The release of the Palace letters was pure theatre. Every element was meticulously stage-managed: the set, the props, the narrative. (From the Palace Letters pp 168-172)
The director-general of the National Archives, David Fricker, who had spent four years and nearly $2 million arguing against their release, and had supplied a secret submission to the court in doing so, now proclaimed the Archives to be a ‘pro-disclosure organisation’ as he presented and interpreted the letters to the public for the first time. The sheer audacity of it turned a bizarre occasion into the surreal.
In a carefully curated selection, Fricker worked his way through just nine of the 212 letters, which told a particular story – as such a limited interpretive frame must. While professing merely to be giving ‘a bit of a preview’, a gentle and benign positioning was clear. ‘I’m not a historian … archivists should not be historians,’ Fricker insisted, before proceeding as archivist qua historian to explore the handful of letters. For, at this unprecedented release of letters between a governor-general and the reigning monarch, against her express wishes and of unparalleled significance to our history, there was no historian present. It was a glaring, conspicuous exclusion.
One letter in particular, from Kerr to Charteris on 11 November 1975, after the dismissal, was highlighted as ‘an important document’ in terms of the role of the monarch at the time and whether, as Fricker termed it, ‘interventions were happening’. With Kerr’s key sentence displayed on screen, Fricker read: ‘I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance’, and noted how this critical phrase was repeated with emphasis by Charteris in his reply of 17 November 1975: ‘In NOT informing the Queen what you intended to do before doing it’. Fricker posited these post hoc assertions as central to considerations of the role of the Queen, which, in this ahistorical schema, lay in what Kerr and Charteris wrote to each other after the dismissal, rather than what was said before it.
This was performance masquerading as history, a crude exercise in setting the narrative. Even as Fricker was speaking, and forty minutes before the letters were publicly released, a News Corp journalist duly made an early call, based on that single letter from Kerr after the dismissal: ‘It was better for her Majesty NOT to know.’ It was soon followed by another hastily tweeted verdict, this time drawing on Charteris’s reply and with an accompanying image of the original letter, ‘the Queen was “NOT” informed’. News Corp’s London establishment newspaper, The Times, chimed in under the heading ‘Letters prove Queen had no part in Australia PM Gough Whitlam’s sacking’. The Daily Mail agreed: ‘The Queen DIDN’T order the Governor-General to dismiss Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam’ – as if anyone thought that she had. As tabloid journalism, it was entirely predictable; as historical analysis, it was risible.
The great disappointment in this callow charade was that after such a titanic team effort to release the letters, which were of unparalleled significance, they could be so easily reduced to the equivalent of a ‘gotcha’ moment, a headline in search of a story. It was as if the entire cache of the Palace letters, a vast and complex window on the vice-regal relationship at an unprecedented time of crisis in our history, could be read from just one letter written by the key protagonist, Sir John Kerr, after the event. The words of Chief Justice Kiefel on the limited evidentiary value of mutual assurances between Government House and Buckingham Palace that the letters were personal, written ‘conveniently after the litigation was commenced … confirming each other’s understanding’, seemed particularly apt.
Buckingham Palace soon joined the rush to its defence, issuing a rare public statement proclaiming that the letters confirmed that ‘neither Her Majesty nor the Royal Household had any part to play in Kerr’s decision’. The royal statement did not acknowledge the High Court’s landmark decision that the Palace letters were not ‘personal’ records, and instead reasserted its belief in ‘the longstanding convention that all conversations between … Governor-Generals [sic] and The Queen are private’, completely disregarding the fact that our High Court had just ruled otherwise. It was as if the Palace letters case had never happened.
The instantaneous verdict, ‘The Queen in the clear!’, could not withstand even the most cursory examination. It told us nothing about the nature of the letters, the process through which Kerr had reached his decision to dismiss the government, and, most importantly, the part played by his correspondence with the Queen in that decision. More sophisticated analyses, based on all the letters and not just one, took slightly longer to emerge, since there were 1,200 pages to work through. The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy reflected that amplifying what came after, rather than before, the dismissal, as the rush to ‘clear’ the Queen had, ‘misses the larger truth of what this profoundly important cache of correspondence lays bare … only a handful of days before the dismissal, Charteris did, in substance, intervene’.
Professor Chris Wallace concluded that the letters showed the Queen ‘providing not just comfort but actual encouragement to the governor-general in his sacking of the government’. Michael Pelly, legal editor at the Australian Financial Review, was left in no doubt that ‘the Palace gave Kerr a green light to sack Whitlam’. It is simply impossible to read these letters, with their consideration of intensely political matters, Kerr’s repeated undermining of the government, and their discussion of the use of the reserve powers to dismiss the elected government, and conclude otherwise. In Nick Feik’s blunt assessment in The Monthly, ‘No respectable historian’ could accept that the Queen played ‘no role’ in Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam.
The Palace letters are the most significant historical records about the dismissal, and the only ones to explore the real-time communications between the governor-general and the Queen over the critical months during which Kerr reached his decision to dismiss the government and appoint the opposition in its place. They provide a remarkable insight into Kerr’s views of the unfolding political situation, his fear of his own recall, his frailties, his need for royal approbation, and his planning for and eventual decision to dismiss the government. In doing so, Kerr acted unilaterally, in a vice-regal capacity as the Queen’s representative in Australia, using the contentious ‘reserve powers of the Crown’ to dismiss an elected government in a raw display of residual quasi-imperial power.
In this post-colonial penumbra of unregulated vice-regal action, it was inevitable that the lingering question would be whether the Queen had played any role in Kerr’s decision to dismiss the Whitlam government. The Palace letters were finally about to answer that critical question.
As a physical archive, the Palace letters reveal much that is lost in their homogenous representation in digital form.
The above is an edited extract from The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam by Jenny Hocking (Scribe, $32.99)
Comment by John Menadue.
The evidence in the Palace Letters is quite clear. The Queen, Martin Charteris and John Kerr collaborated in deceiving the Australian Prime Minister. They knowingly engineered his Dismissal. What a disgraceful performance by them all. No wonder the Queen went to great lengths to keep her role secret.
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 Twitter @palaceletters.
Comments
20 responses to “The Tamed Estate – cover-up of the Queen‘s role in the Dismissal by the National Archives and The Australian”
The word has been used below: it was a C O U P coup.
The coup was instigated by the GG, who is supposed to act on the advice of the PM, with the GG acting in total secrecy as far as the PM was concerned. The GG secretly conspired with both the leader of the opposition, and the Chief Justice and another Justice of the High Court. He was encouraged by HM the Queen, who sought to facilitate the sacking by providing supportive references. So many breaches of convention (at least)!
It is quite clear that Whitlam’s government was actively opposed by Britain’s (and Australia’s?) Establishment, not least by the Queen and Charles – our current and likely future Head of State. It is equally clear that they thought it was their right to act to change a government in Australia – an independent country. It is therefore intolerable that Britain and its Royals have ANY role in official affairs in Australia – they have disqualified themselves.
The Republic of the Commonwealth of Australia is now clearly overdue.
In the days of olde, when knights were bold …
The Queen or the King’s lawful consort would give birth in PUBLIC, at least as far as the Court was concerned. Legitimate succession was vital. Proof meant peace. Modesty had no place.
Why do we not ask, very politely, that the DNA of the Royal Family, everyone on the public purse and all claimed descendants of Victoria Regina, be taken and tested?
The Haemophilia has disappeared from the line….
Russell v Russell made the law look an ass as it stated that while there was a valid marriage, then all children of the mother were legitimate and could inherit, by an irrebuttable presumption of the law.
Who are the genuine inheritors of Victoria? Possibly the Hohenzollerens?
Bring on the Republic!
..WESTMINSTER..
(the geometry of the reich)
TWO gangs of sophists hiding
Behind red white and blue
To get the nod from Caesar
To tax and indict you:
THAT’S Mzrs Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
You call her Lizzie Two
She cares not one iota
What Meinsters do to you:
THE fourth-estate’s the urger
You have to get that clue
They just have to remember
To render, some unto:
THERE are myopic corporate pyramids
On their expanding base of you
Where lodger boys draw gables
Agreed their greed is virtue:
THIS view ..illuminati
Could make you feel quite blue
Until you’ve sussed the formula
Which I will now reduce for you….
…..YOU take the base and times the base
You add the base onto
You take the bleed’n sum of that
And divide the plebs by two
ad infinitum….
No doubt, Morrison will richly reward Fricker, for his arch duplicity. But once again, why is Labor’s Plibersek helping Fricker and Kelly-Bramston, to “mansplain” Hocking on behalf of Morrison?
No doubt also, Morrison is excited at the thought, of welcoming a King Charles “down under”. But the truth is well and truly out now, and no amount of willing lies can ever put it back in the bottle.
Things look pretty bad for the Queen and the British monarchy. By acting on the advice of sleaze-bags, she was a none-too-bright secret agent in the destruction of the government of the most morally upright leader Australia has ever had. (If it weren’t for Whitlam’s moral influence, subsequent Labor governments would have been sleazier than they were). The Queen was not up to the job, and she has undermined the moral influence of her own institution.
Unlike most people here, I’m not anti-monarchist on principle. That is on the more fundamental principle that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a particular person or a golden calf, as long as it keeps the peace. If it fails to do that, then try something else. Nothing has failed to keep the peace more abjectly than electoral democracy. For what proportion of its existence on earth has the US been at peace?
For what proportion of its existence on earth has the US been at peace?
A bloody small one, that’s for sure.
less than two decades since 1777. They make money from drugs and war
ER11 knew exactly what she was doing.
Jenny Hocking is one of our finest historians. The Palace Letters is one of the most important accounts of modern Austalian history. Thank you John Menadue for helping keep the spotlight on this and all the murky related aspects that are still being played out. Looking forward to further information.
Aye .. I hope she can now turn her eye to the Royal Brexit scam, that Her Maj. and Cameron et al perpetrated on the dumb Anglophiles.
A soft coup!
Professor Hocking has done Australian voters a huge service by relentlessly pursuing this matter and producing the evidence of Palace interference in Australian politics. There is no doubt that English politicians are still locked in 18th century thinking that NSW is a penal colony under the rule of the Colonial Office.
We are Australians get used to it!!!!!
Indeed plus there is also the thought that after the palace was so miserably humilated a few years back by the leak of the videos showing the Windsors being taught to do the nazi salutes they probably try to limit as much as they can from being released. It seems the more we learn about these characters the more disreputable they are.
I must not leave the story without giving a shout out to that great Australian Julian Assange who languishes in one the queen of the englanders grubby gaols and is being tortured by one of her ‘courts’. Recently the BBC got the shove by the President of Azerbaijan on this very point and it is worth every second of the five minutes. The BBC censored this piece in their report and it is only discoverable if you search in Russian language. Enjoy the retort by this eloquent leader.
So www dot youtube dot com/watch?v=4g9hcos5mjU
Good link – thanks for sharing.
Assange is a limited hangout .. a gatekeeper.
He has been spectacularly stupid and badly advised. He would have been a far better martyr had he faced what music they could play!
Would the USA prosecute a journo? Not likely! Their gatekeepers are far too valuable and that is part of their protection, the idea that the 1st Amendment has respect
He went for a ride on a tiger that made him an attractive offer.
Now the tiger is toying with him.
Eddie Snowjob took the best deal …he can go on all the internet gigs and take the piss.
Assange ..typical Aussie, playing the second best martyr to old empire.
Magnificent report Jenny Hocking and cutting statement John. Yes, this silent queen of the englanders, this monarch of innocence who leaves it all to ‘her parliament’ and never stands up for ‘her people’. A cowardly, deceptive manipulator that has kept ‘her city of London’ thieves and brigands in the business of global plunder for the entirety of her reign. Australia is made of better stuff than to kow tow to these scoundrels – yet they busy their days in dread of Russia or China and Vietnam before that, and sometimes Afghanistan. Maybe they will find a way to hate Iran or Venezuela next if Biden demands. SAD.