'An uplifting memoir of resilience and strength from ex-Premier of Queensland, Anna Bligh.
'Anna Bligh knows something about hard knocks and high walls. She was raised by a single mother in the working class Gold Coast, a young girl with a soon-to-be-estranged dad who struggled with alcoholism. She spent over 17 years in the rough and tumble of the Queensland Parliament (seven of them as either Deputy Premier or Premier) and she was the first woman to be elected Premier of an Australian State in her own right. In 2011, she led Queensland through the devastation of Australia's largest natural disasters. Her Party then lost the 2012 State election and Anna stepped down to start a new life, only to find herself diagnosed with cancer.
'Writing with her trademark honesty, warmth and humour about the challenges that public and private life have thrown her, Anna reflects candidly - as a wife, mother, daughter, friend and political leader - on the lessons of leadership, resilience, community and family. 'It is not my bruises and scratches that I want others to see,' she writes in this inspiring, unflinching and engaging memoir about breaking through walls and overcoming obstacles, 'I want them to see the hole in the wall.'' (Publication summary)
'‘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)
'‘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)
