "Foundation" series, while the gameplay from the "Monster Hunter" series inspired the variety of weapons and combo mechanics.


title: Godfall

text: The game's first trailer was revealed in December 2019 at The Game Awards, where it was identified to be the first game confirmed for release on the PlayStation 5, due to be released on November 12, 2020. The game was developed with Unreal Engine 4.


title: Godfall

text: At their E3 2021 press conference, Gearbox announced that "Godfall" will release on PlayStation 4 on August 10, 2021. It will come alongside an expansion called "Fire and Darkness".


title: Godfall

text: "Godfall" sold 5,342 physical copies within its first week on sale in Japan, making it the 21st-bestselling retail game of the week in the country.


title: Chris Barron

text: Chris Barron (born Christopher Gross; born February 5, 1968) is an American singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer of Spin Doctors.


title: Chris Barron

text: Christopher Gross was born February 5, 1968, in Honolulu, where his father was stationed during the Vietnam War. Barron spent his childhood in the Bronx and Rye, New York, and later moved to Australia for over three years when he was eight years old. He went to primary school in Sydney.


title: Chris Barron

text: When his family returned to the United States, Barron attended Princeton High School in Princeton, New Jersey, the same school as John Popper, and the two became close friends. Barron and Popper would jam together after school.


title: Chris Barron

text: He attended Bennington College in Vermont for one year. There, he was a member of two local bands: Dead Alcoholics With Boners and the Funbunnies. After leaving Bennington, Barron returned to Princeton, got a job at a restaurant, and immersed himself in music. During this time, he wrote "Jimmy Olsen's Blues" and "Two Princes".


title: Chris Barron

text: One night, John Popper's band Blues Traveler was in town. After hanging out for a night and hearing Barron's songs, Popper invited Barron to move in with them in New York City, and so Barron moved to New York City in 1988, with $100 and an acoustic guitar. He joined the band Trucking Company with Popper and Canadian guitarist Eric Schenkman. Popper left this side project to focus on his main gig with Blues Traveler full-time. With a name change to Spin Doctors, as well as the addition of Aaron Comess and Mark White, the classic lineup was in place by the spring of 1989.


title: Chris Barron

text: On May 17, 1999, just two weeks before the release of the band's album "Here Comes the Bride", Barron woke up unable to talk. He lost his voice due to a rare acute form of vocal cord paralysis that severely affected his ability to talk, let alone sing. He was told he had a 50-50 chance of ever talking or singing normally again. Band keyboardist Ivan Neville took over vocal duties for a few dates, but the band eventually cancelled the remainder of its tour.


title: Chris Barron

text: Barron's voice came back in early 2000 (first comeback [solo] shows in March 2000), at which point he began performing with his band and the Give Daddy Five. Barron undertook what he calls "a journeyman songwriting experience," composing tunes with Blues Traveler's John Popper and with former BMI executive Jeff Cohen. A solo album called "Shag" was released in 2001, featuring diverse influences, including rock, jazz, country, and funk.


title: Chris Barron

text: Spin Doctors remained inactive as a band until September 2001, when news about the closing of legendary NYC venue Wetlands sparked the original four members to reunite. On September 7, 2001, the original line-up took the stage for the first time since 1994 to play at Wetlands. It was the final closing week of the club. The landmark show was a great success for the fans and the band.


title: Chris Barron

text: In 2009, he put out a solo album called "Pancho and the Kid", and a year later he released an EP called "Songs from the Summer of Sangria".


title: Chris Barron

text: In 2012, Barron took part in the Norwegian selection for the Eurovision Song Contest, with The Canoes.


title: Chris Barron

text: Barron met Laura Benanti in the early 2000s. They married on July 25, 2005, but by the end of the year were going through what Benanti has called a "terrible divorce." They were divorced in 2006. He then married actress Lindsay Nicole Chambers, the lead in the Broadway tour of "Kinky Boots".


title: Pilcrow

text: The pilcrow, ¶, is a handwritten or typographical character used to identify a paragraph. It is also called the paragraph mark (or sign or symbol), paraph, or blind P.


title: Pilcrow

text: The pilcrow may be used at the start of separate paragraphs or to designate a new paragraph in one long piece of copy, as Eric Gill did in his 1931 book "An Essay on Typography". The pilcrow was a type of rubrication used in the Middle Ages to mark a new train of thought, before the convention of visually discrete paragraphs was commonplace. In some medieval texts, it indicated a new sentence. In recent times, the symbol has been given a wider variety of roles, as listed below.


title: Pilcrow

text: The pilcrow is usually drawn similarly to a lowercase reaching from descender to ascender height; the bowl (loop) can be filled or unfilled. It may also be drawn with the bowl stretching further downwards, resembling a reversed ; this is more often seen in older printing.


title: Pilcrow

text: The word 'pilcrow' originates from the (), literally, "written on the side or margin". This was rendered in Old French as and later changed to . The earliest reference of the modern 'pilcrow' is in 1440 with the Middle English word .


title: Pilcrow

text: The first way to divide sentences into groups in Ancient Greek was the original (), which was a horizontal line in the margin to the left of the main text. As the became more popular, the horizontal line eventually changed into the Greek letter Gamma (, ) and later into , which were enlarged letters at the beginning of a paragraph.


title: Pilcrow

text: Above notation soon changed to the letter , an abbreviation for the Latin word , which translates as "head", i.e. it marks the head of a new thesis. Eventually, to mark a new section, the Latin word , which translates as "little head", was used, and the letter came to mark a new section, or chapter, in 300 BC.


title: Pilcrow

text: In the 1100s, had completely replaced as the symbol for a new chapter. Rubricators eventually added one or two vertical bars to the to stylize it (as ); the 'bowl' of the symbol was filled in with dark ink and eventually looked like the modern pilcrow, .


title: Pilcrow

text: The pilcrow is used in desktop publishing software such as desktop word processors and page layout programs to mark the end of a paragraph. It is also used as the icon on a toolbar button that shows or hides the pilcrow and similar onscreen annotations that mark "hidden characters", including tabs, whitespace, and page breaks. In typing programs, it marks a carriage return that one must type.


title: Pilcrow

text: The pilcrow may indicate a footnote in a convention using a sequence of distinct typographic symbols in sequence to distinguish the footnotes on a given page; it is the sixth in a series of footnote symbols beginning with the asterisk.


title: Pilcrow

text: The pilcrow character was in the 1984 Multinational Character Set extension of ASCII at 0xB6 (decimal 182), from where it was inherited by ISO/IEC 8859-1 (1987) and thence by Unicode as . In addition, Unicode also defines , , and . The capitulum character is obsolete, being replaced by pilcrow, but is included in Unicode for backward compatibility and historic studies.


title: Pilcrow

text: Historically, the pilcrow symbol was included in the default hardware codepage 437 of IBM PCs (and all other 8-bit OEM codepages based on this) at code point 20 (0x14), sharing its position with the ASCII control code DC4.


title: Pilcrow

text: In Sanskrit and other Indian languages, text blocks are commonly written in stanzas. Two vertical bars, ॥, called a 'double "danda",' are the functional equivalent of a pilcrow.


title: Pilcrow

text: In China, the 〇, which has been used as a zero character since the 12th century, has been used to mark paragraphs in older Western-made books such as the Chinese Union Version of the Bible.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Stone Mountain is a city in DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The population was 6,703 according to the 2020 US Census. Stone Mountain is in the eastern part of DeKalb County and is a suburb of Atlanta that encompasses nearly 1.7 square miles. It lies near and touches the western base of the geological formation Stone Mountain. Locals often call the city "Stone Mountain Village" to distinguish it from the larger unincorporated area traditionally considered Stone Mountain and Stone Mountain Park.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Stone Mountain's history began long before European settlers and the Creek Indians before them. Evidence of numerous earlier Native American tribes, including mound builders, has been found in the area.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: The Treaty of Indian Springs in 1821 opened a large swath of Georgia for settlement by non-Native Americans on former Creek Indian land, including present-day Stone Mountain Village. In 1822, the area that now makes up the city was made a part of the newly formed DeKalb County.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: By the 1820s, Rock Mountain, as it was then called, was "a major travel center", with an inn for travelers. A stagecoach line linking the village with Georgia's capital, Milledgeville, began in 1825. Another stage line ran to Winder and Athens. In 1828 another stage line began trips to Dahlonega, and a fourth connected the community with Macon. "Hundreds of people visited Rock Mountain in the summer [of 1828] and...a house of entertainment was nearby." Rail service did not reach the town, by then New Gibraltar, until 1845.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: A post office was created in 1834 on the old Augusta Road, and Andrew Johnson, called the founder of New Gibraltar and first mayor, around whose house the city limits were drawn, built a hotel along the road in 1836. ("An 1843 amendment to the act of incorporation extended the town limits to in every direction from the house of Andrew Johnson.") About 1839 Aaron Cloud, who also had a hotel, built a wooden observation tower, octagonal like a lighthouse and high, along with a restaurant and club, at the mountain's summit. A storm destroyed the tower in 1849; in 1851, Thomas Henry built a smaller, tower, with telescopes so it could serve as an observatory. Visitors to the mountain traveled by rail and road, then hiked up the mountaintop trail to the top. By 1850, Stone Mountain had become a popular destination for Atlanta urbanites who endured the four-hour round trip by rail just to experience its natural beauty, lodging, and attractions.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Granite quarrying at the mountain was the area's lifeblood for decades, employing many thousands. The excellent grade of building stone from the mountain was used in many notable structures, including the locks of the Panama Canal, the roof of the bullion depository at Fort Knox, Philadelphia's Liberty National Building, and the steps in the east wing of the U.S. Capitol.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: In August 1846, New Gibraltar hosted Georgia's first state fair, then known as the Agriculture Fair and Internal Improvement Jubilee. The fair had just one exhibit—three horses and two cows, both belonging to the event's organizer, John Graves. The next year, the village again hosted the event, which featured caskets, marble, embroidery, brooms, bedspreads, vegetables, blooded stock, wheat, farm tools, and a magnetic telegraph. Stone Mountain hosted the event until 1850, when it moved to Macon.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Though DeKalb County voted against secession from the United States, it was not spared the devastation of the Civil War. Stone Mountain Village went unscathed until the Battle of Atlanta, when it was destroyed by men under the command of General James B. McPherson on July 19, 1864. Several antebellum homes were spared as they were used as hospitals. The railroad depot's roof burned, but the building stood, owing to its 2-foot-thick granite walls.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: From the village’s destruction in July 1864 until November, Union forces scavenged Stone Mountain and the surrounding area, taking corn, wheat, cotton, cattle, and other goods. On November 15, 1864, between 12,000 and 15,000 Union troops marched through Stone Mountain and further destroyed the rail lines. The rails were rendered useless by heating them over burning railroad ties, then twisting them around trees. The term Sherman’s neckties was coined for this form of destruction.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: After the Civil War ended, housing in the area was rebuilt as Stone Mountain granite was again in demand for construction across the nation. A significant portion of the quarry's work force were African Americans, but they were generally excluded from areas where white families lived, so a shantytown, Shermantown, came into being at the southeast side of the village; its name was a reference to Union General William T. Sherman.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: In 1868, Reverend R. M. Burson organized Bethsaida Baptist Church to serve Shermantown. A church building was then built under Reverend F. M. Simons at what is now 853 Fourth Street. Simons was among a delegation of southern African American pastors to meet with Sherman in Washington, D.C. after the war to discuss the treatment of the freedmen. Bethsaida Baptist is still an active part of the Stone Mountain Village.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: By the 20th century, much of Shermantown’s original structures had been replaced. Bethsaida’s original wooden structure was replaced by stone in 1920. Though Shermantown has mostly integrated into the growing Stone Mountain Village, it retains its own distinct community.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: 1915 was the year of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization. Members assembled at Stone Mountain with permission of quarry owner Samuel Venable, an active member. Their activities, including annual cross-burnings, continued for over 40 years, but Stone Mountain’s association with the Klan began to erode when the State of Georgia began to acquire the mountain and surrounding property in 1958. In 1960, Governor Ernest Vandiver condemned the property the state had purchased in order to void the perpetual easements Venable had granted the Klan. This ended any official link between Stone Mountain and the Klan.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: During the Civil Rights Movement's March on Washington, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Stone Mountain in his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech when he proclaimed, "let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!" Charles Burris, the Village's first African-American mayor, dedicated the Freedom Bell on Main Street in King's honor on February 26, 2000. At an annual ceremony held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the bell is rung to commemorate King's legacy.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: The mountain has been known by countless names throughout the centuries. It was called Crystal Mountain by 16th-century Spanish explorer Juan Pardo when he visited in 1567. The Creek Indians who inhabited the area at that time used a name translating to "Lone Mountain". Around the turn of the 19th century, settlers called it Rock Mountain or Rock Fort Mountain. By the end of the 1830s, Stone Mountain had become the generally accepted name. Like the mountain, the village formed at its base was initially known as Rock Mountain but was incorporated as New Gibraltar in 1839 by an act of the General Assembly. In 1847 the Georgia legislature changed the name to Stone Mountain.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: The Stone Mountain Cemetery, established around 1850, is a microcosm of the village’s past. It is the final resting place for roughly 200 unknown Confederate soldiers. 71 known Confederate soldiers are buried there, along with James Sprayberry, a Union soldier. Another notable site is the grave of George Pressley Trout, who is buried there with his wife and his horse. James B. Rivers, the village’s first African American police chief, is at rest there on a hillside facing the mountain. The cemetery is still in use.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Stone Mountain is governed by a council-manager form of government. Citizens elect a mayor and six council members who are all elected at-large. The terms of office are four years, with elections staggered every two years. Daily city operations are managed by an appointed professional city manager. Services provided by the city include police, public works, code enforcement, and municipal court.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: The city also has standing commissions for historic preservation, downtown development, and planning & zoning. The city holds a "City of Ethics" designation from the Georgia Municipal Association and is a member of Main Street America.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Stone Mountain is at the western base of the quartz monzonite dome monadnock of the same name. While Stone Mountain city proper is completely within DeKalb County, the postal regions designated and traditionally considered as Stone Mountain include portions of DeKalb and Gwinnett Counties.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: As of the 2020 United States census, there were 6,703 people, 2,351 households, and 1,578 families residing in the city.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: According to 2017 US Census Bureau estimates, Stone Mountain has 6,368 residents, a 9.0% increase since 2010. There are 2,519 households, with an average of 2.42 persons per household. 8.9% of Stone Mountain residents are foreign-born. Estimates of the racial makeup of the city are 73% African-American/Black, 22.1% White, 1% Asian, 0.9% Native American/Alaskan, and 1.1% of two or more races.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Of persons 25 years or older, 87.3% are high school graduates or higher, while 30.8% have attained a bachelor's degree or higher. The median income is $35,964, with a per capita income of $21,134.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: The Stone Mountain area has been a beneficiary of Georgia's flourishing film industry. Film crews and production personnel have become common sights in Stone Mountain Village. Due to the demand for filming in the historic downtown area, requests for filming in the village are handled by the downtown development authority. The proceeds help fund festivals and other public events for the community.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Most of the shops and buildings on Main Street were built right after the turn of the 20th century and maintain many of the original facades. This has provided an appropriate backdrop for a number of filming projects, ranging from period pieces to those requiring a quaint village setting.


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: Parts of motion pictures like "Footloose" (2011) and "Need for Speed" (2014) were filmed in the village. The growing number of television show credits include "The Vampire Diaries", "Kevin (Probably) Saves the World", "MacGyver", and the Netflix science fiction/horror series "Stranger Things".


title: Stone Mountain, Georgia

text: The children of Stone Mountain are served by the DeKalb County Public Schools. Stone Mountain Elementary School and Champion Theme Middle School are within the city limits.


title: Broom

text: A broom (also known in some forms as a broomstick) is a cleaning tool consisting of usually stiff fibers (often made of materials such as plastic, hair, or corn husks) attached to, and roughly parallel to, a cylindrical handle, the broomstick. It is thus a variety of brush with a long handle. It is commonly used in combination with a dustpan.


title: Broom

text: A distinction is made between a "hard broom" and a "soft broom" and a spectrum in between. Soft brooms are used in some cultures chiefly for sweeping walls of cobwebs and spiders, like a "feather duster", while hard brooms are for rougher tasks like sweeping dirt off sidewalks or concrete floors, or even smoothing and texturing wet concrete. The majority of brooms are somewhere in between, suitable for sweeping the floors of homes and businesses, soft enough to be flexible and to move even light dust, but stiff enough to achieve a firm sweeping action.


title: Broom

text: The word "broom" derives from the name of certain thorny shrubs ("Genista" and others) used for sweeping. The name of the shrubs began to be used for the household implement in Late Middle English and gradually replaced the earlier "besom" during the Early Modern English period. The song "Buy Broom Buzzems" (by William Purvis 1752–1832) still refers to the "broom besom" as one type of besom (i.e. "a besom made from broom").


title: Broom

text: Flat brooms, made of broom corn, were invented by Shakers in the 19th century with the invention of the broom vice.


title: Broom

text: In 1797, the quality of brooms changed when Levi Dickenson, a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts, made a broom for his wife, using the tassels of sorghum, a grain he was growing for the seeds. His wife spread good words around town, creating demand for Dickenson's sorghum brooms. The sorghum brooms held up well, but ultimately, like all brooms, fell apart. Dickenson subsequently invented a machine that would make better brooms, and faster than he could. In 1810, the foot treadle broom machine was invented. This machine played an integral part in the Industrial Revolution.


title: Broom

text: One source mentions that the United States had 303 broom factories by 1839 and that the number peaked at 1,039 in 1919. Most of these were in the Eastern United States; during the Great Depression in the 1930s, the number of factories declined to 320 in 1939. The state of Oklahoma became a major center for broom production because broom corn grew especially well there, with The Oklahoma Broom Corn Company opening a factory in El Reno in 1906. Faced with competition from imported brooms and synthetic bristles, most of the factories closed by the 1960s.


title: Broom

text: In the context of witchcraft, "broomstick" is likely to refer to the broom as a whole, known as a besom. The first known reference to witches flying on broomsticks dates to the 11th-century Islamic traditionalist theologian Ibn Qudamahin his book al-Mughnī ( The Persuader ). The first reference to witches flying on broomsticks in Europe dates to 1453, confessed by the male witch Guillaume Edelin. The concept of a flying ointment used by witches appears at about the same time, recorded in 1456.


title: Broom

text: In Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 film, "The Wizard of Oz", the Wicked Witch of the West used a broomstick to fly over Oz. She also used it to skywrite "Surrender Dorothy" above the Emerald City. The Wizard commands Dorothy and her three traveling companions to bring the Wicked Witch's broomstick to him in order to grant their wishes. Dorothy carries it to the Wizard with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion after the Wicked Witch's death.


title: Broom

text: In Disney's 1940 film "Fantasia", Mickey Mouse, playing The Sorcerer's Apprentice, brings a broom to life to do his chore of filling a well full of water. The broom overdoes its job and when chopped into pieces, each splinter becomes a new broom that flood the room until Yen Sid stops them. This story comes from a poem by Goethe called "Der Zauberlehrling" ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice"). The Disney brooms have had recurring cameos in Disney media, mostly portrayed as janitors, albeit not out of control or causing chaos such as in the original appearance.


title: Broom

text: In Eswatini (Swaziland), witches' broomsticks are short bundles of sticks tied together without a handle.


title: Broom

text: Flying brooms play an important role in the fantasy world of Harry Potter, used for transportation as well as for playing the popular airborne game of Quidditch. Flying brooms, along with Flying carpets, are the main means of transportation in the world of Poul Anderson's


title: Broom

text: The Flying Broom () is a feminist organization in Turkey, deliberately evoking the associations of a Flying Broom with witches.


title: Broom

text: 16. "" (in crypto) are a of good luck around the world. They sweep away bad fortune and protect against evil.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: Two Lovers is a 2008 American romantic drama film, taking its inspiration from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1848 short story "White Nights", which had already been turned into a film seven times, first by Luchino Visconti: "Le Notti Bianche" (1957). The film is directed by James Gray and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Vinessa Shaw. It is set in the largely Russian Jewish neighborhood Brighton Beach in New York City, as was Gray's first film "Little Odessa". "Two Lovers" premiered in competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival in May. The film was Gray's third to enter the competition at this festival. It was released on February 13, 2009.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) is walking along a bridge over a stream in Brooklyn, when suddenly he jumps into the water in an attempted suicide. He changes his mind and quickly walks home to his parents' apartment. His mother Ruth (Rossellini), seeing him dripping wet, tells her husband Reuben their son has tried it again and it becomes evident that Leonard has attempted suicide before.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: His parents tell him that a potential business partner and his family are invited for dinner that night and ask him to be present. When they arrive, Leonard finds that he had been set up with the other family's daughter, Sandra Cohen (Shaw). She inquires about his interest in photography and notices a photo of a girl above his headboard. He explains he had been engaged to the girl for several years, but the relationship was broken off when it turned out both he and his fiancée carried the gene for Tay–Sachs disease, which results in diseased children who generally don't live beyond age 12, so they would be unable to have healthy children.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: Leonard meets a new neighbor, Michelle Rausch (Paltrow), and is immediately attracted to her, choosing to ignore that she is a drug addict. He learns that she is dating a married partner in her law firm, Ronald Blatt (Koteas). At her request, Leonard agrees to meet the pair for dinner at a restaurant. The couple leave him later that evening, as they have plans to attend the Metropolitan Opera. Leonard returns home dejected, but surprisingly, Sandra arrives, sent over by Leonard's parents. Believing that Leonard wanted her to come by, she realizes by his shocked expression that she was set up. She apologizes for the misunderstanding and says that, if he isn't interested, a lot of other guys are. Leonard says that he likes her, and they kiss and eventually make love, and with time, his relationship with Sandra deepens.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: Michelle calls Leonard and says she is sick. He takes her to the hospital, where she has a D&C for a miscarriage. She had been unaware she was pregnant and is even more angry that Ronald ignored her calls. Leonard takes her home but hides when Ronald arrives. Ronald apologizes to Michelle for not having come to her aid, but Michelle coldly asks Ronald to leave and then asks Leonard to write something on her forearm with his finger while she falls asleep. Leonard writes "I love you".


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: Two weeks later, Michelle meets Leonard on the roof of their building and tells him that she has broken up with Ronald and is going to San Francisco. Leonard tells her not to leave and professes his love for her. They have sex and plan to leave together the next day for San Francisco.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: On New Year's Eve, Leonard buys an engagement ring for Michelle. Sandra's father Michael then summons him and offers him a partnership in the family businesses, assuming that he is going to marry Sandra. Noticing the jeweler's gift bag Leonard is holding, the father assumes it is for Sandra; Leonard lies that it is.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: During his parents' New Year's Eve party, Leonard hides in the courtyard to meet Michelle. Michelle arrives late and tells Leonard that she isn't going to San Francisco, because Ronald, having learned Michelle is leaving him for California, has decided to leave his wife and children for her. Disheartened, Leonard permanently breaks things off with her.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: Feeling depressed, Leonard heads to the beach, intending to kill himself. When he drops a glove that Sandra had bought for him, he realizes that, in Sandra, he has found someone who loves him and with whom he can build a happy life. He picks up the glove and sees the boxed engagement ring lying on the sand, where he had thrown it from the boardwalk earlier. He returns to the party, where he gives Sandra the ring and embraces her in a tearful passionate hug.


title: Two Lovers (2008 film)

text: "Two Lovers" received largely positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 82%, based on 167 reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The website's consensus reads, ""Two Lovers" is a complex, intriguing, richly-acted romantic drama". On Metacritic, the film has a score of 74 out of 100, based on 33 reviews. Ray Bennett from "The Hollywood Reporter" defined the film as "an old-fashioned love story in which the melodramatic trapdoors of shock and surprise never open" and added that the film "will please many and it may win awards", though "the acting is (...) restrained." He also lauded the film as "a throwback to the days when love in the movies involved the mind as well as the heart."


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen (13 January 191123 April 2005), known as Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was a conservative Australian politician. He was the longest-serving and longest-lived premier of Queensland, holding office from 1968 to 1987, during which time the state underwent considerable economic development. He has become one of the most well-known and controversial figures of 20th-century Australian politics because of his uncompromising conservatism (including his role in the downfall of the Whitlam federal government), political longevity, and the institutional corruption that became synonymous with his later leadership.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen's Country (later National) Party controlled Queensland despite frequently receiving a smaller number of votes than the state's two other major parties, achieving the result through a notorious system of electoral malapportionment that resulted in rural votes having a greater value than those cast in city electorates. The effect earned Bjelke-Petersen the nickname of "the Hillbilly Dictator". Regardless, he was a highly popular figure among conservative voters and over the course of his 19 years as premier he tripled the number of people who voted for the CP and doubled the party's percentage vote. After the Liberal Party pulled out of the coalition government in 1983, Bjelke-Petersen reduced his former partners to a mere eight seats in an election held later that year. In 1985 Bjelke-Petersen launched a campaign to move into federal politics to become prime minister, though the campaign was eventually aborted.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen was a divisive figure and earned himself a reputation as a "law and order" politician with his repeated use of police force against street demonstrators and strongarm tactics with trade unions, leading to frequent descriptions of Queensland under his leadership as a police state. From 1987 his administration came under the scrutiny of a royal commission into police corruption and its links with state government ministers. Bjelke-Petersen was unable to recover from the series of damaging findings and after initially resisting a party vote that replaced him as leader, resigned from politics on 1 December 1987. Two of his state ministers, as well as the police commissioner Bjelke-Petersen had appointed and later knighted, were jailed for corruption offences and in 1991 Bjelke-Petersen, too, was tried for perjury over his evidence to the royal commission; the jury failed to reach a verdict as the jury foreman was a member of the Young Nationals, and Bjelke-Petersen was deemed too old to face a second trial.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen was born in Dannevirke in the Hawke's Bay region of New Zealand, and lived in Waipukurau, a small town in Hawke's Bay. The Australian Bjelke-Petersen family are of Danish descent.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen's parents were both Danish immigrants, and his father, Carl (known to the family as George), was a Lutheran pastor. In 1913 the family moved to Australia, establishing a farm, "Bethany", near Kingaroy in south-eastern Queensland.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The young Bjelke-Petersen suffered from polio, leaving him with a lifelong limp. The family was poor, and Carl Bjelke-Petersen was frequently in poor health. Bjelke-Petersen left formal schooling at age 14 to work with his mother on the farm, though he later enrolled in correspondence school and undertook a University of Queensland extension course on the "Art of Writing". He taught Sunday school, delivered sermons regularly in nearby towns and joined the Kingaroy debating society.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1933, Bjelke-Petersen began work land-clearing and peanut farming on the family's newly acquired second property. His efforts eventually allowed him to begin work as a contract land-clearer and to acquire further capital which he invested in farm equipment and natural resource exploration. He developed a technique for quickly clearing scrub by connecting a heavy anchor chain between two bulldozers. By the time he was 30, he was a prosperous farmer and businessman. Obtaining a pilot's licence early in his adult life, Bjelke-Petersen also started aerial spraying and grass seeding to further speed up pasture development in Queensland.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: After failing in a 1944 plebiscite against the sitting member to gain Country Party endorsement in the state seat of Nanango, based on Kingaroy, Bjelke-Petersen was elected in 1946 to the Kingaroy Shire Council, where he developed a profile in the Country Party. With the support of local federal member and shire council chairman Sir Charles Adermann and Sir Frank Nicklin, he gained Country Party endorsement for Nanango and was elected a year later at age 36, going on to give regular radio talks and becoming secretary of the local Nationals branch. He would hold this seat, renamed Barambah in 1950, for the next 40 years. The Labor Party had held power in Queensland since 1932 and Bjelke-Petersen spent eleven years as an opposition member.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: On 31 May 1952, Bjelke-Petersen married typist Florence Gilmour, who would later become a significant political figure in her own right.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1957, following a split in the Labor Party, the Country Party under Nicklin came to power, with the Liberal Party as a junior coalition partner. This was a reversal of the situation at the national level. Queensland is Australia's least centralised mainland state; the provincial cities between them have more people than the Brisbane area. In these areas, the Country Party was stronger than the Liberal Party. As a result, the Country Party had historically been the larger of the two non-Labor parties, and had been senior partner in the Coalition since 1925.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1963 Nicklin appointed Bjelke-Petersen as minister for works and housing, a portfolio that gave him the opportunity to bestow favours and earn the loyalty of backbenchers by approving construction of schools, police stations and public housing in their electorates. At various times, he also served as acting minister for education, police, Aboriginal and Island Affairs, local government and conservation and labour and industry. He would serve in cabinet without interruption until his retirement in 1987. Only Thomas Playford IV, who served in the South Australian cabinet without interruption from 1938 to 1965, served longer as a federal or state cabinet minister.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Nicklin retired in January 1968 and was succeeded as Premier and Country Party leader by Jack Pizzey; Bjelke-Petersen was elected unopposed as deputy Country Party leader. On 31 July 1968, after just seven months in office, Pizzey suffered a heart attack and died. Deputy Premier and Liberal leader Gordon Chalk was sworn in as caretaker premier. The Country Party had 27 seats in Parliament; the Liberals had 20. Nonetheless, there was some dispute over whether the Liberals should take senior status, which would have made Chalk premier in his own right. Matters were brought to a head when Bjelke-Petersen—elected Country Party leader within days of Pizzey's death—threatened to pull the Country Party out of the Coalition unless he became Premier. After seven days Chalk accepted the inevitable, and Bjelke-Petersen was sworn in as Premier on 8 August 1968. He remained Police Minister.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Within months of becoming premier, Bjelke-Petersen encountered his first controversy over allegations of conflict of interest. In April 1959, while still a backbencher, he had paid £2 for an Authority to Prospect, giving him the right to search for oil over 150,000 km near Hughenden in far north Queensland. The next month he incorporated a company, Artesian Basin Oil Co. Pty Ltd, of which he was sole director and shareholder, and the same day entered an agreement to sell 51% of the company's shares to an American company for £12,650. The following day he sought the consent of Mines Minister Ernie Evans to transfer the oil search authority to Artesian for £2; the consent was given a week later.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: When the Taxation Commissioner ruled that the £12,650 windfall from the £2 authority was a taxable profit, Bjelke-Petersen appealed, eventually taking the matter to the High Court. The appeal was dismissed, with Justice Taylor ruling that Bjelke-Petersen's six million percent gain from the £2 authority arose from "a profit-making undertaking". In 1962 Artesian transferred its Authority to Prospect to a new company, Exoil NL, for £190,000, and Bjelke-Petersen in turn bought a million shares in Exoil.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: On 1 September 1968, three weeks after becoming premier, Bjelke-Petersen's government gave two companies, Exoil NL and Transoil NL—in both of which he was a major shareholder—six-year leases to prospect for oil on the Great Barrier Reef north of Cooktown. Opposition Leader Jack Houston revealed the Premier's financial involvement in the companies at a press conference in March 1969, where he asserted Bjelke-Petersen had gained "fabulous wealth" from the £2 prospecting authority, which had now mushroomed into Exoil shares worth AU$720,000. Bjelke-Petersen said he had done nothing wrong, but resigned his directorship of Artesian in favour of his wife.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The Country-Liberal coalition was returned to power at the 1969 Queensland election, with the state's system of electoral malapportionment delivering the Country Party 26 seats—a third of the parliament's 78 seats—from 21.1% of the primary vote, the Liberals taking 19 seats from 23.7% of the vote and the Labor Party's 45.1% share of the vote leaving it with 31 seats.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Further controversy followed. In June 1970 it was revealed that a number of Queensland government ministers and senior public servants, as well as Florence Bjelke-Petersen, had bought shares in the public float of Comalco, a mining company that had direct dealings with the government and senior ministers. The shares finished their first day of trading at double the price the ministers had paid. Bjelke-Petersen again rejected claims of a conflict of interest, but the Country Party state branch changed its policy to forbid the acceptance of preferential share offers by ministers or members of parliament.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In October, the Country Party lost a by-election in the Gold Coast seat of Albert, prompting several nervous MPs to make plans to oust Bjelke-Petersen as leader and replace him with Ron Camm. Bjelke-Petersen spent the night and the next morning calling MPs to bolster support, surviving a party room vote by a margin of one, after producing a proxy vote of an MP who was overseas and uncontactable. Plans by Country Party members to support a Labor Party vote of no confidence in parliament were quashed after the intervention of party president Robert Sparkes, who warned that anyone who voted against Bjelke-Petersen would lose their status as the party's candidate at the next election.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen seized on the controversial visit of the Springboks, the South African rugby union team, in 1971 to consolidate his position as leader with a display of force.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Springboks matches in southern states had already been disrupted by anti-apartheid demonstrations and a match in Brisbane was scheduled for 24 July 1971, the date of two Queensland by-elections. On 14 July Bjelke-Petersen declared a month-long state of emergency covering the entire state, giving the government almost unlimited power to quell what the government said was expected to be "a climax of violent demonstrations". Six hundred police were transported to Brisbane from elsewhere in the state.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In the week before the match, 40 trade unions staged a 24-hour strike, protesting against the proclamation. A crowd of demonstrators also mounted a peaceful protest outside the Springboks' Wickham Terrace motel and were chased on foot by police moments after being ordered to retreat, with many police attacking the crowd with batons, boots and fists. It was one of a series of violent attacks by police on demonstrators during the Springboks' visit to Queensland.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The football game was played to a crowd of 7000 behind a high barbed-wire fence without incident. The state of emergency, which gave the government the appearance of being strong-willed and decisive, helped steer the government to victory in both by-elections held on match day. Police Special Branch member Don Lane was one of those elected, becoming a political ally of the Premier.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen praised police for their "restraint" during the demonstrations and rewarded the police union for its support with an extra week's leave for every officer in the state. He described the tension over the Springboks' tour as "great fun, a game of chess in the political arena". The crisis, he said, "put me on the map".


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The following May—six months before the Labor Party's landslide victory at the 1972 Australian federal election under Gough Whitlam—the Country-Liberal coalition gained another comprehensive win at the 1972 Queensland state election: Bjelke-Petersen's party took 26 seats with 20% of the vote, the Liberals took 21 seats with a 22.2% share and Labor got 33 seats from 46.7%. It was the first state election to be fought following a 1971 electoral redistribution that added four seats to the parliament and created four electoral zones with a weightage towards rural seats, with the result that while Brisbane electorates averaged about 22,000 voters, some rural seats such as Gregory and Balonne had fewer than 7000.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: From 1971, under the guidance of newly hired press secretary Allen Callaghan, a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation political journalist, Bjelke-Petersen developed a high level of sophistication in dealing with news media. He held daily media conferences where he joked that he "fed the chooks", established direct telex links to newsrooms where he could feed professionally written media releases and became adept at distributing press releases on deadline so journalists had very little chance to research news items. The Premier's public profile rose rapidly with the resulting media coverage. Bjelke-Petersen began regular media and parliamentary attacks on the Whitlam Labor government, vowing to have it defeated, and he and Whitlam exchanged frequent verbal barbs, culminating in the prime minister's 1975 description of the Queensland premier as "a Bible-bashing bastard ... a paranoic, a bigot and fanatical". The pair clashed over federal plans to halt the sale of Queensland coal to Japan, take over the administration of Aboriginal affairs, remove outback petrol subsidies and move the Australian border in the Torres Strait southwards to a point midway between Queensland and Papua New Guinea. Bjelke-Petersen also vehemently opposed the Whitlam government's proposal for Medicare, a publicly funded universal health care system. The battles helped to consolidate Bjelke-Petersen's power as he used the media to emphasise a distinctive Queensland identity he alleged was under threat from the "socialist" federal government.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The Queensland government bought a single-engine aircraft for the Premier's use in November 1971, upgrading it to a twin-engine aircraft in 1973 and even bigger model in 1975. Bjelke-Petersen, a licensed pilot, used it often to visit far-flung parts of the state to campaign and boost his public profile.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In April 1974, in a bid to broaden its appeal beyond rural voters, the Country Party changed its name to the National Party.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In April 1974 Bjelke-Petersen outmanoeuvred Whitlam after the prime minister offered Democratic Labor Party senator Vince Gair, a bitter opponent of the government, the position of ambassador to Ireland as a way of creating an extra vacant Senate position in Queensland. Whitlam, who lacked a majority in the Senate, hoped Gair's seat would be won by his Labor Party. But when the arrangement was disclosed by newspapers before Gair had resigned from the Senate, the Opposition conspired to keep Gair away from the Senate President (to whom Gair had not yet given his resignation) and ensured he voted in a Senate debate late that night to avoid any move to backdate the resignation. At 5.15pm the Queensland Cabinet met to pass a "flying minute" and advised the Governor, Sir Colin Hannah, to issue writs for five, rather than six, vacancies, denying Labor the chance of gaining Gair's Senate spot. The intention was to have Gair's seat declared a casual vacancy, allowing Bjelke-Petersen to fill the vacancy until the next election.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Labor argued that Gair's appointment, and hence his departure from the senate, was effective from no later than when the Irish government accepted his appointment, in March. This was a matter of protracted debate in the Senate over many days, and was never resolved, but it was rendered irrelevant when Whitlam called a double dissolution of both Houses, in an election gamble he only narrowly won.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In October 1974 Bjelke-Petersen called an early election, setting the 1974 Queensland election for 7 December, declaring it would be fought on "the alien and stagnating, centralist, socialist, communist-inspired policies of the federal Labor government". The premier visited 70 towns and cities in the five-week campaign and attracted record crowds to public meetings. The result was a spectacular rout for the Labor Party, which was left with just 11 of the legislature's 82 seats after a 16.5 percent swing to the Coalition, leading observers to call Labor's caucus a "cricket team." The only seat Labor retained north of Rockhampton was Cairns, by fewer than 200 votes. The National Party, contesting its first state election under the new name and fielding candidates in just 48 seats, lifted its vote from 19.7 percent to 28 percent, creating a threat for the Liberal Party, and also picked up a number of city seats including its first in Brisbane, the eastern suburbs seat of Wynnum. The Nationals even managed to oust Labor leader Perc Tucker in his own seat. "The Australian" newspaper named Bjelke-Petersen, whom it described as the "undistinguished" Queensland premier, "Australian of the Year", citing "the singular impact he has exerted on national political life".


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1975, Bjelke-Petersen played what turned out to be a key role in the political crisis that brought down the Whitlam government. When Queensland Labor Senator Bertie Milliner died suddenly in June 1975, Bjelke-Petersen requested from the Labor Party a short list of three nominees, from which he would pick one to replace Milliner. The ALP refused to supply such a list, instead nominating Mal Colston, an unsuccessful Labor candidate in the 1970 election, whom Bjelke-Petersen duly rejected. On 3 September Bjelke-Petersen announced that he had selected political novice Albert Field, a long-time ALP member who was critical of the Whitlam government. Field's appointment was the subject of a High Court challenge and he was on leave from October 1975. During this period, the Coalition led by Malcolm Fraser declined to allot a pair to balance Field's absence. This gave the Coalition control over the Senate. Fraser used that control to obstruct passage of the Supply Bills through Parliament, denying Whitlam's by now unpopular government the legal capacity to appropriate funds for government business and leading to his dismissal as Prime Minister. During the tumultuous election campaign precipitated by Whitlam's dismissal by Sir John Kerr, Bjelke-Petersen alleged that Queensland police investigations had uncovered damaging documentation in relation to the Loans Affair. This documentation was never made public and these allegations remained unsubstantiated.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Queensland was renowned for being the lowest taxed state in Australia for much of Bjelke-Petersen's tenure. Over heated objections by Treasurer Gordon Chalk, Bjelke-Petersen in 1977 announced the removal of state death duties, a move that cost his state $30 million in revenue. So many New South Wales and Victorian residents sought to establish their permanent address in Queensland as a result, boosting state coffers with stamp duty from property transactions, that other states followed suit within months and also abolished the tax. To help compensate for lost revenue, the government introduced football pools; four years later the government granted a casino licence on the Gold Coast, although this too was mired in allegations of corruption and favouritism.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Issues of police powers and civil liberties, first raised at the time of the 1971 Springboks tour, resurfaced in July 1976 with a major street demonstration in which more than a thousand university students marched towards the Brisbane city centre to demand better allowances from the federal government. Police stopped the march in Coronation Drive and television cameras captured an incident during the confrontation in which a police inspector struck a 20-year-old female protester over the head with his baton, injuring her. When Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod announced he would hold an inquiry, a move supported by Police Minister Max Hodges, Bjelke-Petersen declared there would be no inquiry. He told reporters he was tired of radical groups believing they could take over the streets. Police officers passed a motion at a meeting commending the premier for his "distinct stand against groups acting outside the law" and censured Whitrod. A week later Bjelke-Petersen relieved Hodges of his police portfolio. Secure in the knowledge that they had the Premier's backing, police officers continued to act provocatively, most notably in a military-style raid on a hippie commune at the Cedar Bay commune in Far North Queensland late the following month. The police, who had been looking for marijuana, set fire to the residents' houses and destroyed their property.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen rejected calls for an inquiry into the raid, declaring the government would believe the police and claiming the public clamour was "all part of an orchestrated campaign to legalise marijuana and denigrate the police". In defiance of the premier, Whitrod went ahead with an inquiry anyway and on 16 November ordered summonses be issued against four police officers on more than 25 charges, including arson. He chose the same day to announce that he was quitting his post. Whitrod claimed his resignation marked a victory for the forces of corruption, but said he had decided to quit rather than tolerate further political interference by the premier and new Police Minister Tom Newbery. Whitrod said Queensland showed signs of becoming a police state and he compared the growing political interference in law enforcement to the rise of the German Nazi state. Whitrod was replaced by Assistant Commissioner Terry Lewis, despite Whitrod's warning to the Police Minister that he was corrupt.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1977, Bjelke-Petersen announced that "the day of street marches is over", warning protesters: "Don't bother applying for a march permit. You won't get one. That's government policy now!" Liberal parliamentarians crossed the floor defending the right of association and assembly. One Liberal MP, Colin Lamont, told a meeting at the University of Queensland that the premier was engineering confrontation for electoral purposes and was confronted two hours later by an angry Bjelke-Petersen who said he was aware of the comments. Lamont later said he learned the Special Branch had been keeping files on Liberal rebels and reporting, not to their Commissioner, but directly to the Premier, commenting: "The police state had arrived." When, after two ugly street battles between police and right-to-march protesters, the Uniting Church Synod called on the government to change the march law, Bjelke-Petersen accused the clergy of "supporting communists". His attack sparked a joint political statement by four other major religious denominations, which was shrugged off by the premier.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The government's increasingly hardline approach to civil liberties prompted Queensland National Party president Robert Sparkes to warn the party that it was developing a dangerous "propaganda-created" ultra-conservative, almost fascist image. He told a party conference: "We must studiously avoid any statements or actions which suggest an extreme right-wing posture." Bjelke-Petersen ignored the advice. He condemned the use of Australian foreign aid to prop up communist regimes, urged Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to stop criticising the governments of South Africa and Rhodesia and from 1977 proposed Queensland secede from Australia and establish its own currency. He also accused political opponents of being covert communists bent on anarchy, observing: "I have always found ... you can campaign on anything you like but nothing is more effective than communism ... If he's a Labor man, he's a socialist and a very dangerous man."


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Three weeks before the 1977 Queensland election, 400 demonstrators were arrested in what a Melbourne newspaper called "Joh's War". Aided by an electoral redistribution that removed two Liberal-held seats, the Nationals won 35 out of 82 seats, compared with 24 for the Liberals and 23 for a resurgent Labor Party. It was the first time in Queensland political history the Nationals had outpolled the Liberals. Bjelke-Petersen used the party's strength to move key Cabinet posts that had long held by the Liberals into the hands of National Party ministers. In October 1978 thousands of demonstrators again attempted to defy anti-march laws with a protest march in Albert St, Brisbane, which was again repulsed by police lined five deep. In a Brisbane byelection a month later National Party support slumped to just 10 percent, half of what party strategists had expected. But by the end of 1978, both the state Liberal and Labor parties had new parliamentary leaders—the fourth Labor opposition leader during Bjelke-Petersen's reign and the third Liberal leader.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Florence Bjelke-Petersen was elected to the Senate in October 1980 as a National Party member and six weeks later Joh was successful for a fifth time as premier at the 1980 Queensland election, with the Nationals converting a 27.9 percent primary vote—their highest ever—into 35 of the parliament's 82 seats, or 43 percent of seats. It also created a record 13-seat lead over their coalition partners, the Liberals, who had campaigned by offering Queenslanders an alternative style of moderate government.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The Nationals picked up all four Gold Coast seats and all those on the Sunshine Coast. Once again the premier took advantage of his party's dominance over the Liberals in Cabinet, this time demanding that the seven Liberal ministers sign a coalition agreement in which they promised unquestioned allegiance to Cabinet decisions. The move turned the Nationals' 35 votes to a guaranteed majority of 42 in the House, effectively neutralising any potential opposition by the 15 Liberal backbenchers.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen began making appointments, including judges and the chairmanship of the Totalisator Agency Board, that had traditionally been the domain of Liberal ministers, and accusations arose of political interference and conflicts of interest as mining contracts, casino licences and the rights to build shopping complexes were awarded to business figures with National Party links. Accusations of political interference also arose when police released without charge TAB chairman Sir Edward Lyons, a National Party trustee and close friend of Bjelke-Petersen, after a breathalyser test showed he was driving with more than double the legal blood alcohol limit.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Relations with the Liberal Party continued to deteriorate. By August 1983, after 26 years of coalition, they had reached their nadir. Bjelke-Petersen was angered by a Liberal Party bid to establish a public accounts committee to examine government expenditure. Shortly afterward, Liberal leader Llew Edwards was ousted in a party room coup by Terry White, who had long advocated a greater role for the Liberals in the Coalition. Bjelke-Petersen refused to give Edwards' old post of deputy premier to White, choosing instead to adjourn parliament — which had sat for just 15 days that year—declined to say when it would sit again, and insisted he could govern alone without the need of a coalition, commenting: "The government of Queensland is in very, very good hands." Labor leader Tom Burns said the closure of parliament showed "that no rules exist in the state of Queensland." In a fortnight of political crisis, Bjelke-Petersen defied an ultimatum by Liberal parliamentarians to accept their leader in Cabinet, prompting White to tear up the Coalition agreement and lead the Liberals to the crossbench.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Watching with satisfaction as the Liberal Party engaged in vitriolic infighting, Bjelke-Petersen called an election for 22 October, claiming: "I really believe we can govern Queensland in our own right." The campaign coincided with the launch of an "official" Bjelke-Petersen biography, "Jigsaw", which lauded him as a "statesman extraordinaire" and "protectorate of Queensland and her people". Further rubbing salt in the wounds of his former coalition partners, his campaign was boosted by the support of prominent Liberals from other states including Tasmanian premier Robin Gray and former Victorian and NSW premiers Sir Henry Bolte and Tom Lewis. The Nationals also poured significant resources into Brisbane-area Liberal seats, seeing a chance to not only win government in their own right, but destroy their former Liberal partners.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Three months before his 73rd birthday, Bjelke-Petersen and his party recorded a resounding victory, attracting 38.9 percent of the primary vote to give them exactly half the parliament's 82 seats, just one short of a majority. Labor, with 44 percent of the vote, won 32 seats. The Liberals were decimated, losing all but eight of their 21 seats. Bjelke-Petersen openly urged Liberals to cross the floor to the Nationals in hopes of getting an outright majority. Just three days later, two Liberals—former ministers Don Lane and Brian Austin—took up Bjelke-Petersen's offer and joined the Nationals in return for seats in cabinet. With Lane and Austin's defections, the National Party was able to form a majority government for the first time at the state level in Australia.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1984 Bjelke-Petersen was created a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) for "services to parliamentary democracy". Author Evan Whitton suggests the premier had made the nomination himself.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1985 Bjelke-Petersen unveiled plans for another electoral redistribution to create seven new seats in four zones: four in the state's populous south-east (with an average enrolment of 19,357 electors per seat) and three in country areas (with enrolments as low as 9386). The boundaries were to be drawn by electoral commissioners specially appointed by the government; one of them, Cairns lawyer Sir Thomas Covacevich, was a fundraiser for the National Party. The malapportionment meant that a vote in the state's west was worth two in Brisbane and the provincial cities. A University of Queensland associate professor of government described the redistribution as "the most criminal act ever perpetrated in politics ... the worst zonal gerrymander in the history of the world" and the most serious action of Bjelke-Petersen's political career.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: A "Joh for PM" campaign was conceived in late 1985, driven largely by a group of Gold Coast property developers, promoting Bjelke-Petersen as the most effective conservative challenger to Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and at the 1986 Queensland election he recorded his biggest electoral win ever, winning 49 of the state's 89 seats with 39.6 percent of the primary vote. The ALP's 41.3 percent share of the vote earned it 30 seats, while the Liberal Party won the remaining 10 seats. In his victory speech, Bjelke-Petersen declared the Nationals had prevailed over the "three forces" who had opposed it: "We had the ALP organisation with its deceits, deception and lies, we had the media encouraging and supporting them, and we had the Liberal Party ... our assault on Canberra begins right now."


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: It was the seventh and final electoral victory of the Bjelke-Petersen era. In January 1987 the premier handed control of the state to Deputy Premier Bill Gunn and announced he would seek election to the House of Representatives, formally embarking on his "Joh for Canberra" push. By early 1987 the campaign, with its promise of a 25 percent flat tax, was attracting the support of 20 per cent of voters in opinion polls.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In late 1986, two journalists, the ABC's Chris Masters and "The Courier-Mail"'s Phil Dickie, independently began investigating the extent of police and political corruption in Queensland and its links to the National Party state government. Dickie's reports, alleging the apparent immunity from prosecution enjoyed by a group of illegal brothel operators, began appearing in early 1987; Masters' explosive "Four Corners" investigative report on police corruption entitled "The Moonlight State" aired on 11 May 1987. Within a week, Acting Premier Gunn decided to initiate a wide-ranging Commission of Inquiry into police corruption, despite opposition from Bjelke-Petersen. Gunn selected former Federal Court judge Tony Fitzgerald as its head. By late June, the terms of inquiry of what became known as the Fitzgerald Inquiry had been widened from members of the force to include "any other persons" with whom police might have been engaged in misconduct since 1977.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: On 27 May 1987, Prime Minister Hawke called a federal election for 11 July, catching Bjelke-Petersen unprepared. The premier had flown to the United States two days earlier and had not yet nominated for a federal seat; on 3 June he abandoned his ambitions to become prime minister and resumed his position in the Queensland government. The announcement came too late for the non-Labor forces, as Bjelke-Petersen had pressured the federal Nationals to pull out of the Coalition. Due to a number of three-cornered contests, Labor won a sweeping victory.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Fitzgerald began his formal hearings on 27 July 1987, and a month later the first bombshells were dropped as Sgt Harry Burgess—accused of accepting $221,000 in bribes since 1981—implicated senior officers Jack Herbert, Noel Dwyer, Graeme Parker and Commissioner Terry Lewis in complex graft schemes. Other allegations quickly followed, and on 21 September Police Minister Gunn ordered Lewis—knighted in 1986 at Bjelke-Petersen's behest and now accused of having taken $663,000 in bribes—to stand down.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The ground had begun to shift out from under Bjelke-Petersen's feet even before the hearings began. The first allegations of corruption prompted the Labor opposition to ask the Governor, Sir Walter Campbell, to use his reserve power to sack Bjelke-Petersen. His position deteriorated rapidly; ministers were openly opposing him in Cabinet meetings, which had been almost unthinkable for most of his tenure.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Throughout 1986, Bjelke-Petersen had pushed for approval of construction of the world's tallest skyscraper in the Brisbane CBD, which had been announced in May. The project, which had not been approved by the Brisbane City Council, enraged his backbenchers. During a party meeting, MP Huan Fraser confronted Bjelke-Petersen, saying "I know there is a bloody big payoff to you coming as a result of this. You're a corrupt old bastard, and I'm not going to cop it."


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: By this time, Sparkes had also turned against Bjelke-Petersen, and was pressuring him to retire. On 7 October, Bjelke-Petersen announced he would retire from politics on 8 August 1988, the 20th anniversary of his swearing-in.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Six weeks later, on 23 November 1987, Bjelke-Petersen visited Campbell and advised him to sack the entire Cabinet and appoint a new one with redistributed portfolios. Under normal circumstances, Campbell would have been bound by convention to act on Bjelke-Petersen's advice. However, Campbell persuaded Bjelke-Petersen to limit his demand to ask for the resignations of those ministers he wanted removed. Bjelke-Petersen then demanded the resignation of five of his ministers, including Gunn and Health Minister Mike Ahern. All refused. Gunn, believing Bjelke-Petersen intended to take over the police portfolio and terminate the Fitzgerald Inquiry, announced he would challenge for the leadership. Bjelke-Petersen persisted regardless and decided to sack three ministers—Ahern, Austin and Peter McKechnie—on the grounds of displaying insufficient loyalty.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The next day, Bjelke-Petersen formally advised Campbell to sack Ahern, Austin and McKechnie and call an early election. However, Ahern, Gunn and Austin told Campbell that Bjelke-Petersen no longer had enough parliamentary support to govern. While Campbell agreed to the ouster of Ahern, Gunn and Austin, he was reluctant to call fresh elections for a legislature that was only a year old. He thus concluded that the crisis was a political one in which he should not be involved. He also believed that Bjelke-Petersen was no longer acting rationally. After Bjelke-Petersen refused numerous requests for a party meeting, the party's management committee called one for 26 November. At this meeting, a spill motion was carried by a margin of 38–9. Bjelke-Petersen boycotted the meeting, and thus did not nominate for the ensuing leadership vote, which saw Ahern elected as the new leader and Gunn elected as deputy.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Ahern promptly wrote to Campbell seeking to be commissioned as premier. This normally should have been a pro forma request, given the Nationals' outright majority. However, Bjelke-Petersen insisted he was still premier, and even sought the support of his old Liberal and Labor foes in order to stay in office. However, even with the combined support of the Liberals and Labor plus Bjelke-Petersen's own vote, Bjelke-Petersen would have needed at least four Nationals floor-crossings to keep his post. Despite Bjelke-Petersen's seemingly tenuous position, Campbell had received legal advice that he could sack Bjelke-Petersen only if he tried to stay in office after being defeated in the legislature. This was per longstanding constitutional practice in Australia, which calls for a first minister (Prime Minister at the federal level, premier at the state level, chief minister at the territorial level) to stay in office unless he resigns or is defeated in the House.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: The result was a situation in which, as the "Sydney Morning Herald" put it, Queensland had a "Premier who is not leader" and the National Party a "Leader who is not Premier". The crisis continued till 1 December, when Bjelke-Petersen announced his retirement from politics. He declared: The policies of the National Party are no longer those on which I went to the people. Therefore I have no wish to lead the Government any longer. It was my intention to take this matter to the floor of State Parliament. However, I now have no further interest in leading the National Party any further.Three months later, Bjelke-Petersen called on voters at the federal by-election in Groom to support the Liberal candidate instead of the National contestant. Bjelke-Petersen said the Nationals had lost their way and turned their backs on traditional conservative policies.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In February 1988, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal announced a hearing into the suitability of entrepreneur Alan Bond, the owner of the Nine TV network, to hold a broadcasting licence. The investigation centered on the network's $400,000 payout to Bjelke-Petersen in 1985 to settle a defamation action launched by the premier in 1983. Bond had made the payment (negotiated from an initial $1 million claim) soon after buying the network and a major Queensland brewery and claimed in a later television interview that Bjelke-Petersen told him he would need to make the payment if he wished to continue business in Queensland. (In April 1989 the broadcasting tribunal found that Bjelke-Petersen had placed Bond in a position of "commercial blackmail".)


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen was called to the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry on 1 December 1988, where he said that, despite allegations raised in the media and parliament, he had held no suspicion in the previous decade of corruption in Queensland. He said a Hong Kong businessman's 1986 donation of $100,000 to an election slush fund—delivered in cash at the premier's Brisbane office—was not unusual, and that he did not know the identity of other donors who had left sums of $50,000 and $60,000 in cash at his office on other occasions. Questioned by barrister Michael Forde, Bjelke-Petersen—whose citation for his 1984 knighthood noted that he was "a strong believer in historic tradition of parliamentary democracy"—was also unable to explain the doctrine of separation of powers under the Westminster system.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Under Ahern (1987–89) and Russell Cooper (1989), the Nationals were unable to overcome the damage from the revelations about the massive corruption in the Bjelke-Petersen government. At the 1989 state election, Labor swept the Nationals from power in a 24-seat swing—at the time, the worst defeat of a sitting government since responsible government was introduced in Queensland.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: As a result of the Fitzgerald inquiry, Lewis was tried, convicted, and jailed on corruption charges. He was later stripped of his knighthood and other honours. A number of other officials, including ministers Don Lane and Austin were also jailed. Another former minister, Russ Hinze, died while awaiting trial.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 1991 Bjelke-Petersen faced criminal trial for perjury arising out of the evidence he had given to the Fitzgerald inquiry (an earlier proposed charge of corruption was incorporated into the perjury charge). Bjelke-Petersen's former police Special Branch bodyguard Sergeant Bob Carter told the court that in 1986 he had twice been given packages of cash totalling $210,000 at the premier's office. He was told to take them to a Brisbane city law firm and then watch as the money was deposited in a company bank account. The money had been given over by developer Sng Swee Lee, and the bank account was in the name of Kaldeal, operated by Sir Edward Lyons, a trustee of the National Party. John Huey, a Fitzgerald Inquiry investigator, later told "Four Corners": "I said to Robert Sng, 'Well what did Sir Joh say to you when you gave him this large sum of money?' And he said, "All he said was, 'thank you, thank you, thank you'." The jury could not agree on a verdict. In 1992 it was revealed that the jury foreman, Luke Shaw, was a member of the Young Nationals and was identified with the "Friends of Joh" movement. A special prosecutor announced in 1992 there would be no retrial because Bjelke-Petersen, then aged 81, was too old. Developer Sng Swee Lee refused to return from Singapore for a retrial. Bjelke-Petersen said his defence costs sent him broke.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen's memoirs, "Don't You Worry About That: The Joh Bjelke-Petersen Memoirs", were published the same year. He retired to Bethany where his son John and wife Karyn set up bed and breakfast cottages on the property. He developed progressive supranuclear palsy, a condition similar to Parkinson's disease.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: In 2003, he lodged a $338 million compensation claim with the Queensland Labor government for loss of business opportunities resulting from the Fitzgerald inquiry. The claim was based on the assertion that the inquiry had not been lawfully commissioned by state cabinet and that it had acted outside its powers. The government rejected the claim; in his advice to the government, tabled in parliament, Crown Solicitor Conrad Lohe recommended dismissing the claim and said Bjelke-Petersen was "fortunate" not to have faced a second trial.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen died in St Aubyn's Hospital in Kingaroy in April 2005, aged 94, with his wife and family members by his side. He received a State Funeral, held in Kingaroy Town Hall, at which the then Prime Minister, John Howard, and Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie were speakers.


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Beattie, who had been sued by Bjelke-Petersen for defamation and was arrested during the 1971 Springbok tour protests, said: "I think too often in the adversarial nature of politics we forget that behind every leader, behind every politician, is indeed a family and we shouldn't forget that."


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: As the funeral was taking place in Kingaroy, about 200 protesters gathered in Brisbane to "ensure that those who suffered under successive Bjelke-Petersen governments were not forgotten". Protest organiser Drew Hutton said "Queenslanders should remember what is described as a dark passage in the state's history."


title: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

text: Bjelke-Petersen was buried "beside his trees that he planted and he nurtured and they grew" at the Kingaroy