For Queen Elizabeth II, Australia is a distant but cherished realm. She did not choose to become Queen of Australia; that prize came by birth and constitutional evolution. She makes no claim upon Australia but discharges the responsibility she inherits. It is a strange, almost baffling, arrangement: Australia’s head of state is the Queen of another country living on the other side of the world.
The release in July 2020 of the Buckingham Palace letters—the correspondence during the 1975 crisis between Sir John Kerr as Governor-General and the Queen of Australia through her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris—exposes a domain the Australian people have never seen. Depending upon your perspective, these letters will provoke surprise, admiration or anger.
The monarchical system in this country rests upon a duality—the Queen is head of state but her powers have been nationalised and are exercised by the Governor-General chosen from the Australian nation. The Queen does not belong to the daily life of the Australian community. The people respect the Queen but assume she has no power over them. They also assume the Governor-General acts on the advice of the Prime Minister. The survival of this intricate system depends on the avoidance of internal breakdown.
This is why the 1975 crisis became such a flashpoint—the principles of the system were thrown into jeopardy and, in the process, the defects in Australia’s head of state model were exposed. Our Constitution is one of the oldest among democracies. Yet this is an astonishing, even a fantastic arrangement, anchored in historical origins, tempered by mutual self-interest, encompassing jurisdictions 17 000 kilometres apart and whose business is conducted in strictest secrecy.
How could it not contain potentially fatal fractures? If you were starting from scratch today nobody would remotely construct such an arrangement. What happened in 1975 was that wilful leaders with a sense of destiny pushed the model to near breaking point. The rupture in relations between Kerr and Gough Whitlam leading to the dismissal of the Prime Minister is known and documented.
But the related issue of relations between the Queen and Kerr—while known to a certain extent—has awaited the release of the Buckingham Palace letters. This is probably the final chapter in the story of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, the most dramatic and divisive event in Australia’s constitutional history. But while the letters are important, they are not the only source. Documents on their own do not reveal the full story.
The letters reveal the system at its moment of deepest trauma. The 1200 pages of letters, attachments and newspaper clippings released by the National Archives of Australia put on the public record how the Palace in London and the Governor-General in Canberra dealt with each other. The documents throw sunlight on secrecy, showing what the Queen of Australia actually does.
The letters belong to another age, when letter writing was a way of life and business, before email and text messages. They were sent by courier bag, with a delay of several days between dispatch and delivery. These are letters deemed ‘personal’ and ‘private’ between friends but also between constitutional entities.
If you thought the Queen was above politics, you could not be more mistaken. This misconception is widespread—it arises because of confusion over the notion of monarchical impartiality. Yet the Palace is immersed in politics. The Queen meets the British Prime Minister each week for an hour. She presides as head of the Commonwealth and is head of state in fifteen countries in addition to Britain, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Jamaica.
The Netflix series The Crown, while providing sometimes a fantasy view of the Queen’s challenges over the decades, is true in its central theme—the monarchy lives with perpetual political drama and its survival depends upon public consent. Symbolism and secrecy are its hallmarks.
The monarchy is a triumph of optics. People seem to have a near inexhaustible demand for news of the royals as the latest generation, Prince William and Prince Harry, command modern- day screens. The Queen, now in the sixty-eighth year of her reign, has conducted a tour de force of discretion, keeping afloat public support for the Crown in a world where demands for democratic equality and social justice might have brought its demise.
This is achieved by an iron rule—staying out of constitutional trouble. In his book The English Constitution, the nineteenth-century writer Walter Bagehot said, ‘we must not let daylight in upon the magic’—meaning the success of monarchy lay in its mystique.1 But mystique is now replaced by monarchical marketing and political non-interference.
Ultimately, the system depends on its workability. That means each component doing its job—a dignified and popular Queen, a wise Governor-General and a known set of conventions to govern relations between the Governor-General and the Prime Minister. Queen Elizabeth has been monarch to fifteen Australian Prime Ministers. But the only function the Queen now retains is to appoint and remove the Governor-General on the advice of the Australian Prime Minister.
This means there are various ways of describing our system. It is a constitutional monarchy but the monarch is British. Australia has no monarchy and will not invent one. But because the power of the sovereign resides with the Governor-General not with the Queen herself, our system could be called a Governor-Generalate.2 It is therefore no surprise that throughout the Palace correspondence Kerr is the initiator, the seeker, the cultivator. For his full three years in office from 1974 to 1977 he engages the Palace at length, writing most weeks, often long four-, five- or six-page letters. Unsurprisingly, he is even more active before and during the constitutional crisis.
Often addressing Charteris as ‘My dear Private Secretary’ and frequently ending with the phrase ‘Please assure Her Majesty of my continued loyalty and humble duty’, Kerr floods the Palace with his assessment of Australian politics, the leaders, the main events and every tedious aspect of vice-regal business. Far too often his tone is obsequious and self-serving. Sir John was infatuated by pomp, honours, ceremony and his own self-importance. He loved the office and he loved the idea of travelling to London for an audience with the Queen.
Kerr’s typical pose is that of a conciliator, a man who realised he lacked the toughness for a political career. Once a Labor man, he inclined to the conservative side as Governor-General. His distaste for the Whitlam government’s methods is undisguised and his suspicion of Whitlam is a feature of the correspondence. But he is two-faced. Kerr offers the Palace one side of his disposition and offers Whitlam another side.
As a reporter on Australian events, Kerr is patronising of Whitlam and Fraser, subtly identifying their foibles, at one point mocking them as ‘political heroes’ and invariably adopting a superior tone. After the crisis, however, the letters change—Kerr is agitated, troubled, obsessed about security, worried about Whitlam’s campaign against him and upset that he is not getting more support from Fraser. In this period, isolated at Yarralumla, he needs Charteris as a support. He opens his heart and voices his fears, provides excruciating details about the attacks on him, and in one letter explains the circumstances of the divorce of Anne Kerr as a prelude to their marriage, so the Palace will know the claims made by his enemies are false.
He is endlessly cultivating the Palace, writing voluminous letters and then fretting whether he is writing too much. During the crisis, Kerr discusses a range of options with the Palace, including the use of the reserve powers. A rough word count suggests Kerr writes five or six times as many words as Charteris. It fulfils an emotional need and later becomes therapy. Charteris offers a kind of pastoral care. Kerr loves a social life, companionship, friendship, a drink and applause from his peers. He seeks and needs reassurance from the Palace and frequently asks Charteris about the Queen’s own opinion. But it is easy to misinterpret Kerr’s letters—Kerr often looks a weak man yet he never forgets the power equation. Kerr knows the power that resides in his office and he cherishes the virtually unlimited constitutional discretion he possesses. Only later does his purpose become obvious—he wants the confidence and support of the Palace in order to maximise his own discretion and freedom for constitutional action. There is purpose in his method.
Tim McDonald, the official channel with the Palace in 1975 at Australia House, London, on protocol-related issues, said the letters revealed Australia’s ‘undefined relationship to a distant foreign Head of State whose primary interests do not necessarily coincide with ours’. He said Kerr ‘while intellectually qualified’ was ‘temperamentally unsuited to the role of Governor-General’ given his insecurities.3
Charteris writes as a veteran civil servant, immersed in the culture of the Palace, dedicated to the Queen’s interest and deeply experienced in monarchical issues. Writing with the Queen’s authority he invariably said she had read Kerr’s letters. On occasions this may have been a polite subterfuge but it can be safely assumed the Queen read Kerr’s letters during the crisis.
The chief focus of Charteris is to maintain cordial relations with Kerr, monitor the Governor-General and correct for any extravagances. Charteris’ letters, far briefer than those of Kerr, are friendly, conversational and supportive. As a member of the royal household he is deferential to Kerr as a Governor-General. His tone is chummy in a British way but his purpose is to keep the Queen protected from the turbulence of Australian politics. The guiding star of the Palace is well established—to avoid confrontation in domestic crises in Australia or other nations where she is head of state.
The letters from Charteris reflect the style of the times. Contemporary readers will find them unusually chatty, informal and occasionally indiscreet. After the dismissal, Charteris sometimes risks the Palace’s integrity in his endorsements of Kerr’s dismissal. But they are written with intent—to sustain a constitutional relationship between London and Canberra.
Charteris is not Kerr’s legal adviser. He has no status in that capacity and often defers in the letters to Kerr’s superior legal knowledge. Most of the occasional legal suggestions that Charteris makes are just that—suggestions. When he does make what sounds like a legal recommendation it is mostly a statement of the obvious: that Kerr should follow the Constitution. Nor is Charteris Kerr’s political adviser. Occasionally he counsels Kerr—when this occurs it is conspicuous, during the crisis and afterwards when an agitated Kerr flirts with resignation.
In an adroit way, Charteris applied periodic pressure to Kerr, his theme being the crisis was Kerr’s management responsibility, not theirs. As Charteris told Kerr, the office of Governor-General ‘does not seem to lie on a bed of roses’.4
Tim McDonald called Charteris ‘an experienced, wily and polished public servant’ who exuded an air of ‘effortless superiority’. He said: ‘Charteris establishes himself as the firewall between Kerr and any possibility of the monarchy being involved in the Governor-General’s political responsibilities to the detriment of British interests.’ McDonald added: ‘The Palace letters need to be read in this light, rather than interfering in Australian politics and implicated in a plot to overthrow the Whitlam government.’5
As a professional, Charteris would always enjoy good relations with whoever was Australian Prime Minister, Whitlam or Fraser. Whitlam regarded him as a friend. Any notion the Palace professionals were anti-Whitlam or hostile to the Prime Minister during the 1975 crisis has no evidence to sustain it, either in the letters or elsewhere. Whitlam had a proper and cordial relationship with the Queen. And the Queen during her long reign has had no habit of rummaging about in the political affairs of Commonwealth nations to liquidate leaders of whom she disapproved.
The letters from Charteris are brilliant in disguising the weakness of the Crown’s position. This is founded, first, on remoteness—the Palace cannot pretend to master what is happening in Australia. It is removed in space, time and ethos. It relies on Kerr as the information source. Second, the Palace is constitutionally hostage to Kerr. The Queen cannot select and remove the Governor- General—she does so only on the Prime Minister’s advice. The Palace must live with the Queen’s representative that it gets— good, bad or indifferent. Its posture of support and cooperation with the Governor-General is necessitated by these realities. The Palace has no choice—it cannot dismiss Kerr—it has to make the relationship work.
But that relationship changed with the dismissal. After the dismissal, the Palace had to live with the reputational consequences of Kerr’s action and the political backlash in Australia. Because Kerr acted in the Queen’s name, the Palace could not publicly criticise the Governor-General and because the Governor-General, as the Queen’s representative, was under public attack, Charteris felt obliged to offer whatever private support he could. Sometimes he went too far. The ritual of supporting and encouraging Kerr became almost farcical with exaggerated praise that now reads as a misjudgement. These words were unwise and imprudent. But they reflected the dilemma of the Palace—it had to live with what Kerr had done and offer personal reassurance.
The 1975 crisis was triggered by two events. First, on 15 October Fraser announced that the Opposition would block the budget in the Senate to force Whitlam to a general election. This followed the resignation of the Minister for Minerals and Energy, RFX ‘Rex’ Connor, for misleading parliament over the loans affair. But Fraser was only able to do this because of corrupted Senate numbers—the New South Wales and Queensland governments had refused to replace Labor Senate vacancies with new Labor senators. ‘The Opposition now has no choice,’ Fraser said. ‘We are dealing with a chain of improprieties which constitutes one of the most extraordinary and reprehensible episodes in Australia’s political history.’
Second, Whitlam asserted his right as Prime Minister to defy the Senate, to confront Fraser, to break the nerve of the opposition parties and force a humiliating retreat upon them. Whitlam saw this as the greatest moment of his career. He said the Senate’s power had never been used before to force an unwilling government to the people and this was a violation of democracy since governments could only be made and unmade in the House of Representatives not the Senate.
Whitlam was entitled to ‘tough it out’ but there was a limit on this tactic. The provision of supply—funds for the general running of government—would only last for another six weeks. No Governor-General could sit immobilised and allow the nation to sink into financial chaos.
Fraser’s audacity in forcing the crisis was met by Whitlam’s brinkmanship in retaliation. It was a clash of titans that would shake the constitutional system. The sheer strength of the two leaders made a political compromise extremely difficult. The consequence was that the Governor-General was drawn into the crisis as a public debate erupted over his possible role and options.
From the start Fraser made it clear that, given Whitlam’s defiance, he believed the Governor-General had an obligation to dismiss the Prime Minister if Whitlam remained in office refusing to call an election. Whitlam’s defiance depended upon the willingness of Kerr to acquiesce and give him time to break the Opposition’s will. But Kerr was Whitlam’s problem. The Governor-General was supportive in their private conversations but always had reservations.
As a lawyer steeped in the reserve powers of the Crown, Kerr had no doubt of his authority to dismiss the Prime Minister at some point if there was no political resolution. The Governor-General’s instinct was to distrust Whitlam. He felt insulted by Whitlam’s overbearing attitude towards him and his insistence that Kerr had no option but to follow the advice of the Prime Minister.
Whitlam’s mismanagement of Kerr was monumental. His wife, Anne Kerr, said: ‘Gough Whitlam almost never came out to Yarralumla just to have lunch with John or to have a chat … Whitlam completely misjudged John. He wanted to work with people, not against them. Whitlam misinterpreted this as acquiescence.’6
But Kerr betrayed the essence of his office—he became convinced his position was at risk. The Governor-General believed that if Whitlam had any inkling Kerr might move against him then Whitlam would approach the Palace to remove Kerr.
Ambush and deceit were Kerr’s weapons. When Whitlam went to Government House at lunchtime on 11 November 1975 to advise a half-Senate election he was dismissed by Kerr in the study, taken by surprise, with the Governor-General marshalling the powers of the Crown and the authority of the Chief Justice of the High Court against him.
The central critique of Kerr has endured ever since—if the Governor-General believed intervention was necessary he should have indicated this to Whitlam and given the Prime Minister the option of advising an election. Kerr’s priority should have been an election, not dismissal. His refusal to warn or counsel Whitlam lay at the heart of the political and constitutional rupture.
Over the past forty-five years virtually everything has been revealed about the explosive interaction involving Whitlam, Fraser and Kerr. These men were epic relics from an earlier age—the ‘great man of history age’—when political titans resorted to constitutional violence to smash their opponents. But the dismissal’s place in our culture has never been confined by journalistic and documented history. The event seems too large, the lure of conspiracy too irresistible.
For many years after there was a powerful impulse to insist that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved and that Kerr acted under the influence of the CIA. This argument won its deceptive plausibility from the fact that there was a parallel crisis at the time in the Australian–US intelligence relationship with alarm on the US side that the Whitlam Government might not renew the agreement covering the Pine Gap intelligence facility in Central Australia. A range of advocates have championed variations of this theory including legendary investigative journalist Brian Toohey, author Peter Carey and the UK-based Australian journalist John Pilger.
The release of the Palace letters provided a new opportunity to relitigate this claim of CIA involvement. After the High Court decision, Pilger wrote: ‘An Anglo-American coup overthrew a democratically elected ally in a demeaning scandal in which sections of the Australian elite colluded.’7 Journalist Alex Mitchell said: ‘the CIA was following Washington’s agenda and the Palace was following London’s. They were both in it up to their necks.’8 Guy Rundle claimed: ‘The plain fact is that Sir John Kerr was now the servant of two masters. He was a former CIA asset who had become a British high-Tory type.’9
Over many years the authors have investigated claims of CIA involvement. They founder at the vital link: there has never been evidence of a connection between the security/intelligence crisis and Kerr’s dismissal of the government. The security crisis was not discussed at any of the meetings involving Whitlam, Fraser and Kerr during the constitutional crisis. The mythology, however, has exerted a grip on the cultural imagination. The notion of a CIA conspiracy was too thrilling to ignore. Even Margaret Whitlam at one point said she was willing to believe the CIA was involved.10
The CIA’s briefing to United States President Gerald Ford on 11 November 1975 was released in part in August 2016. As a result of a freedom of information request by the authors, the President’s Daily Brief was declassified in full in July 2020. The brief is classified as ‘top secret’ and is described by the agency as ‘the highest level of intelligence on the president’s key national security issues and concerns’. It reveals the CIA was clueless about Kerr’s intended dismissal of Whitlam. The CIA said Whitlam’s dismissal was ‘a surprise move’ and ‘an unexpected shock’.11
During the Royal Commission into Australia’s Security and Intelligence Agencies headed by Robert Hope in 1983–84, the allegation of CIA involvement in the dismissal was raised. Hope met with Democratic Minority Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Sub-Committee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in Washington DC in June 1984. Hope asked if the Committee had looked into any CIA link to the dismissal. Moynihan told him it had ‘been the subject of thorough inquiry’ by the Committee’s staff and the Committee itself in April 1978 and again in September 1982.12
Hope wrote to Prime Minister Bob Hawke to report this discussion with Moynihan. ‘The Committee had found no evidence of CIA interference in Australia,’ Hope wrote. ‘The CIA had denied any such activity. Senator Moynihan said he was sure, as sure as one can be in relying on statements of others, that the Australian government had not been “targeted” by the CIA.’13
This followed Hawke’s visit to the United States the year before. Geoff Yeend, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, had accompanied Hawke and they held talks with Moynihan and his Committee. In a letter Yeend wrote to his deputy secretary Alan Rose, he said Moynihan referred to the ‘allegations of CIA activity in Australia’ and noted the ‘mystification in the US as to how these allegations continue to get currency’.14
Hawke and Hope had no reason to suspect any CIA involvement in the dismissal. Nor did Whitlam. ‘I take the view that all the events of October and November 1975, including Kerr’s conduct and motives, are sufficiently explained by the internal record; there is no need to introduce an external conspiracy,’ he wrote.15
Sadly for its advocates, the Palace letters offer nothing but a wasteland for the CIA theory. The only mentions are when Kerr in passing refers to the CIA stories en route to rejecting them. Yet the CIA link has a psychological appeal that may never die. It seems to fulfil a niche in the Australian psyche—that foreigners have been our undoing: from Phar Lap’s death to Bodyline against Don Bradman, British betrayal at Gallipoli and Singapore to the CIA ruining the Whitlam Government. In truth, this displays a lack of national maturity, an inability to recognise that the deception and conspiracy of 11 November 1975 was homegrown. It was Australia’s responsibility. Elaborate fabrications should not be constructed to blind us to our own failures.
In recent years, however, a new theory has arisen in another revisionist interpretation of the dismissal. Tapping into one of Australia’s longest grievances, the claim is that the Queen and her Palace officials were authorising agents in the dismissal, gave Kerr the ‘royal green light’ to act and were involved in the planning. The emotional resonance of British betrayal provides the lightning rod for this theory. Once again, it seems too compelling not to be true with its cultural apotheosis—here is the final British betrayal, this time by the Queen herself, leading inexorably to the sunlit uplands of an Australian republic.
This is a revisionist history without evidence. The three principal figures—Whitlam, Fraser and Kerr—never alleged the Palace was involved. Indeed, they believed the opposite, with Kerr insisting he kept the Palace in the dark to protect the Queen. The Queen has authorised unequivocal statements saying she had no role in the dismissal and could have no role under the Australian Constitution. This view has been consistently put by the two key Palace officials at the time: Sir Martin Charteris and Sir William Heseltine.
The principal architect of these claims is Jenny Hocking from Monash University, Whitlam’s biographer and author of The Dismissal Dossier, published in 2015, with an updated edition released in 2017. In her Whitlam biography, a series of articles and in her The Dismissal Dossier books from 2015 onwards—before the release of the Palace letters—Hocking made escalating assertions, astonishing in their scope and significance, if true. She said her research ‘places the dismissal in an entirely new light, one in which the British authorities played a central role’.16
In The Dismissal Dossier, Hocking said: ‘In fact the Palace had clear advance knowledge that the dismissal of Gough Whitlam was precisely what Kerr was considering.’17 In her Whitlam biography, Hocking wrote that weeks before supply was blocked, Kerr ‘had already conferred with the Palace on the possibility of future dismissal of the Prime Minister, securing in advance the response of the Palace to it’. She added that there were ‘several critical conversations and understandings reached’ with the Palace.18 In other words, her claim is that the Palace had not only been told of a possible dismissal but, critically, had given its response and an understanding had been reached.
In a 2017 article, she said: ‘Contrary to the accepted story that the Queen was not involved in the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975, it is now clear that the Palace had a significant role in the process. Those involved, in Australia and in Britain, kept this involvement hidden from the Australian people in a process of collusion, deception and artifice.’ She said her recent research into Kerr’s papers showed the Queen had been involved along with British officials ‘in a staggering breach of Australian sovereignty’. She said ‘even the most basic facts’ about the dismissal ‘that were once considered settled, have proved to be false’.19
Hocking identified a web of ‘deep intrigue’ involving Prince Charles, Charteris and Kerr that constituted ‘a royal green light for continued deception of the Prime Minister—after all, the Palace was doing just that—and for the dismissal of the government’. She said the deception of the Australian government was conducted before and after the dismissal and that Charteris was a principal agent of this deception. Hocking said it was ‘now undeniable’ that ‘the Queen and the Palace were involved in the dismissal’ and that only an ‘ever-diminishing coterie’ continued to deny this.20 She said it was ‘an unforgivable breach of our independence and our national sovereignty that British authorities approached the Governor-General at this critical time’ in the cause of protecting the Queen’s interests.21
While Hocking admitted the full story of the dismissal must await the release of the correspondence between Kerr and the Palace, she said the material she had discovered was sufficient to make ‘untenable’ any claim the Palace was not involved. In summary, Hocking’s claim was that the Queen had ‘clear’ and ‘advance knowledge’ of the dismissal, was ‘involved’ in it and gave it ‘a royal green light’, and then tried to cover it up for the next forty-five years. So, the release of the letters should confirm these claims. This was the question put to Hocking on Network Ten’s The Project the evening the letters were released:
Waleed Aly: Do you think that what we’ve seen today, and these letters reveal, that the Queen or her representatives wanted to see Gough Whitlam sacked?
Jenny Hocking: Oh, look, you can’t say that from the letters at all.22
However, in 2017 Hocking had extended her web of intrigue far beyond the Palace. Her theory encompassed the British government, led at that time by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, through her allegation of a campaign by officials at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Whitlam Government and to undermine it. She said that ‘the FCO and the British High Commission in Canberra discussed their intervention in Australian politics in the weeks before the dismissal’.
Hocking laid an extraordinary charge against them: that British officials were seeking to thwart Whitlam’s options for a half-Senate election to resolve the crisis. Hocking said ‘it is impossible to overstate the significance’ of this British intervention. She said: ‘This is not mere contemplation of British involvement in an Australian political matter of mutual national interest, this is British Foreign and Commonwealth Office discussing British intervention in the Australian electoral process, specifically in the half-Senate election which they knew that Whitlam was intending to call if supply was not passed.’23 She called her revelations ‘volcanic’.24
In short, Hocking’s ‘web of intrigue’ seems to include much of the so-called British establishment—the Queen, Charteris, the Palace, Prince Charles, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British High Commission in Canberra. The idea that such different people and institutions were driven by a compulsion to undermine or destroy the Whitlam Government in violation of their proper duties and responsibilities is simply astonishing. This is the unexplained factor in the Hocking thesis. Why would the Queen secretly authorise the dismissal of Gough Whitlam? Is this consistent with the character of the Queen? No reason, let alone evidence, has been advanced to explain this improper behaviour.
At heart, this reflects a misunderstanding of the relationship between the Governor-General and the Palace. After the Palace letters were released, Australia’s leading authority on the reserve powers of the Crown, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sydney, Anne Twomey, said about much of the media commentary that ‘when you don’t know the precedence, everything appears to be unprecedented’. This led commentators ‘to turn standard utterances into something extraordinary and conspiratorial’.25 Many commentators were shocked at the way Kerr and Charteris interacted and their degree of friendly intimacy. But this is the nature of the system; it was the Queen’s representative engaging with the Queen’s private secretary on a political and constitutional crisis. It is unsurprising they wrote with frankness to each other.
Twomey identified the misconceptions at work: ‘Underlying nearly all the commentary on the Palace letters is an assumption which seems to derive from the prevalent conspiracy theories, that the Palace wanted Kerr to dismiss Whitlam and therefore encouraged him to do so, if not by direct words, then by hints and nudges.’ She added: ‘But what is the basis for this assumption? For most it seems to be that the Palace is powerful, Whitlam was dismissed and therefore the Palace must have wanted and caused his dismissal. I am unaware of any evidence to suggest a desire on the part of the Queen to dismiss Whitlam. By all accounts, the Queen and Charteris got on well with Whitlam.’26
Hocking makes a specific accusation against the Palace. She says the Palace had an obligation to inform Whitlam of the ‘secret’ communications between Kerr and the Palace, implying they were improper and disloyal. She says the Palace should have reported back to Whitlam on the exchanges over dismissal and that its failure to do so meant ‘the Palace not only abetted Kerr’s deception, it was complicit in it’.27 However, there is nothing improper about the Queen’s representative in Australia reporting to the Queen and the Palace. This practice has been followed by most Governors-General until recently. What is conspicuous about Kerr is the virtual obsession he had about this aspect of the job. His letters can be criticised on several grounds. But claims in the Australian media after the release of the letters that it was wrong or shocking for Kerr to communicate at length with the Palace are baseless. There has never been any suggestion Whitlam disapproved of this practice. Indeed, he only wanted smooth relations between Yarralumla and the Palace. Such correspondence did not have to be approved by Whitlam and any such notion is fanciful.
Kerr’s discussion of the dismissal issue is surprising only to those ignorant of the 1975 crisis. Dismissal was the strategy that Fraser openly advocated. It was canvassed in the newspapers along with other forms of vice-regal intervention. Kerr attached newspaper clippings for the Palace to show the public debate in Australia, the speculation about his role and the pressure he was under to intervene in some way or other. He also recounted some of his discussions with Whitlam involving a dismissal scenario when that speculation had been raised by Whitlam himself. The idea that Kerr should have reported to the Palace but said nothing about the public and private Australian discussions on the pivotal issue of dismissal makes no sense.
Hocking’s claim the Palace should have contacted Whitlam to warn him what Kerr was saying in his letters would have been dangerously counterproductive. That would have been a direct intervention by the Queen in the crisis. It would have caused uproar in Australia if revealed—as it surely would have been—and would have been universally seen as the Palace interfering, advancing Whitlam’s cause over Fraser’s, declaring virtual ‘no confidence’ in the Governor-General or, beyond that, even encouraging Whitlam to move against him.
In summary, Hocking’s thesis rejects statements by Buckingham Palace and the Governor-General that there was no collusion. She says both deceived Whitlam and the Australian people. Hocking claimed the accepted view that Kerr dismissed Whitlam without the prior knowledge of the Palace, and therefore without the Queen’s involvement, is a ‘preposterous fiction’.28
Hocking’s analysis has received modest though not insignificant publicity. In particular, she won support from sections of the Labor Party and enthusiastic backing from the chair of the Australian Republic Movement and The Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Peter FitzSimons. In 2017, FitzSimons wrote:
Kerr did not act alone. Hocking’s analysis reveals that unelected British officials, and very likely the Queen herself, were aware that Australia’s democratically elected leader was likely going to be dismissed well before Gough himself, and—in the case of the officials at least—even took part in meetings that helped make it happen. Oh, the horror! The outrage!
FitzSimons said that this news ‘entirely blows away the whole notion of the monarchy being a mere benign symbol’ and revealed that seventy-five years after Federation, Britain was ‘actively intervening in our affairs’.29
Australian author Anna Funder called Hocking’s book ‘shocking, compelling and profoundly important’. The then national director of the Australian Republic Movement Michael Cooney called Hocking’s revelations ‘incredible’.
The authors reviewed the British government documents in London years earlier and analysed them in our previous book. We found no basis for her claims. The Hocking thesis took a blow when Twomey, drawing upon her own study of British government files, said: ‘My conclusion was the complete opposite of Hocking’s.’ Twomey said the documents appeared to show the British government was ‘doing its best to keep itself and the Queen out of it’.30
Having said the Palace letters were fundamental to revealing what really happened, Hocking initiated action in the Federal Court of Australia and then the High Court against the National Archives to secure the release of the letters. She was backed by a significant legal team working on a pro-bono basis including Antony Whitlam, QC, barrister Tom Brennan and Bret Walker, SC, and instructed by Corrs Chambers Westgarth in Sydney.31 In a tribute to her efforts, Hocking prevailed in the High Court. The National Archives released the letters on Tuesday, 14 July 2020, at an event addressed by its director-general, David Fricker.
The authors requested access to the Palace letters in 2012 and subsequently argued for their release in person and in writing to the director-general. The authors called for the release of the letters and said it was ‘nonsense’ to classify them as private records in our previous book. The authors pressed the issue with Prime Ministers Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, and with Attorney-General George Brandis, arguing the lack of transparency was ‘not consistent with Australia’s independence’.32
It is noteworthy and to his credit that Sir John Kerr consistently argued that the Buckingham Palace letters should be released. Kerr wanted the Australian public to have access to the correspondence and to understand what had happened. He was unhappy with the position of the Palace seeking to keep the letters from public view. In a handwritten note attached to a copy of the correspondence that he had with him in England written in 1986, Kerr said: ‘I cannot conceive that such basic historical material as this will not be available to scholars after the crisis has retreated into history.’33 Kerr always argued the letters would be consistent with his published memoirs and his public account of the crisis—and this was largely true.
The 2020 release of the Palace letters is probably the last stage in the documentary story of Australia’s greatest political crisis. Its value is to reveal to the public the way the Governor-General and the Palace related to each other during the trauma. But it also serves another purpose—by releasing the correspondence it allows a conclusive judgement to be made on competing historical versions about the role of the Queen. As the authors have argued, the Palace letters further confirm there was a conspiracy to remove Gough Whitlam—but the revisionists have got it wrong. The conspiracy was located in Government House not Buckingham Palace.