All Fall Down by Matthew Condon Read Free Book Online

Chief Justice,’ Bjelke-Petersen reportedly told his Liberal colleagues. ‘Why don’t you give me my way with the second position?’
    Seven Liberal ministers declined to support the recommendation. Nevertheless, Andrews was selected. The ‘flying minute’ approving the appointment was taken to Government House and ratified.
    The Bar Association did not send a congratulatory telegram, but later made it clear that Andrews had the confidence of the Bar. The Liberal Party State Executive called an emergency meeting over the Chief Justice affair, and narrowly voted to stay in partnership with the National Party. Meanwhile, Bjelke-Petersen and his government were criticised for politicising the judiciary.
    The whole affair, however, didn’t sit well with White. He couldn’t believe the Police Commissioner might have a hand in the internal machinations of Cabinet. ‘I’ve got no doubt that Lewis stymied the careers of a lot of people because of his relationship with the Premier,’ reflects White. ‘Not long after I was sworn in my secretary said, “Oh, the Police Commissioner wants to see you.”
    ‘I thought, what have I done wrong? So, he lobs in the office and it was all about having a cup of tea and just saying, you know, we, the police force, were delighted when the Premier appointed you to Cabinet.
    ‘And I said, “Hang on, the Premier didn’t appoint me, I believe that Llew Edwards appointed me.”
    ‘“Oh,” he said.’
    The Flower Farmer of Amity Point
    For years, former assistant commissioner of police, Tony Murphy, had been dropping over to the fishing village of Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island, and piecing together a house. He had gone to the island in the mid-1960s with his and Terry Lewis’s good mate, Barry Maxwell, proprietor of the Belfast Hotel in Queen Street, and bought at auction two adjacent blocks of land right down the eastern end of Gonzales Street, on the corner of Tosh Street. Maxwell bought a parcel at the corner of Tosh Street and Sovereign Road.
    According to Murphy’s family, he built a besser brick garage on one of the blocks, complete with a small kitchen and bathroom. The family spent holidays there, enjoying the island life. The three blocks of land overlooked four hectares of Crown Land that, upon his retirement just before Christmas 1982, Murphy leased. He planned to grow a small farm of Geraldton Wax – Chamelaucium uncinatum – the hardy, flowering shrub common in Western Australia. The plant, with white, pink and mauve flowers, lasted generously after cutting and was popular with florists.
    Murphy first built a besser brick home on one of his blocks and, after a long and colourful career as one of Queensland’s most astute and tough detectives, knuckled down to work as a flower farmer. Replacing his suit, he was often seen on his ‘farm’ at the end of Gonzales Street dressed in khaki dungarees. He cleared much of the acreage and built a small generator, housed in a pale brick shed, to pump water to his bushes. The land was sandy, ideal for growing Geraldton Wax, and he soon had a tractor to help cultivate the block.
    Murphy’s activities caught the attention of the tight Amity community. Here was a place sparsely populated with holidaymakers, generational fishermen and misfits. People kept to their own business. In a travel story on Amity Point, published in The Queenslander in 1899, the author wrote: ‘The pure air of Amity was breathed by many a man whose life, so to put it, was his own – many a man who, perhaps embittered and cast aside, lived with no care for the future, with no pleasant thought of the past.’
    Murphy may or may not have had pleasant thoughts of the past, but his transition from big city detective to island hamlet flower farmer, was a substantial one. ‘We’d made a different life for ourselves down there, growing flowers,’ says Murphy’s wife, Maureen. ‘He was always in the yard to take his mind off things. [It was] hard, hard