AustLit

'‘I have no interest in writing a back-stabbing, tell-all critique of my colleagues in public life . . . Those readers who’ve come looking for gossip and intrigue can return this book to its shelf.’ So warns Anna Bligh in the preface to her memoir, Through the Wall: Reflections on Leadership, Love and Survival (2015: x). While this attitude is admirable, unfortunately it leaves the reader with only a general impression of Bligh’s involvement in politics during what was arguably the most momentous time in Queensland’s political history. This period spanned the last years and fall of the far-too-long-term Bjelke-Petersen government, the election of the Goss Labor government, and the subsequent ups and downs of the Labor party, including Bligh’s own leadership. I wasn’t particularly looking for gossip and intrigue (although I wouldn’t turn my nose up at either), but character sketches of more of the main players on both sides of politics would have been a valuable addition to the historical knowledge of that period — and there is no denying that there were some great characters, for good and ill, in politics at that time.' (Introduction)