Blurb: Sir Henry Bolte, the battling sheep farmer who became Australia’s most successful, paradoxical and improbable state premier – a political genius and a great Liberal leader, or a reactionary autocrat who asserted his authority through the noose? He was the man many Victorians loved to hate, yet his opponents were mesmerized by his political cunning and his capacity for the unexpected.

This book tells how he emerged in 1955 as a ‘stop-gap’ premier, and went on over the next 17 years to achieve a mastery that astonished those who remembered the chronic political instability that preceded him.

This book strips away the façade of charismatic ordinariness that gave Bolte his electoral appeal: it analyses the power bases through which he asserted his dominance, describing his behind-the-scenes relations with colleagues in cabinet, the parliamentary party and the Liberal state executive. The author also gives a revealing insight into the way Bolte exploited the press, which he came to regard as part of his own apparatus of power.

Previously unpublished material throws new light on the [Ronald] Ryan hanging and many other aspects and issues of Bolte’s premiership, including his long campaign against Canberra and the centralist prime minister Gorton. The author argues that Bolte, the ardent ‘states’-righter’, was instrumental in bringing about Gorton’s downfall, and that this was his most resounding victory in a career replete with political triumphs.