16
‘MY BEST APPOINTMENT’

If our generation had enjoyed the full benefits of equality for women initiated by my Government 34 years ago, no limits need be set on the positions and honours which might have come her way.¹
—Gough Whitlam

THE FLAT in Darling Point was startlingly small, as if their stature in every way demanded something grander. After forty-four years together, Gough and Margaret Whitlam still lived just half a kilometre from their first flat in Roslyn Street. This was where they returned to from Paris, ostensibly to retire. But within a few months their schedules seemed scarcely to have changed. Margaret was heavily involved with the Australian Opera and the Sydney Theatre Company, a judge of the National Book Council Awards and a member of a New South Wales government committee reviewing adult education. Gough meanwhile was not about to capitulate to expectations of graceful political retreat, to be generously pensioned off with a gold card for travel, an office and the inevitability of age. He had just been appointed a member of the University of Sydney Senate for a second term,² Chair of the Australia–China Council, a member of the Hawke government’s Constitutional Commission and, from 1987, would be chair of the Council of the National Gallery of Australia. His membership of the Executive Board of UNESCO would take him back to Paris at least four times a year; he was also a vice-president of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, meeting for four days each year in Paris (in Brasilia in 1988), and a member of UNESCO’s General Assembly of the States Parties to the World Heritage Convention, meeting for a week every two years in Paris.³ Increasingly these UNESCO responsibilities would overlap with his visits as Chair of the Council of the National Gallery, taking him in a single month in May 1990 to New York, London, Amsterdam, Rome, Prague and Venice.

With Whitlam’s return to Sydney, his relationship with Bob Hawke, strained since the Hawke government’s first moves to reintroduce university fees, with an ‘administrative’ fee announced in 1985, spiralled rapidly downward.⁴ If there was a single policy reversal that had most distressed Whitlam, it was this. He saw it as a direct strike at his government’s legacy, nothing less than the removal of the heart of the Program—and by a Labor government: not even Fraser had done that, he fulminated.⁵ Free tertiary education was one of his and his government’s proudest achievements; for decades he received letters and affirmations from those who otherwise would never have been able to attend university, telling him of the impact this one policy had had on their lives. But the party and the times had changed in a way that Whitlam could not understand and would not accept, and the ascendant economic rationalists in Cabinet had decreed free tertiary education a ‘subsidy for the wealthy’ rather than an opportunity for all.

Hawke had learnt much from the dysfunctions of the Whitlam Cabinet, the publicly aired internal divisions, the aggravation of sectional interests and the speed of reform. His government was cautious and his approach conciliatory—and Hawke’s personal popularity ratings were breaking all records. Soon after Whitlam had returned to Sydney, he launched an extraordinary attack on Hawke’s consensus style of government and his limp reform agenda. The most important lesson to be drawn from his own government, Whitlam argued, lay not in its difficulties or even in its failings (of which he conceded very few) but in its achievements—and in how much more of the program there remained for the Hawke government now to implement. In this Whitlam would acknowledge no difference in circumstance or substance between his government and Hawke’s—his path and his program were to him the essential reformer’s guide and he would brook no variation from either. Whitlam publicly assailed the Hawke government for its lack of courage in the face of the difficulty of reform and for its lack of progress on electoral equality, a national rehabilitation and compensation scheme, Aboriginal land rights and the national acquisition and management of state railways and hospitals—all of them residual areas of the Whitlam Program still awaiting completion. ‘Ministers have appeared fearful of putting a foot forward lest they should put a foot wrong’, he said.⁶

But Bob Hawke was never going to repeat what he saw as the major problem for the Whitlam government: Whitlam’s autocratic style of government, of implementation above consultation. Where Whitlam had acted, Hawke sought consensus, an approach that Whitlam openly derided: ‘when he gets in, Hawke doesn’t know what to do—he calls a summit!’⁷ In a speech to the South Australian Fabian Society early in 1987, Whitlam launched a highly personal attack on Hawke, accusing him of jettisoning reform in favour of popularity: ‘the importance of reform can never be gauged by percentage points in public opinion … no politician, even the top ALP ones, can be permanently popular or permanently charismatic’.⁸ The task of a reformer was clear—it was reform, not the chase for popularity and certainly not the urge to stay in office—and Hawke was simply wasting his opportunity for reform. This public sniping infuriated Hawke who no doubt thought that Whitlam might have protected his own government better, if only he had lifted his head up occasionally from the endless task of reform. It was an unseemly manifestation of the gulf—in time and circumstance, in strategy and policy direction—between these two Labor governments. From the sidelines, a decade away from his time as prime minister, Whitlam’s attacks on his own party in office appeared bitter and self-seeking. Hawke snapped that Whitlam ‘seems to approve of the Government sufficiently to accept every position that I have made available to him’.⁹

One such position that Whitlam had accepted with particular satisfaction was his membership of the Constitutional Commission, mirroring in these final years of his public life his membership of the 1956 Constitutional Review Committee during his first. It was another rare opportunity for detailed revision of the Australian Constitution, so frequently misunderstood, so readily criticised and yet so difficult to change. In three years the commission considered an immense range of constitutional possibilities: from Indigenous recognition and land rights to democratic freedoms and human rights, from residual relations with the monarchy to the role of the executive, relations between parliament and the judiciary and even interstate river management and the status of local government.¹⁰ But like the Constitutional Review Committee thirty years before it, the Hawke government’s Constitutional Commission made significant recommendations for change that were largely ignored.

Whitlam’s political preoccupations could be seen in the commission’s concerns for ‘one vote one value’, for four-year fixed terms of office, for the protection of political and human rights and for a specified federal power over national accident compensation.¹¹ But of greater personal and political interest to him was the commission’s consideration of several issues stemming directly from the events of 1975 including the power of the Senate over money Bills and the powers of the Governor-General. In one of its strongest statements, the commission recommended that the Constitution be amended to ensure that the powers of the Governor-General over the appointment and dismissal of ministers must be exercised only on the advice of the Prime Minister.¹² The Hawke government’s failure to act on the commission’s report was to Whitlam just another example of ‘the institutionalised procrastination in all constitutional matters in Australia’¹³ and joined his growing list of disappointments with his successor Labor Prime Minister.

As Whitlam entered his seventies, his schedule would have challenged someone years younger, and he threw himself into every one of these positions, beginning with the Australia–China Council soon after his return from Paris. In October 1986, as chair of the council, he made his first visit to China in ten years and for the next decade this two-week visit would be a highly anticipated annual event, he would always be welcomed with extravagant deference as the political leader who had established relations between China and Australia.

Whitlam’s recent appointment for a second term as a Fellow of the University of Sydney Senate allowed him to push for another of his government’s unfulfilled commitments, the establishment of a university in the western suburbs of Sydney. Despite his government’s moves to deal with this twenty-five years earlier, there was still no local university to meet the undisputed educational needs of the major population centres of the western suburbs. Whitlam urged the University of Sydney Senate to support the new university, telling the fellows ‘that while they prided themselves on managing the oldest university in Australia, they should not concede that they were too old for child-bearing’.¹⁴ Whitlam had first committed a future Labor government to the new university in Sydney’s west while still in Opposition and in 1974 the government had announced initial funding for the university, to be based at Campbelltown.¹⁵ The University of Sydney was asked to advise on academic standards for what would soon become first the proposed Chifley University College and, ultimately, the University of Western Sydney. The ceremonial ‘turning of the first sod’ took place in 1986. The university’s links to the Whitlam government had been personalised in the form of the first Chair of the Chifley University College Interim Council, Whitlam’s former adviser, Peter Wilenski.¹⁶

Although his term as Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO had ended, Whitlam’s commitment to it had not. As a member of the Executive Board and vice-president of the World Heritage Committee, he returned to Paris several times each year for the next four years. It was a demanding position; Executive Board meetings were held twice a year for three to four weeks at a time, and the General Conference ran over four weeks every two years. As UNESCO emerged from its most divisive period, the Executive Board had taken over some of the more contentious elements previously done by the secretariat, recommending the appointment of the director-general and setting the agenda for the General Conference and ultimately of UNESCO itself.¹⁷ The Executive Board was where the real debates took place and Whitlam was, at a critical time, an active participant who ‘never missed an occasion to defend the ideas of the founding fathers of UNESCO’s role, in particular international cooperation’.¹⁸ While the Board was meeting, Whitlam worked from a small office in the UNESCO building, coming in every day during session. In 1987, he was elected chair of the Executive Board’s Program and External Relations Commission, the body that oversaw the development of UNESCO’s program for the next two years and a position that also gave him a seat on the Executive Board Bureau—and more meetings.

Whitlam’s input into the reform process could also be seen with the Executive Board’s adoption in 1989 of a proposal he had first put to it three years earlier: that UNESCO’s unwieldy fourteen ‘verbose and diffuse’ activities be grouped into five clear core programs.

 

We shall not in my view be able to justify and promote UNESCO adequately unless and until we concentrate our work under the five main elements in our Constitution: peace and justice, education, science, culture, communication … Those are words that most people understand and, more importantly, can accept.¹⁹

Whitlam pushed hard for this reform, chastising the Executive Board in May 1989 for not going far enough in its initial attempts to concentrate its activities into UNESCO’s areas of competence and for allowing the rash of small ‘almost personalised’ programs to continue.²⁰ The eventual adoption of this proposal by the Executive Board later that year was an important change; the proliferation of programs had fuelled criticisms against it, too easily generating the perception that UNESCO was engaged in political activities outside its mandate.

The 1989 General Conference was Whitlam’s last, and the first to welcome new members of UNESCO in six years. A self-described ‘fanatic’ on the universality of membership, Whitlam had been instrumental in the negotiations for membership of the new Asia–Pacific Group member nations the Cook Islands and Kiribati. In his final speech to the General Conference, Whitlam took a parting shot at the United States, called on UNESCO to remain united and urged it not to abandon its mandate: ‘We must strive to correct United States misconceptions and misapprehensions; we need not pander to them’. As his extended term came to a close, Whitlam could feel some vindication of his consistent view that reform would best be achieved from within UNESCO and not by withdrawal from it. Although he could not deny that the withdrawal of the US and Britain had caused serious financial and reputational damage, UNESCO had survived and had undergone substantial reform, including the appointment of a new director-general, as it looked toward its fiftieth anniversary:

 

We are charting the course which UNESCO will take till 16 November 1995, the golden anniversary of its birth. Our deliberations must ensure that on that anniversary, in this city which so brilliantly celebrates anniversaries, the delegates of all the governments and peoples of the world will be able to acknowledge the contribution of this session to the advancement of the objectives entrusted to us under our Constitution and by the United Nations …

 

It has been an honour and a joy, as a permanent delegate and then as a Board member, to have been part of the process for over six years.²¹

Margaret Whitlam’s ‘other world’ began in Paris in September 1991, with a busload of thirty Australians on ‘A Cultural Tour to Europe with Margaret Whitlam’.²² For the next three weeks, Margaret would lead this group through the music, galleries, ballet, opera and food of Europe—from France to Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany. It was the beginning of nine wonderful years in which Margaret led eighteen international study tours, mostly to Europe but also to England, South America, Thailand and China. Leading these tours was her ideal job, combining her knowledge and love of the arts, her professional experience in adult education and social work, and her personal skill in bringing people together and making them feel at ease. Margaret had a curiosity about places and people that carried her through these journeys with undiminished excitement from the first to the last, and a natural warmth that drew people to her. She put aside any thought of her troublesome hip that had been replaced soon after their return from Paris in 1987, and ignored the ominous continuing signs of osteoporosis; ‘I’m like a “violet crumble”’, she told an interviewer, taking only a stick with her for emergencies.²³

The tours were run by John Wellings and Anne Krone, whom Margaret had met during her work on the review of adult education in New South Wales; they had also organised a highly successful international conference on adult education together in the bicentenary year. In 1990 they invited Margaret to join them at International Study Programs (ISP) as the senior program consultant and she could not have been more delighted. ‘I said, “Fabulous! Suits me!”’²⁴ The plan was to bring small groups of adult travellers together around themes of history and culture, to make each tour a mix of study, travel and fun. Background notes were sent to each participant; the UNESCO Heritage sites featured heavily on every tour; and lectures by local speakers, academics, diplomats and writers were all planned meticulously along with the carefully structured itinerary. This was the independent role that Margaret had always hoped for and that she had, more than once, relinquished in deference to Gough’s work; this was her time. It was an unusual turn in their long relationship that at the same time as they were being seen increasingly as a couple, as an enduring and endearing one—‘royalty’, ‘dynasty’, ‘first political couple’ were now favoured descriptors—Margaret was branching out on her own, while Gough was winding down. In 1997 they were the only couple to be jointly honoured by the National Trust of Australia as ‘National Living Treasures’. In their domestic setting he remained remarkably dependent on Margaret for basic necessities; that was the division of responsibilities their lives had been built around—‘He’s a bit of a chauvinist, although he’s better than he was. He’s been trained. He doesn’t know it—he thinks he has developed naturally—but he has been trained’.²⁵ When Margaret left for a tour she would prepare his food in advance, and leave careful instructions with friends and family to make sure he would be all right in her absence. Gough was always Margaret’s first priority wherever she was and whatever the circumstance.

By the time Margaret returned home from ISP’s first European foray the next tour was already decided: they would take a group through Eastern Europe in May 1992 during a period of dramatic political change. Wellings and Krone asked whether Gough, despite his nominal retirement, would consider joining her as a co-leader. So for the first time, Gough joined Margaret’s growing professional schedule and not the other way around. ‘A Study Program in Eastern Europe with Gough and Margaret Whitlam’ was the first of ten tours that they would lead jointly, although this was not to be the end of Margaret’s individually run cultural tours. Her tours—‘Mostly Music with Margaret Whitlam’ through Switzerland, Italy and Austria, and those through France—were always highly popular. The ‘Great Russian Journey with Gough and Margaret Whitlam’ in June 1994 was their longest tour at twenty-six days, taking them from the eastern point of Russia through Japan and across the breadth of the country from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea on the Trans-Siberian railway. The smallest was Margaret’s own ‘Impressions of France—The Artists’ Lives and Their Works’ in 1998, running for just two weeks.

The study tours were a great success and booked out well in advance, mostly by participants returning for a second or third time or even more, and ISP soon stopped advertising them altogether. There was simply no need. Word of mouth would fill the few places long before any public announcement was made. Margaret and Gough were well suited to run the history-focused tours as a team; Gough could indulge his exceptional knowledge and recall of history and the classics, he could experience again his great love of travel and even better, he would have a captive audience of bus travellers unable to escape his lengthy excurses on it all. During one particularly long recitation, Margaret moved to the front of the bus to try to get him to finish; she was the only one whose fierce walking stick, toe tapping, or tongue clicking would eventually get him to stop: ‘Don’t let Margaret sit near me when I’m speaking, she makes those clicking noises … and it puts me off!’ he grumbled. As she wandered down the aisle a little unsteadily with her stick, Margaret noticed an unusual quiet—every passenger on the bus was fast asleep. Admitting defeat, she sat down in front of Gough, still talking, and fell asleep herself. After this a thirty-minute policy was introduced for his narrations, and occasionally adhered to.²⁶

At other times Margaret would be astonished again by her husband’s knowledge and off-the-cuff recall. After a visit to Winchester Cathedral during her literary tour of England, Gough took the microphone to make an impromptu presentation, telling Margaret that some of the travellers might not have appreciated the significance of what they had just seen—of the caskets with the remains of King Canute and other pre-Norman kings that he had found ‘very moving’. One hour later, after detailing the British monarchs and their complex lines of intermarriage from King Egbert to the Norman invasion and on to William the Conqueror, every incident with its correct date and every coronation described to perfection, Margaret was not sure whether their audience would jeer, fall asleep or cheer. When they burst into spontaneous applause she marvelled again at her ‘favourite man’, and wondered how it was that he could have such trouble remembering their telephone number.²⁷

They were not always so fondly connected. Whitlam’s explosive temper might have abated with his political stressors but it could still erupt fiercely and unexpectedly, and when it did it was invariably directed at Margaret. John Wellings, who witnessed this more than once, saw how hurtful this was to Margaret who would nevertheless ‘tick him off like she would a schoolboy who was misbehaving’.²⁸

Travelling with a former prime minister, particularly such an immediately identifiable one, opened some unexpected doors. In Moscow, Whitlam chaired the ISP seminar on Soviet history and recent political developments in a large room in the Kremlin and was most amused to see himself referred to in the old state-published encyclopaedia as ‘Prime Minister and leader of the workers’ party’.²⁹ Even in the most obscure places he would invariably be recognised by someone wanting a photograph or an autograph. Outside a memorial to the murdered last tsar and his family in the isolated city of Yekaterinburg, the custodian presented Gough with a picture of the tsar and posed for a photograph. Back in Moscow they emerged from their evening at the Bolshoi to be greeted by an enthusiastic, cheering crowd—a surprisingly warm reception, Whitlam thought, waving back—until Margaret quietly pointed out that Mikhail Gorbachev was standing two steps in front of him.³⁰

In 1993 their itineraries became even more crowded when they were asked to assist Australia’s bid for the 2000 Olympics, and joined one of the official lobby groups, focusing on Africa. Whitlam’s contacts in Africa were extensive; he asked the ambassador’s secretary at UNESCO to draw up a list with background files on every member of the IOC he had met during his time there. Hundreds of contacts were put together for them to visit later that year with the Australian bid team. Their enthusiasm and energy seemed boundless, astounding their younger colleagues. In September they visited thirteen African countries with the Australian Olympic Committee President, John Coates, presenting Sydney’s plans and facilities and urging support for Australia to politicians, dignitaries and bureaucrats, many of whom they knew. Even Whitlam conceded that the itinerary was ‘strenuous’ both physically (they struggled to fit into the chartered Westwind 1124 from Nairobi) and personally: ‘Never have Margaret and I chosen or been compelled to spend every hour of every day and night together for so long’.³¹ They were still together in Monaco with the Sydney bid team to hear the results of the final voting: Sydney had succeeded by a single vote. They left Monaco for London and were straight back to work on their next tour.

Margaret had been looking forward to her first study tour to Britain, ‘A Literary Tour of England with Margaret Whitlam’. She had designed it around a literary theme, her great passion, and had included short stays in Scotland and Wales. She studied the itinerary for days in their Darling Point flat, with Gough looking at the maps over her shoulder, remarking somewhat forlornly that these were all places he would love to visit too. Margaret was torn, if not a little irritated; he would be miserable without her, she knew that, but this was her tour, not his. In the end, she relented: he could come as a participant, she told him, but ‘I was still to lead the tour. Famous last words!’ This was her first experience of leading a tour with Gough accompanying as a participant. She knew it was going to be difficult from the very first day, when he picked up her newspaper outside their hotel door and started reading it: ‘He’d just assumed it was his … I could have donged him!’³² Somehow, as only Margaret could, ‘I managed him’, but it would be three years before she relented again and let Gough join her as a participant on ‘An Italian Interlude with Margaret Whitlam’, her 1996 study tour through Venice, Tuscany, Positano and Rome.

In addition to their European tours, they also found time to take occasional study tours through South America. Whitlam had been the first Australian prime minister to visit South America and he had visited again during his time at UNESCO and on the World Heritage Committee; the local World Heritage-listed sites would again be a feature of these tours. On their final study tour to South America in 1996, Gough wrote a short piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, giving every sense of his unflagging enthusiasm for history, politics and travel that these tours had brought together.

 

We are staying in eight cities, including Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Lima and La Paz, and encountering cultures spanning thousands of years, from the earliest Indian societies through the tumult of the conquistadors to the exotic blend that is modern South America. It’s a history that involves many often-overlooked links with the development of Australia …

 

Thursday Sept 19 Iguazu
Nature’s greatest celebration of water at Iguazu must be experienced—the roar, the spray and the views from a hundred different vantage points. The vast clouds of spray foster lush vegetation and the parks shelter 2,000 species of plants and rare fauna, including giant ant-eaters, giant otters, howling monkeys, ocelots, jaguars and caymans.

A 90-minute flight has taken us to Argentina’s Iguazu National Park, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1984. (Brazil’s Iguacu National Park was inscribed in 1986.) The waterfalls, some 80 metres high and 2.7 kilometres wide, can be viewed from many more angles—by foot, boat and helicopter—than either the Niagara or Victoria falls …

 

Saturday Sept 21 Brazil
Brazil had an early connection with Australia. Governor Phillip, who transported convicts from Lisbon to Brazil while serving in the Portuguese navy between 1774 and 1778, called at Rio in 1787 with the First Fleet on the way to Botany Bay …

 

Monday Sept 23 Peru
The city embraces the very old and the very new; pre-Inca temples and a delightful new park looking out over the Pacific Ocean and dedicated to ‘love’. The city of Lima built it because ‘a philosopher had noted that in the cities of the world there are no monuments to love’ …

I tell the group that at a civic reception in Lima in April 1975 I had linked Australia and Peru: ‘It is surely one of the curiosities of history that, while an Australian Prime Minister was born in South America, this is the first time that an Australian Prime Minister has paid a visit to the continent. Those events are separated by 108 years.’

I was referring to John Watson, the youngest Prime Minister to take office in Australia and the first Labor Prime Minister, who was born in Valparaiso in 1867.³³

As they left South America, still adding to the log-books he had meticulously maintained since his wartime service as air-force navigator, Whitlam noted that they had travelled 12 000 kilometres by plane, 1150 by coach, 240 by train, 65 by boat, 18 by helicopter and 6 by cable car.³⁴

In between tours to Greece and Turkey and (for Margaret) to France, they spent a week in Venice in June 1998 for their daughter Cathy’s wedding to Kim Williams. They had scarcely been back in Sydney for three months before Margaret was to leave again, on the second of her ‘Great Experiences of Britain’ tours. This time their son Stephen was coming as a participant and Gough was staying home. Once again Margaret had prepared his food, organised the family and was just about to be picked up for the airport when she bent over to move a cord lying across the floor—Gough might trip over that, she thought as she leant down—losing her balance and tripping over the cord. In terrible pain, and unable to move, Margaret somehow managed to reach her phone; her doctor, an ambulance and Cathy all arrived within minutes. By the time Stephen rang, still waiting for his mother at the airport, Margaret was already on her way to St Vincent’s Hospital with a broken wrist and a broken pelvis.³⁵

This was Margaret’s second fall in twelve months; osteoporosis had become a significant problem but she never complained and persevered through the pain: ‘if something is unpleasant I can substitute something pleasant for that unpleasantness’, she said.³⁶ Although now walking only with the aid of a stick, Margaret recovered well enough to plan their final tour together, a ‘Journey Through Eastern Europe with Gough and Margaret Whitlam’ in September 1999. Even then she missed the start of the tour with pneumonia. Father Jim Hackett, who had been on almost every one of the ‘Whitlam tours’, was struck by how much Gough depended on Margaret, that without Margaret on the tour he seemed ‘lost without her’. Margaret had always been the foil to Gough’s shyness and without her he was more reserved, less confident; he would ring her constantly.³⁷ It was not until Margaret joined them in Romania that Gough seemed truly relaxed. Their decade of study tours ended there in Eastern Europe, with Margaret soon to turn 80 and Gough at 83, both now walking with a stick in resolute defiance of the encroaching constraints of age, and both keen to get home to their next political campaign—an Australian republic.

The Howard Coalition government’s referendum would establish Australia as a republic with an Australian President as head of state—instead of the Queen of Australia and the Governor-General—to be appointed after public nomination and by vote of at least two-thirds of the Parliament. The form of the republic model proposed by Howard was more divisive than the question of Australia as a republic itself; many republicans would have preferred a model in which a president was directly elected by the people. It was the classic three-cornered contest and, although most Australians supported a republic, the referendum did not succeed. Like most politicians, Whitlam could never have supported a direct election model that would establish a president with a competing mandate against elected government; the prospect of rival appeals to popular will was too real with an elected president. The referendum attracted a great number of cross-party and cross-institutional support: former governor-general Sir Zelman Cowen, former High Court chief justices Brennan and Mason, and Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. In a remarkable scoop for the ‘yes’ campaign, Whitlam and Fraser issued a joint statement urging support for an Australian republic with an Australian head of state. The campaign’s final television advertisement featured Whitlam and Fraser together urging a ‘yes’ vote: ‘Malcolm, it’s time’, Whitlam said, to which Fraser replied, ‘It is’.

Political observers had witnessed, to their great astonishment, a gradual political rapprochement between the bitter adversaries of 1975, Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam. Time had indeed been a great healer. Whitlam never retreated from his stringent view of Kerr’s personal and political propriety but he begrudgingly recognised that Fraser’s behaviour had, after all, been political behaviour—Whitlam might not have agreed with it and he certainly would not have replicated it, but the real deception as he saw it had been all John Kerr’s. Fraser himself seemed surprised by Whitlam’s indulgence:

 

for some reason I don’t think Gough ever really … he didn’t seem to resent what I did as Leader of the Opposition. I know there were some people whose actions at that time that he resented bitterly and strongly and deeply … he never seemed to blame me personally for the things that had happened.³⁸

Margaret, whose personal assessments were always acute, was somewhat more guarded in her estimation of Fraser: ‘I couldn’t have put up with being in his company in the 1970s or ’80s, but now I find him almost engaging’.³⁹

The political thaw had begun in 1986 with the Hawke government’s changes to Australia’s media ownership rules. The central theme in these changes was that media proprietors should choose their preferred means of domination—as Treasurer Paul Keating described it with alliterative flourish: ‘you can be princes of print or queens of the screen, but not both’. Australia then (as now) had one of the most highly concentrated media sectors in the world and with these changes Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd would be able to purchase the Melbourne Herald and Weekly Times group, dramatically increasing his existing dominance of press in Australia.⁴⁰ Four years later, with the Fairfax press about to be sold to overseas media interests, journalists at the Melbourne Age called for a ‘charter of independence’, organising a rally to protect the paper’s independence and in support of media diversity. They called it ‘Maintain your Age’, and invited both Whitlam and Fraser to speak.⁴¹ The two elderly protagonists appeared on stage together and shook hands, a brief but significant reconciliation. From this point on Whitlam and Fraser took common positions on several matters, from Indigenous land rights to refugees and asylum seekers. By 2010 Fraser had left the Liberal Party he had led so tumultuously to office in 1975 and had established himself as a prominent critic of its contemporary policies, leadership and direction. Whitlam noted approvingly, ‘Malcolm has improved’.⁴²

Their strange coalescence of age and purpose played out in the most unexpected ways. The former Prime Minister John Gorton died in 2002 at the age of ninety. Gough Whitlam, who now replaced Gorton as Australia’s oldest living prime minister, attended the service in Sydney’s St Andrew’s Cathedral; so too did Malcolm Fraser, whose actions as Minister for Defence in 1971 had ended Gorton’s prime ministership and whose actions as leader of the Opposition in 1975 had prompted Gorton’s resignation from the Liberal Party. Gorton’s funeral service would forever be remembered for more than the usual pious recollections of a former prime minister, and perhaps that was just as the maverick John Gorton would have liked it.

Fraser had barely taken his seat with his wife Tamie alongside Gough and Margaret among the mourners at the front of the church when Gorton’s former Attorney-General, and Liberal member Malcolm Turnbull’s father-in-law, Tom Hughes, QC, approached the pulpit to deliver a bitter, excoriating eulogy. ‘I realise what I am about to say is said in the distinguished presence of a former parliamentary colleague. [But] I have to speak the truth, and I will.’⁴³ And so he did. For the next twenty minutes Hughes accused Fraser of disloyalty, of opportunism and of the ‘political assassination’ of Gorton. Fraser sat stony faced through it all, captive to this public humiliation, waiting for Hughes’ furious condemnation to end. As it did, Whitlam reached his arm across Tamie, tapping Fraser on the shoulder: ‘Let not your heart be troubled, Comrade’.⁴⁴

In 1994 Whitlam’s hope for an adoptive political dynasty had moved one step closer when his protégé Mark Latham secured his old seat of Werriwa. On 2 December 2003 it moved even further from hope to reality with Latham’s election as leader of the Australian Labor Party. Both the ascension and the date—exactly thirty-one years since the election of the Whitlam government—delighted him.

By the end of their five years working together on The Whitlam Government, Latham knew more about the method, the content and the difficulties of implementation of ‘the program’ than anyone who had not actually been there at the time. He shared Whitlam’s enthusiasm for social equality through equality of opportunity and the provision of services rather than economic equality alone, and Latham understood Whitlam’s notion of shared public–private enterprise as a modern approach to a Laborist ideal of capturing private wealth for national good. In many ways Latham’s notion of the Labor Party of the late twentieth century was a contemporary refinement of the Whitlam modernising approach of two decades earlier, but without its practical substance of identifiable policy application.

In his parliamentary method Latham quickly emulated Whitlam—the repetitious use of questions on notice to draw information from the Opposition, the research-driven speeches circulated widely and some even published in book form—although his fiery speeches even at their best could not come close to Whitlam’s mastery of that forum. Whitlam provided the foreword for Civilising Global Capital: New Thinking for Australian Labor, Latham’s important contribution to Labor’s changing political agenda, highlighting its need to find contemporary relevance in an internationalised economic reality. Whitlam described Latham’s book as ‘a fresh and thoughtful assessment of the means by which Labor might renew its program for social democracy’, although his comments were at best muted.⁴⁵

Latham’s first international visit as new Labor leader was to Papua New Guinea, organised through Whitlam’s office and with his personal greetings to its long-standing Prime Minister, Michael Somare. But in the lead-up to Latham’s election campaign of 2004, with too little experience as party leader and none in leading a campaign, and with the party far from united behind him, it was clear that Latham was neither physically well nor emotionally equipped to deal with the unrelenting demands of leadership. After a disastrous campaign, notable as much for the media’s repeated unsubstantiated claims against Latham as for his inability to handle them, John Howard cemented his hold as Liberal Prime Minister and Mark Latham lost whatever hold he still had on the Labor leadership.

With Latham’s protracted but inevitable resignation as leader, Whitlam released a statement describing his former assistant as a person of ‘outstanding character and capacity’ and lamenting the premature end of his public life. Privately he was greatly concerned by Latham’s health problems, believing that it was in neither his nor the party’s interests for him to remain in the parliament, telling Labor member Joel Fitzgibbon that it was ‘unsustainable’ for Latham to stay on as the member for Werriwa: ‘No parliamentarian could tell his electors that he was too ill to be the leader of his Party but was well enough to look after their interests in the Parliament’, he later explained.⁴⁶

Like so many Labor leaders before him, Latham was a good hater with a long memory, and when he heard of Whitlam’s comments he simply refused to see or speak to him again, cutting all contact with the man who had been his greatest political and personal mentor. In his diaries, published in 2005—filled with anger, bitterness and expletives but giving an incomparable insight into a party in ideological confusion and electoral decline nonetheless—Latham described Whitlam’s comment as ‘the cruellest cut of all’.⁴⁷ Which, in the Labor Party’s rich history of cruel cuts, was something of an exaggeration.

In July 2002 Gough Whitlam returned to China for a series of celebrations marking the thirtieth anniversary of his government’s establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Australia. It was a recognition of a great political milestone but it was also, as they gathered in Shanghai, ‘a splendid reunion of old friends’, of those who had been with him on that first official Labor Party visit to China in 1971 and so much more besides. Those like Tom Burns, whose agitations during the special Federal Executive meeting of 1966 had delivered Whitlam the vital Queensland delegates’ votes, saving him from certain expulsion from the party and securing a history; ‘I am proud to acknowledge our collaboration of half a lifetime, here in the great capital of One China’, Whitlam told him.⁴⁸ And of course there was Graham Freudenberg, with him in China in 1971 and with him in China in 2002, as he had been at every one of the defining moments in Whitlam’s political odyssey.

The two men were together, in China, when Whitlam heard that his son Nicholas had been found guilty of breaching his duties as a director of the NRMA (National Roads and Motorists’ Association). Freudenberg knew the side of Whitlam that few ever glimpsed, an emotional, passionate family man: ‘This is the worst thing that has ever happened to us’, Whitlam told him.

‘Worse than 1975?’

‘Worse than 1975’, Whitlam replied.⁴⁹

As chairman of the NRMA Board, Nicholas Whitlam had spearheaded moves towards the demutualisation of the Association, separating the old NRMA into two parts—the insurance arm, Insurance Australia Group (IAG), and the motoring organisation, NRMA Limited—and generating a bitter internal dispute in the process. In the coruscating outcome of a civil case against him brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Nick Whitlam was found to have given ‘incredible’ and ‘dishonest’ evidence, fined $20 000 and banned from being a company director for five years.⁵⁰ Appealing against his conviction, he approached his father’s one-time adversary and former Attorney-General in the Fraser government, Bob Ellicott, to appear for him.⁵¹ In a unanimous verdict in July 2003, the full bench of the Appeal Court fully acquitted Nicholas, dismissing the case against him, with costs against ASIC. But the legal exoneration could never undo the financial damage or repair the reputational damage that, as he later described, had been overwhelming: ‘I’d had my reputation trashed, my livelihood taken away … and imperilled for the future’.⁵² It had been a Pyrrhic victory, perhaps, but one in which Bob Ellicott had been pivotal.

Whitlam’s political life had slowed but Whitlam himself had not. He worked from his William Street office most days, maintained an arduous schedule of public speaking (he was still regularly invited, despite his reputation for long-winded digressions, for treating time limits as optional) and continued to harangue his party colleagues over the need for electoral reform, a national insurance and compensation scheme and the adoption of international conventions. The year 2002 brought with it another anniversary and another round of now-ritualistic reassessment and nostalgic recollection. But this time it was clear the emotion of the dismissal had faded and the focus of this endless fascination had subtly shifted. For the first time, the election of the Whitlam government received greater prominence than the manner of its demise. This was the year of twin anniversaries—fifty years since Whitlam’s election to parliament as the member for Werriwa and thirty years since the election of his government. It was an opportunity for Whitlam to give his own reflection on his life’s work, as he did in a speech in the evocative Old Parliament House, a building with ‘powerful associations’ for him:

 

Throughout my public life, I have tried to apply an overarching principle and a unifying theme to all my work. It can be stated in two words: contemporary relevance. It was the fundamental test I applied, in particular, to the development of Labor policy in the years before 2 December 1972. There is a case to be argued that my Government faltered whenever we lost sight of the principle or allowed the rush of events to subsume it.⁵³

Whitlam had always been an idealist—‘there can be no freedom without equality’—but the idealism and the passion had so often been subsumed beneath the wordy policy development, the internal party disputes and the unending struggles that all reforming governments faced. ‘I took an uncomplicated attitude to the ALP Federal Platform. Where I disagreed with it, I sought to change it; where I agreed with it, I sought to implement it’. And in both his idealism and his pragmatic reformism, the touchstone for Whitlam was always, and most fundamentally, equality:

 

I had sought for a decade and more to re-define equality in practical, relevant terms applicable to the contemporary Australian society and economy. I maintained that, in modern communities, even the wealthiest family could not provide its members with the best education, the best medical treatment, the best environment, unaided by the community … In the Australian context, this meant that the national government must finance them, or they would not be financed adequately or at all. I specified that the goal of this concept of equality was not equality of incomes, but greater equality of the services which the community provides.

It was not an exclusively nostalgic reflection, revisiting as every anniversary had the flawed judgements and the missed opportunities, raising again the question of what might have been. The speed of reform, Whitlam’s inability to manage his Caucus, his hesitation in appointing Bill Hayden as Treasurer, his failure to heed the warnings of others, his overweening sense of self, of undiluted confidence in his own role as Prime Minister—as ‘the one thing this government has going for it’—that had blinded him even to the possibility of Kerr’s actions, his grave error in not calling the half-Senate election as soon as Supply was blocked. In those moments of self-reflection the common, inescapable thread was Whitlam’s singular failing—his errant personal judgement. It has cost him and his government dearly.

At the same time, Whitlam pointed with great anticipation and some relief to the pending release of the archival records of his government, soon to be publicly available under the ‘thirty-year rule’ covering official documents: ‘I cannot exaggerate the importance of these records. It is not a matter of vindication but of verification. If there is any such thing as the “inside story” of the Whitlam Government, it is to be found in these records’.⁵⁴

The importance of the release of these documents was nowhere more pronounced than over East Timor where claim and counterclaim had swirled for decades, fuelled by the selective release of official documents. In this context the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee’s 1999 hearings into East Timor assumed great significance, providing a forum for establishing a historical record outside these polarised positions. Whitlam certainly took it as such, offering himself with alacrity to the committee and appearing before its Canberra hearings in December 1999 in a performance described as ‘vintage Whitlam, discursive and erudite and wholly unapologetic’.⁵⁵ Introducing himself as ‘an elder statesman’, Whitlam told the committee that the position he had taken on East Timor when in government was ‘completely correct’.⁵⁶ He expressed astonishment that the leaked documents seemed to have been vested with greater veracity than the fully verified complete official documents, now declassified, which he provided to the committee and asked to be made public. Not for vindication, but verification.

The committee’s investigations showed, as had all the public airings of these traumatic events, the repeated contraction of events months apart into one, the gradual confusion of key dates, such that the invasion of East Timor by Indonesian troops in Dili in December 1975 had imperceptibly merged with their violent incursion into Balibo two months earlier, obfuscating the details of the murders of the Australian journalists as much as the details of the invasion itself. The claimed complicity of Whitlam in all of this had been built on the ‘dangerous ambiguity’ in his position on East Timor—an expectation of the likely incorporation into Indonesia together with an insistence on self-determination for East Timor. As the committee’s detailed examination of Whitlam’s evidence came to an end and the conservative Senator Ross Lightfoot described the exchange as ‘fascinating’, Whitlam said, ‘The time has flown!’⁵⁷

It had been a defiant performance but the encroachments of age would not be stayed and, six years later, as he approached his ninetieth year, Whitlam found himself at times struggling over a word, grasping to recall a name, losing his proud precision in language and knowledge. His physical decline was more insistent and more marked; his aching knees could no longer hold that massive frame and he became increasingly sedentary, ignoring Paul Keating’s exhortation to exercise, to practise daily deep knee bends: ‘the Chinese say you die from the feet up’, Keating told him, with scant sensitivity.⁵⁸ Still the public demands on him remained and in 2007 resulted in the spectacle of the wheelchair-bound former prime minister, clearly frail and slightly confused, appearing before a New South Wales coronial inquest into the death of Brian Peters, one of the five journalists killed in East Timor thirty-two years earlier.

Whitlam had provided a written statement to the inquest consistent with what he had always said about his and his government’s knowledge of these deaths: that the foreign affairs department had instructed him repeatedly at the time and since—that he should not reveal how he had first learned of the deaths of the journalists at Balibo.⁵⁹ Called to appear in person, Whitlam arrived to a scrum of cameras, journalists and news crews. Freudenberg said it was as if Whitlam himself were in the dock. Giving evidence for several hours, Whitlam hesitated at critical dates—‘Was it November or December?’, he asked from the witness box; ‘Was Parliament sitting? I can’t remember’—as events, people, dates and places that would once have been stuck in the firm grip of his exceptional mind now hovered, just out of reach.

In April 2007, as they celebrated their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, Gough and Margaret Whitlam were awarded the first joint national life membership of the Australian Labor Party.⁶⁰ They arrived to a packed auditorium at the ALP national conference in Sydney—Gough in a wheelchair, Margaret with her ubiquitous stick—to frenzied applause and the familiar chants, echoing the past: ‘We want Gough! We want Gough!’ Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd, soon to take the party into government and one of the many beneficiaries of the free tertiary education provided by the Whitlam government, recalled Whitlam’s advice to him as a fifteen-year-old party member eager to become a diplomat—go to university and study a language.

The fervour that had greeted their arrival was only surpassed when Whitlam stood up from his wheelchair and, with his hand on national party president John Faulkner’s shoulder, slowly walked toward the podium to speak. The tumult followed him for a long time. He began with Margaret:

 

Men and Women of Australia’s oldest and greatest party, I appreciate this honour all the more because of my co-recipient. Margaret has been the partner of my life and work for 65 years this week. If our generation had enjoyed the full benefits of the equality for women initiated by my Government 34 years ago, no limits need be set on the positions and honours which might have come her way, as certainly as she receives this honour in her own right.⁶¹

He made another of his now obligatory appeals to the party ‘to establish fixed and simultaneous four-year terms for every House of Parliament in Australia’ and recalled ‘Australia’s finest national achievement’, the end of the White Australia policy: ‘My chief ally Don Dunstan and I removed White Australia from the Platform. It was the beginning of Australia’s finest national achievement—the creation of a genuine multicultural society, inclusive, outward-looking, forward-looking’. And Gough Whitlam ended as he had begun, with Margaret and with the party, reaffirming ‘the old faith and the new hopes for the Australian Labor Party which Margaret and I have now officially joined for life’.

In February 2008 Gough and Margaret returned to Canberra for the last time, to attend the Rudd government’s Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples. Theirs had been an exceptional partnership. ‘I can’t imagine life without her’, he said.⁶²

When they returned to Sydney it was clear that he would now have to contemplate just that. With his mobility seriously restricted, and unable even to rise from his chair without assistance, Gough’s health was increasingly difficult to manage from the confines of their Darling Point flat. Margaret was struggling with her own health issues, while caring for Gough’s needs as well. Their children, doctors and friends had all been telling them for months what Margaret was determined to resist—that he needed permanent specialist care outside the home. In the end, the inevitable wrench was decided for them. When Gough was admitted to St Vincent’s hospital in 2008 with a serious infection in his lower leg, they both knew that he would not return. After weeks of rehabilitation in St Luke’s hospital he was moved to Lulworth House, the adjoining managed care centre, where he remained. He was physically constrained but mentally alert and typically determined, still going into his William Street office three days each week, visiting family on the weekends and seeing Margaret on Tuesdays. He retained his humour, despite the circumstances, telling Margaret as he was wheeled into the Darling Point flat on a visit for lunch, ‘These are very nice premises I’ve got you!’.⁶³

In early 2012 Margaret Whitlam suffered a fall at home and did not recover. Two weeks later, Gough travelled to her bedside at St Vincent’s private hospital to spend what he knew would be their final hours together. On 17 March, Gough issued a short statement announcing Margaret’s death:

 

We were married for almost 70 years. She encouraged and sustained me and our four children, their families and many other people in a life full of engagement with Australians from all walks of life.

She was a remarkable person and the love of my life.⁶⁴

The family service at the beautiful St James’s Anglican church just behind the law courts in Phillip Street in Sydney, the city’s oldest remaining colonial church, was the closest you could get to a state funeral without actually being one. The family had been offered one by the Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, but had declined this honour, rarely offered to the partners of prime ministers. The public outpouring of respect, grief and affection was widespread and genuine: ‘A revered public figure’, ‘a national living treasure’, a ‘trail blazer’, ‘a remarkable woman’ and a national icon. How much had changed in forty years, from the obloquy and the venom that had beset even Margaret in the post-dismissal years. A crowd had quietly gathered outside as Gough Whitlam, surrounded by family and Labor Party figures, entered the church. He stared squarely ahead, his face set in grief as if even to look up would precipitate its collapse.

Whitlam’s personal devastation marked the end of a shared political era that had spanned seven decades, with reverberations that continued to be felt. His grand vision of reform as constitutionally achievable and politically relevant, as popular and enduring had proved to be exactly that. But Whitlam well understood the difficulties in taking this path, the way of the reformer. ‘Nothing is inevitable, least of all change’, he remarked. Whitlam’s greatest achievement in the Labor Party had been to overcome the deadening acceptance of ‘the inevitability of gradualism’, the urge for inaction, the relentless pressure to conform, to be safe, to fail to reform.⁶⁵ Remarkably and against exceptional odds, much of the party’s hard-fought program for change, the mandate for Whitlam’s avowedly ‘activist government’, had not only been implemented, it had endured. Generations since those traumatic years had taken for granted, accepted as common sense for a late twentieth-century democracy, those basic elements of justice, independence and equity that had in the early 1970s faced almost inconceivable denunciation, opposition and obstruction: the end of the White Australia policy, the end of the British honours system in Australia, an Australian national anthem, no-fault divorce, electoral equity, universal health insurance, votes for eighteen-year-olds, legal aid, national education funding, acceptance of international conventions and an independent foreign policy stance, the Racial Discrimination Act and Indigenous land rights.

To Whitlam this was a political landscape almost unrecognisable from where he had begun, as an excitable young boy in the Wellington Hotel watching the Labor caucus celebrating the certain end of the Bruce–Page government eighty-three years earlier. His life was a personal and political vindication of the beliefs forged in his childhood in Canberra, cemented and deeply challenged in the decades to come, but persisting—in the parliament as the means for peaceful change, in the Labor Party as the party of reform, in the global commitment to international conventions and in the power of education as the great leveller, as the path to equal opportunity. That was Gough Whitlam’s time.