Antinuclear

Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government (Part 5)

January 11, 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Jenny Hocking

Continued from Part 4

On the afternoon of 11 November 1975, Kerr revealed that he had secretly met with the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Garfield Barwick, the previous day against the express advice of the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. The significance of Barwick’s intervention was made clear within days, with the publication of his letter to Kerr before the dismissal affirming his view that the reserve powers are extant and Kerr’s action legally sound. Although Barwick seemed content to carry the mantle of legal eminence gris behind Kerr’s decision, only decades later did it emerge that in fact, he was not.The critical revelation in this transformational history was of the previously unknown role of then High Court justice, Sir Anthony Mason, as Kerr’s secret confidante and guide over many months, “fortifying me for the action I was to take”, as Kerr described it…………………………Mason had even drafted a letter of dismissal for Kerr which he neither divulged to his fellow High Court justices at the time, nor to our history since. Mason’s view, as he told me was, “I owe history nothing”.

The discovery of that single file, “a discovery of historical importance”, effected a seismic shift in the dismissal historiography, after which the dismissal as previously understood changed irrevocably. Kerr’s insistence that this had been a solo act, that he had neither consulted with nor revealed his intentions to others, was now a very different story of collusion and deception. The Age concluded that Mason’s statement is the final piece in the dismissal jigsaw and, rather than vindicate Sir John’s actions, it makes plain that Sir John deceived Mr Whitlam”.

The revelation of Mason’s role after nearly forty years exposed significant gaps in historical representations of the dismissal. ……………………..

The Unattainable Archive: Destroyed, Lost, and Burnt

……………………………………………. I will describe three types of archival encounters evidencing the unattainable archive and its consequences for historical inquiry: destroyed, burnt, and missing archives. Each of these constituted an evidentiary absence with varying impact on the dismissal history.

fhe Destroyed Archive: Gough Whitlam’s Australian Security Intelligence Organisation File

……………… Clearly, any file maintained by the domestic security service on Gough Whitlam would be a critically important historical record in itself………………………

……………. the Archives informed me that, having maintained this security file for nearly forty years, it had been destroyed in a routine culling, just weeks before I requested it……

……..The misplaced destruction of Whitlam’s security file compounds the unsettled history of the dismissal ………In the absence of the file itself an already clouded history becomes further compromised…………………………….. https://theaimn.net/critical-archival-encounters-and-the-evolving-historiography-of-the-dismissal-of-the-whitlam-government-part-5/

Concludes tomorrow: Part 6

This essay was originally published on Wiley Online Library.

January 12, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized