Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government (Part 2)
I will never forget the day when I, living in a country area, ran to answer a phone call. It was my mother, in the faraway city. And I’ll never forget her exact words: “The queen’s man has sacked our elected Prime Minister!”
My Mum summed it up. Later, I have realised that this was a case of the UK government toeing the line of the USA government, and making sure that Australia got that USA military intelligence hub, Pine Gap.
January 8, 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Jenny Hocking
Continued from Part 1
After years of legal action, still absent from public view are crucial documents from a most contentious time in British imperial history: the 1947 and 1948 diaries covering the Mountbattens’ shared involvements in pre-Independence India, transition and partition, among “scores of other files” not yet released.
These remain locked away, and Lownie has spent £250,000 of his own funds in pursuit of public access to papers which constituted a purportedly public archive, while the Cabinet office has spent £180,000 keeping them secret. Particularly disquieting is Lownie’s recent claims that he has himself become the target of security surveillance as he continues to pursue the closed Mountbatten files.
Somewhere among those voluminous Mountbatten papers are letters between Mountbatten and the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, about the dismissal of the Whitlam government. These letters were briefly cited by Mountbatten’s authorised biographer Philip Ziegler in which Mountbatten declared that he “much admired” Kerr’s “courageous and constitutionally correct” action in dismissing Gough Whitlam.
Several years ago, I visited Southampton University hoping to see Mountbatten’s dismissal correspondence with Kerr since, as discussed below, bizarre circumstance means that it no longer exists in Kerr’s papers in the National Archives of Australia. Although Ziegler had been granted access and had quoted from Mountbatten’s congratulatory letter to Kerr, I was denied access to the diaries and letters. Instead, I was handed some thin, rather desultory files containing a handful of itineraries, dinner placements, menus, and invitations to Mountbatten during his visit to Australia. No diaries and certainly no letters between Mountbatten and Kerr.
……………………………In relation to Kerr’s secret correspondence with the Queen, “the Palace letters” regarding the dismissal, it was the use of this uniquely powerful word in the archival lexicon – “personal” – that had placed the letters outside the reach of the Archives Act 1983 and necessitated an arduous Federal Court action to challenge their continued closure. Livsey notes in relation to the migrated Kenyan archive that the construction of “regimes of secrecy” in which the label “personal” was used to control access to and knowledge of British colonial practice; “files labelled ‘Personal’ could be consulted by white British officials only and ‘should not be sighted by local eyes’”…………………..
Lownie’s now four-year legal battle has been described as eerily similar to the Palace letters legal action which I took against the National Archives of Australia in 2016, arguing that the Queen’s correspondence with the Governor-General was not personal, and seeking its release. The case ended in the High Court in 2020 with a resounding 6:1 decision in my favour, the Court ruling that the Palace letters are, as I had argued, not personal and that they are Commonwealth records and come under the open access provisions of the Archives Act. The letters were released in full in July 2020, in a striking rebuff to the claimed convention of royal secrecy on which the Archives had in part relied.
…………………………………….. At its most significant, the denial of access to royal documents as “personal” enables the sophistry that the monarch remains politically neutral at all times to persist……………….
…………Although the Queen was publicly a careful adherent of that core requirement of neutrality, something the “meddling Prince” Charles most assertively was and is not, Hocking argues that “the much vaunted political neutrality is a myth, enabled and perpetuated by secrecy”. Professor Anne Twomey similarly notes that “If neutrality can only be maintained by secrecy, this implies that it does not, in fact, exist”.
Our own history gives us a powerful example of the way in which archival secrecy functions as a Royal protector, casting a veil over breaches of the claimed political neutrality of the Crown, in the changing historiography of the dismissal of the Whitlam government. ……………………….
For decades, the dismissal history was constrained by the impenetrable barrier of “Royal secrecy” which denied us access firstly, to any of Kerr’s correspondence with the Queen, ………………………………………….
Sir John Kerr’s abrupt dismissal, without warning, of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 just as Whitlam was to call a half-Senate election, was an unprecedented use of the Governor-General’s reserve powers and “one of the most controversial and tumultuous events in the modern history of the nation”, as the Federal Court described it.
These powers, derived from those of an autocratic Monarch untroubled by parliamentary sovereignty and even less by the electoral expression of the popular will, had not been used in England for nearly two hundred years, and never in Australia…………………………………………………………………. more https://theaimn.net/critical-archival-encounters-and-the-evolving-historiography-of-the-dismissal-of-the-whitlam-government-part-2/
Jenny Hocking is emeritus professor at Monash University, Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University and award-winning biographer of Gough Whitlam. Her latest book is The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. You can follow Jenny on X @palaceletters.
1 This month
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Antinuclear 