Maverick MP Bob Katter hits 50 years in parliament
Ask Bob Katter and he'll tell you he has lived many lives.
University drop-out, activist, army reservist, labourer, grazier, published author, and politician.
The man in the Akubra also goes by many names: The Maverick, The Mad Katter, Crocodile Katter, and now Father of the House, as he marks 50 years as a politician on December 7.
Anyone with the slightest interest in Australian politics knows who Bob Katter is.
His no-holds-barred style of politics has remained a constant as prime ministers and premiers have come and gone.
Bob Katter and Andrew Wilkie dressed as pigs in parliament in February. (ABC News: David Sciasci)
He has stepped into the halls of parliament dressed up as a pig, the grim reaper, and carting wheelbarrows of bananas — always willing to play on his unconventional reputation to make a point.
Bob Katter Jr is the eldest of three siblings born to Mabel and Robert Katter in Cloncurry. (Images supplied: Susie Katter)
Still, Mr Katter doesn't see his five decades in public office as an "achievement".
"In fact, I'm deeply embarrassed by it," he said.
"It's lovely all these people being nice to me, but I just feel terribly uncomfortable with that sort of thing.
"I always say, 'Mate, you don't want to get a statue of yourself in the public square because you know what happens to statues? Birds do their business on statues'."
Road to Canberra
In the red-dirt scrub of Cloncurry in north-west Queensland, a young Bob Katter watched his father carve out a political career he would one day mirror.
"I remember the dust and the flies, I remember [being] the skinniest kid in the playground who was bullied by the kids who were shoeless and tough, and the mates who stuck by him until he was tough as the rest," Mr Katter recalled.
"A poor, tough little kid of the west."
A young Bob Katter (right) with his parents and siblings. (Supplied: Susie Katter)
His father, Bob Katter Snr, was a one-time member of the Labor Party and union delegate who made the move from local business to council.
He then went into federal politics, representing the Country Party in the sprawling seat of Kennedy and serving as Minister for the Army in the McMahon government in 1972.
A political dynasty was slowly taking form, but Bob Katter denies he had a political career mapped out from the start.
"I wasn't naive to politics … I've always been involved, but then Whitlam came along," Mr Katter said.
"I was just obsessed with destroying him before he destroyed Australia — that was the way I saw it, fairly or unfairly."
A 1974 election ad for Mr Katter in a north-west Queensland newspaper. (Supplied)
A young Mr Katter flexed his activist muscles when The Beatles toured Down Under in 1964.
Decades later, he outed himself as one of the university students who egged the Fab Four's motorcade as it cruised through Brisbane.
Mr Katter was elected to the Queensland parliament in 1974 and became a key figure in the cabinet of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the state's longest-serving Premier, who was brought down over the findings of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption under his government.
Mr Katter said his move to federal politics was decided in a discussion with National Party ally, former Queensland speaker and cabinet minister Neil Turner.
"I said, 'Joh had it right, someone's got to go to Canberra'," he recalled.
Three years after his father died, Mr Katter was narrowly elected for the Nationals in the seat of Kennedy in 1993, marking the beginning of a three decades-hold over the third largest federal electorate in Australia.
Disagreement over economic ideology with the National Party resulted in the Member for Kennedy running as an independent in 2001, before launching Katter's Australian Party with his son Robbie — the Queensland member for Traeger — in 2011.
Mr Katter once represented the National Party in Queensland state politics. (Supplied: Susie Katter)
Shift in politics
Mr Katter is part of a rare club of longtime politicians.
The longest serving member of the Australian parliament was war-time Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who spent 58 years in state and federal politics, including 51 consecutive years in federal parliament.
"It's pretty rare," said Professor Frank Bongiorno from the Australian National University's School of History.
"I think it's less likely that we'll see another politician do 50 years in the future because more parliamentarians tend to see their political career as part of a wider professional career — a pathway to something or somewhere else."
Bob Katter speaks to the media at Parliament House in Brisbane in 1984. (ABC News)
Professor Bongiorno said there had been a big shift in the make-up of the Australian parliament over the past half a century.
"Politics today, I think, is less party dominated than it was 50 years ago," he said.
"Obviously, independents have become much more important, as have minor parties.
"It's less male, it's less white and perhaps less Anglo Celtic."
Looking back
Mr Katter's half-century in politics is being commemorated with a portrait in Parliament House and a statue in Charters Towers, where he and his wife reside.
He cites pushing for Indigenous freehold land ownership and water infrastructure development among his proudest causes, despite not building a weir or dam over that 50 years.
"But within eight years, I got both state and federal governments to agree to build the Bradfield Scheme," he said.
That was until the decades-long vision to drought-proof the arid lands of western Queensland was abandoned after reviews found it completely unviable.
Bob and son Robbie Katter arrive at a Mount Isa pub in 2012, on the election campaign trail. (Supplied: SLQ/ Dean Saffron)
There have been eight Prime Ministers of Australia during Mr Katter's time in Canberra, stretching back to Labor's Paul Keating.
He counted Liberal John Howard and Labor's Kevin Rudd as his top picks so far.
He said he and Mr Rudd were the only two non-Liberals that used to go every week to the Christian group meetings.
"I hate to say anything bad about John Howard because he was a really good bloke, in every sense of that word, and a good Australian," Mr Katter said.
"But it was not a good government, and that was more the fault of the National Party, they wrecked all the farming industries in Australia."
Mr Katter with a smoking gun in a 2016 commercial which showed him shooting his political rivals. (Supplied)
Mr Katter said he had seen a "profound" shift in politics during his time in office.
"I sit under a big picture of [Australia's 18th Prime Minister] Jack McEwen, and Jack said he would never see his country in another war without the ability to build a main battle tank," he said.
"Well, we couldn't build a bloody bayonet in Australia these days.
"It is very different. If you're in the mainstream parties, I'd say my prayers at night if I was you."
Mr Katter says he feels most comfortable out and about in north-west Queensland. (Supplied: KAP)
While knocking on the door of 80, Mr Katter has no intention of slowing down.
Just don't call him a career politician.
"You want to know who I am? Well, look at a picture of the Cloncurry Tigers rugby league team, then you got who I am," he said.
"But you start thinking about me as being someone who's served 50 years.
"No, you got that wrong. That's just completely wrong."