Bjelke Blues edited by Edwina Shaw

Bjelke Blues is all about resistance during the nineteen years that Joh Bjelke-Petersen reigned as Premier of Queensland. It’s the kind of book that has you laughing while also crying and beating your head against the table. This was Queensland? It beggars belief. Countless remembrances written by a wide variety of Queenslanders make up the content of this book. Ordinary people who protested for a better Queensland; people who were openly harassed in the most appalling manner and subjected to violence, arrest, surveillance, and financial penalty by the police for the most ridiculous reasons. This is the sort of stuff that you read about under police states; life in the USSR during the Cold War. But no, this was Queensland from 1968 through to 1987. A democratic state within a democratic country. Like I said, I had to frequently remind myself this wasn’t fiction.

Visit my full review on this book here.

I’ve teamed up once again with Mrs B’s Book Reviews and The Book Muse. It’s going to be a little different for 2020, the card has less squares, allowing us to run bingo on the second Saturday of each month. Also, for the first time since beginning bingo, I haven’t specified genre, type, or even fiction or non-fiction for the categories. 2020 is all about themes, and from there, the choice is wide open.

Hope to see you joining in! If you want to play along, just tag us on social media with your bingo posts each month. You can also join the Page by Page Book Club with Theresa Smith Writes over on Facebook, where we all post in the same place on the same date and chat over each other’s entries. Alternatively, drop a link each month into the comments of my Saturday bingo post so I can follow your progress blog to blog.

#BookBingo2020