Yuwaalaraay writer and founding member of Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins, Nardi Simpson talks with Bundjalung writer, editor and Byron Writers Festival board member Grace Lucas-Pennington about her debut novel Song of the Crocodile.

Full of music, Yuwaalaraay language and exquisite description, Song of the Crocodile is a lament to choice and change, and the unyielding land that sustains us all, if only we could listen to it. This debut novel is a captivating Australian saga from the winner of the 2018 black&write! fellowship.

At the close of the conversation Nardi performs her original track ‘Song of the Crocodile’ on ukulele.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

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KERRY O’BRIEN: How nice to see a live audience. Let’s hope there are many more of them without interruption, wouldn’t that be nice to think about. There are at least four notable things about the story of Jenny Hocking’s hunt for the so-called Private Letters between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace relating to his dismissal of Gough Whitlam, an elected Prime Minister commanding a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, the people’s house. One is that the Queen still wanted to keep the letters buried 45 years after the event. Another is that the Australian National Archive which describes itself as the guardian of over 1,000 years of iconic national documents chose to fight tooth and nail to keep them secret on the ludicrous Basis that they were Sir John Kerr’s own private correspondence. Another is Jenny Hocking’s extraordinarily dogged determination to beat both the Palace and the Archive. And the fourth is the Palace Letters themselves, they’re revelations and their loaded implications and that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. Jenny Hocking, welcome back to Byron.

JENNY HOCKING: Thank you very much, Kerry. Thank you.

KERRY O’BRIEN: We live in an age where even important events can disappear from the public eye within days, swamped by the never-ending tide of 24 hours news so much of which is so bloody boring. And irrelevant and we’re talking about something that happened nearly half a century ago here. So before we cut to the heart of what you have uncovered, why does it remain important to all generations of Australians to understand what really happened?

JENNY HOCKING: Well, the first thing I’d say is that it’s neither boring nor irrelevant. And I think the key to the dismissal and understanding that what is really a continuing fascination about it is that we haven’t known the full story of what happened 45 years ago and that’s quite a remarkable thing. It was an unprecedented episode in your history where an elected Government was removed from office by an unelected official without warning and despite the fact that the Whitlam Government retained its majority at all times and despite the passage Of a motion of no confidence later that day against the appointed the Fraser Government, and so it is something that’s absolutely critical to understand what happened for the purposes of history, but also, of course, because we need to understand what is the relationship, the vice-regal relationship in a post-colonial setting which these letters reveal to us so magnificently.
I have actually been surprised during the course of the court case just how much interest there has been in unpacking the full story because I think we all know now that the story we – we heard and were told and believed at the time of the dismissal was really a very skeletal one…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yeah.

JENNY HOCKING: ..and as more and more revelations have come out along the way, at every point of that, there’s been quite a significant surge of interest in the dismissal again and I found it at times truly shocking to be working through archival material and find not only how much had been kept from us, but how much that had been deliberately kept from us by the key protagonists.
And the last thing I’ll say on this about the significance of it is the significance of the court case in terms of enabling us to look at material because what drove me was that these really important historical documents were actually kept from us by the Queen and that…

KERRY O’BRIEN: That’s a statement in itself, isn’t it?

JENNY HOCKING: Well, it is. It’s another aspect of what we see as the role of the palace New Zealand this history. It’s the role of the Palace in preventing us from knowing this part of our history. My view both as a historian but as, of course, as an Australian was that we have a right to know our history. You know, it’s a history that was kept from us for 45 years and there it was in our own archives in Canberra embargoed by the Queen. So where there is an interest, I think it’s because of all of these things, because we haven’t yet found that final story.

KERRY O’BRIEN: No. When you first began researching and writing the two volumes, biography of Gough Whitlam, where did the dismissal sit as a priority for you? And did you have any sense at all, any sense at all – of the treasure trove of material that still sat undiscovered and not just the Palace Letters, there was a lot of material when you really did start walking down that trail, that you were accessing without veto?

JENNY HOCKING: Well, I didn’t know the extent to which the archival material would so dramatically change the history, no. I knew there was a huge story to tell about Gough Whitlam when I started the biography because funnily enough, although so much was written about him and his government and of course the dismissal, it tended to be in those terms and so here is this fascinating extraordinary Australian and – you know, Graham Freudenberg’s work, of course, really is handled in that way, but a full-scale biography from start to finish, you know, in terms of his fascinating family background, his childhood in Canberra, and all of the things that influenced him, had really not yet been put together and I began in the early – round about 2003/2004 and Sir John Kerr’s papers were just becoming available under the 30-year Public Access Rule. So it coincided with that.
But I also was very conscious that I didn’t want the dismissal to become Gough Whitlam’s life in terms of the biography.

KERRY O’BRIEN: No.

JENNY HOCKING: Because it had become so much a part of the way we looked at him in office the way we looked at him as a political individual and I wanted to take it from the other end and look forward. And I think in the process of doing that by perhaps turning around the way the dismissal was normally looked at, it actually painted a different picture of it because it because it put it in a context of an unravelling as it developed. But, no, I had no idea that some of the most critical material in that history as we now know it had been lying in Kerr’s papers for decades and you would know the key one, of course, was the revelation about the role of Sir Anthony Mason, High Court Justice at the time, in Kerr’s planning, as he says, “Fortifying me for the action I was to take”, and even writing a draft letter of dismissal for Kerr.
So that was just one of the – and I – I write in this book the Palace Letters, my extraordinary feeling of opening that file and knowing that this file was really going to change the history of the dismissal as we understood it and it has.

KERRY O’BRIEN: It sounded to me from what you have said that it – it confirmed suspicion s rather than substantially surprised you, but we’ll get to that shortly. Kerr’s – Kerr was actually Gough’s fifth choice as Governor-General.
(LAUGHTER)
.

KERRY O’BRIEN: There was a list that Hasluck had submitted of his suggestions and Gough had canvassed a couple of other people. And – and he went through a few of them. But – but there should have been, I would have thought, quite a bit of information on Kerr that when Gough did start going down that road that should have sounded alarm bells.

JENNY HOCKING: It should have. Look, I think – it’s one of the strange things about Whitlam I thought when I was working on writing the biography, there was an element to him that was not, I suppose you’d say, street-wise or he didn’t judge people, that’s clear, he was not an expert judge of people. He didn’t suspect people. Others in the Labor Party who had worked against Kerr in the 1950s, because Kerr was always an extreme right-winger, a grouper, we’d say today, in the Labor Party in the industrial disputes, and Lionel Murphy in particular, Whitlam’s Attorney-General, has frequently appeared in those industrial disputes for left-wing unions always against John Kerr. And often Jim McClellan, they were close friends. He knew of Kerr’s background. When he had heard Kerr was appointed, he apparently said, “Gough will rue the day he ever appointed John Kerr Governor-General.”
But the other thing about Whitlam, he was such a believer in the institutions and you see that again and again. He had almost a blind faith in the institutions that he could not conceive of people behaving in particular improper ways in those institutions. And he believed Kerr would do – would behave with propriety. He believed he would come Of course as former Chief Justice of not longstanding either, the Chief Justice of New South Wales, and if anything that to me would have put out alarm bells because why is somebody moving from a position of real significance and power in New South Wales as the Chief Justice after barely a year when he started speaking to – to Whitlam about becoming Governor-General you know, if he didn’t want to play an active role And there’s a lot of archival material shows that Kerr had an activist perception of the role of Governor-General, quite an improper one From the outset.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Which was the complete antithesis of Gough’s view of the Governor-General’s role and it was a matter of record if he looked closely enough. Is that fair to say?

JENNY HOCKING: I’m not sure if it was a matter of record in terms of Kerr’s views at the time. A lot of those have come out subsequently through interviews, for example. Robyn Hope said that Kerr spoke to him in some detail before he took up the position and specifically asked about the powers of a Governor-General.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yeah.

JENNY HOCKING: The explicit powers of the Governor-General and there’s doubt he was fascinated about that and he was determined to play – to play a key role. But the other thing about Whitlam not only using an institutionalist, but he – because of that, he behaved with what he always saw as this really strict propriety and he was not prepared to tell others in his party about his thoughts about appointing Kerr until he had told the Queen of that appointment. And so you have a slightly ludicrous situation where others in the party and in Government didn’t know that Kerr was going to be appointed until the announcement had actually been formalised which is pretty shocking.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Like all of us, I guess, there were great contradictions in Whitlam and that was one of them that on the one hand he did have this great respect for the institution and one of them the institution of the independence of the public service even though that so many of those senior departmental head had worked for conservative ministers and Prime Ministers for 23 years basically had become conservatives themselves and were – in some celebrated instances were not acting independently but he embraced those public servants and I think some of that went to his own father.
His own father who was – was he Crown – chief Crown Solicitor or Solicitor-General?

JENNY HOCKING: He was Crown Solicitor.

KERRY O’BRIEN: For Crown Solicitor for Menzies.

JENNY HOCKING: That’s right. That’s why I found Whitlam’s background so fascinating because, you know, he was – he was someone who very unusually, in fact I don’t think there’s anybody else who has spent their formative years growing up in Canberra at the time when Canberra was literally just developing because his father had, as Crown Solicitor, or his deputy then at that point, had come to Canberra in, I think, 1927 with that, you know, that huge wave of public servants from Sydney and Melbourne – Melbourne in particular – and so Canberra was literally growing up with Gough Whitlam and he went to Telopea Park High School and then went to Canberra Grammar for two years but he loved Canberra.

KERRY O’BRIEN: At the same time, you see, he was crash or crash through, Gough Whitlam, and he was Gough Whitlam who was prepared to turn some tradition on its head. When it looked like supply was – that they were going to run out of money because supply was being block ed In the Senate. He was trying – he was looks at all kinds of ways to – to raise that money and keep it going. But let’s not dwell too much on Gough himself right at the moment because there are big issues here too.
So while various elements at come to life over the decades, had come into the public gaze over the decades after the dismissal of aspects of what had happen that we didn’t originally know, can you just recap on what new information you had found out from your sleuthing through National Library, the Archive, and the Kerr files that you started to talk about that you were able to get your hands on before the Palace Letters and I’ll take you through them individually because they add up to a picture – quite a telling and compelling picture.
So Fraser’s dealings with Kerr – there was some stuff that was known, we knew that Kerr had spoken to him that morning, but I think there was – there were interviews that Fraser himself gave for the National Library and also Reg Withers that were quite significant.

JENNY HOCKING: Reg Withers in particular. The key thing through the initial story we understood for the dismissal is that Kerr acted alone, it was a lonely – Alan Reid described it, a lonely agonising decision, and the thing is the more material that came out, the less lonely that actually appeared to be because so many other people we now know actually were involved in that beforehand and much of this is really constitutionally deeply improper. There’s only one constitutional relationship in terms of Government and that is with the Government of the day. There’s no constitutional relationship with the opposition and the Governor-General at all. In fact, there’s some very interesting advice from the Attorney General’s department when Kerr sought to speak to the leaders of the opposition at that time, Billy Snedden, and was told in no uncertain terms that this had to go through the Prime Minister.
So we now know that Fraser, in fact, was in telephone conversation with Kerr before the dismissal and that comes from Reg Withers again an embargoes interviewed which he had embargoed himself until after his death. I happened to remember that that was embargoed and soon after he died, I looked at that and opened that for the first time.
But it was, again, quite shocking to see that what Fraser has others had publicly insisted upon at every point that there had been no prior contact with Kerr had unravelled twice. It had first unravelled when it was revealed that Fraser had, in fact, spoken to Kerr that morning, that he set the conditions of being appointed as Prime Minister – all of it of course secret from the actual Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam – and which Fraser and Kerr both denied for a decade.
Reg Withers, again, and this is only about five years ago – posthumously released interview shows he was in Fraser’s office in the weeks before, I think about a week before the dismissal when Kerr rang, spoke to Fraser on his private line, and as he hung up, Withers recounted that Fraser looked at him and said, “You didn’t hear that conversation. It didn’t happen”, and Reg Withers said, “I didn’t hear a thing.” So it’s…
KERRY O’BRIEN: And it was abundantly clear in that conversation so – so Kerr had conversations with both Gough and Malcolm on the morning of November 11 and – and the conversation with Gough was quite formal and straightforward and I think pretty short. The conversation with Fraser by comparison was quite detailed and it went to getting Fraser’s agreement to a set of conditions if Fraser was to be made Prime Minister and what was clear to Fraser from that conversation was that Kerr was going to act to dismiss Gough.

JENNY HOCKING: Absolutely.

KERRY O’BRIEN: So Fraser was under serious pressure inside his own party room. Liberal senators were starting to crack. We now know that that five of them were going to – were going to basically allow supply through within a few days and Fraser was able to go into his Party room and hold the line by telling them basically not the exact words but, “Trust me, it’s going to work.” And so that was just one in a way small illustration of the immense advantage that Fraser had in that whole process.

JENNY HOCKING: It’s extraordinary and in many ways I think I describe it in the biography that Kerr had begun treating Fraser as if he was, in fact, in Government already. He was speaking to him with the authority that he was refusing to give Whitlam. And what he spoke to Whitlam about that morning was a continuation of what had really been a rolling conversation ever since the supply was blocked was that Whitlam at some point would call the half Senate election and that had always been the case. That was the Government’s advice, it was its decision and that’s another thing that got lost in the history which I was determined to bring back in – it was clearly and publicly known that that was the Government’s response.
By 6 November, the Government had – Whitlam had decided he would announce that on the 11th, that the half Senate election would be announced in the Parliament on 11 November on the afternoon. It would be held on 13 December. The paperwork for all of that is in the Archives. And the shocking thing about the dismissal apart from its deception and the breach of various conventions is that Whitlam had confirmed with Kerr just that morning the wording of the letter that he had to sign to go out to all the different state governors for issues of writs for the half Senate election. So that morning they conferred on that. Kerr had agreed with it. Kerr had – had convey ed that to Whitlam. That’s why Whitlam was at Yarralumla at 1 o’clock.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Whitlam was going out…

JENNY HOCKING: To call half the Senate election.

KERRY O’BRIEN: ..to call half the Senate election.

JENNY HOCKING: And it’s also why he always called it an ambush because he was there under quite different purposes from Kerr. And it’s interesting that it’s acknowledged in the Palace Letters actually in a letter that Kerr writes to Charterers after the dismissal and he actually says to him, “Well, I knew what his advice was.” So he acknowledges Whitlam had given him advice to call the half Senate election and he says, “I know what his advice was – I knew what his advice was, he had given it to me that morning over the phone. I did not accept it”, and then he says to Charteris, “You know the reasons why I couldn’t risk that for the monarchy.”
So it’s – the Palace Letters have really given us the most extraordinary insight into a whole lot of these actions that we simply didn’t know before.

KERRY O’BRIEN: OK. So the Palace Letters are the icing on our cake tonight. So then there’s Kerr and Mason – Sir Anthony Mason who at that stage was a High Court judge, had been a junior to Kerr in court cases much earlier in their lives, they had a friendship and Mason subsequently appointed by a Labor Government became Chief Justice of the High Court.
So tell me briefly about that – that Kerr-Mason connection because this is extraordinary too.

JENNY HOCKING: It was a startling find among Kerr’s papers and not one I ever expected to find, but it just had a simple title headed Conversation With Sir Anthony Mason – I think it said September 1975 to November 1975 – and I was just struck by how it just said conversation as though there’s only one conversation over three months. I asked for it and when it arrived, I still remember where I was when I read it because it was such a shock and it’s written in the most melodramatic language which Kerr tends to do and for once it was actually perfectly appropriate because he writes that, you know, “If this document is found in my archives after my death, it’s because his name must be known and it will be in the shadows of history.” I was thinking who he is speaking about.
And it was, in fact, Sir Anthony Mason as he described they had not just three months of meetings, but probably six months of meetings including setting up the most bizarre tutorials, you’d have to say, in secret with the Law School at the ANU to advise Kerr, again all of it in secret – Whitlam knew nothing about this nor did John Menadue head of department – to advise Kerr on what his powers were. This obsession with these powers and extent of his powers…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Long before there was anything like a political let alone a constitutional crisis.

JENNY HOCKING: Yes, this begins in March. He starts having these very odd meetings with senior legal academics at the ANU in – in March – in March/April 1975.

KERRY O’BRIEN: But also telling Mason says to Kerr while he’s having his own private meetings, he says he probably shouldn’t be a part of the body of discussion with these other law academic s about the reserve powers because it might come before the High Court. So there, Mason, was acknowledging that this was a matter that could come before the High Court and that is also very significant in relation to Garfield Barwick’s advice.
But, yes, so how important did Mason become for Kerr?
JENNY HOCKING: Oh, absolutely critical. Kerr describes him as his guide. He’s with him the entire way along and I think it actually means that we have to reconsider Barwick’s role because Barwick has always been seen as the, sort of, shady figure behind Kerr, but actually when you read Kerr’s description which is a 12-page type description of absolutely riveting revelation and Mason then came out the day my biography Whitlam came out with, this was revealed, and he came out with his own statement, largely confirming everything…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yes.

JENNY HOCKING: ..Kerr has said. But it was…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Took issue with him on some things, didn’t he ?

JENNY HOCKING: Yeah. But the substance of it he confirmed.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yeah.

JENNY HOCKING: And I think what surprised me also is the way in which Kerr and Mason worked together to finalise what was the most appropriate time to bring Barwick into their conversation. So far from Barwick driving this himself, he was in a sense being used by them to bolster a decision they’d already taken. And so Barwick only comes in the last two days, but Mason and Kerr have been all the way along for the previous three months.
I interviewed Mason when I’d wrote the biography and of course I didn’t want to tell him exactly what I knew, but I wanted to give him an opportunity to speak to it. And I did ask him and I actually said no the interests history, “You are one of the – you know, only three people remaining who can shed light on this. Would you speak to me about this?” And he just looked at me and said, “I owe history nothing.”
You know, I had many moments of being utterly shocked in the things I found, but that struck me as such a moral question that somebody who had been a public figure, paid for as a public individual for so many decades, could play with our Government and our appointment of government as if it was not of relevance to the Australian people and it sought to keep that secret then for 37 years. I was pretty shocked.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yeah.

JENNY HOCKING: And I put that straight in the book.
(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

KERRY O’BRIEN: And he still beyond that statement remains silent.

JENNY HOCKING: That’s right. He hasn’t spoken. I did write and ask him if he would speak to me and he wrote back and said, “I think I have told you quite enough.”
(LAUGHTER)

KERRY O’BRIEN: So then there was Kerr and Barwick. And Gough had expressly said, as Prime Minister, had advised or instructed his Governor-General that he was not to get an opinion from the Chief Justice of the High Court about the reserve powers. And that was precisely what Kerr did behind Whitlam’s back and there was no other way to describe it, it’s exactly what it was. And the only – the only sort of upfront thing about it was that Barwick had insisted on his visit being recorded formally.
But his opinion, what – his – the opinion that he gave to – to Kerr was also surely compromising his own position as Chief Justice.

JENNY HOCKING: Absolutely. And you’re right. He insisted it going into the vice-regal notices that he had been there and this is something that Kerr and Mason did not do with their meetings, they were kept entirely from the vice-regal notices. But Kerr’s opinion – sorry, Barwick’s opinion was written after – after Kerr said, “I have already decided to dismiss the government. You know, will you write an opinion”, indicating that is constitutionally proper which is Barwick did, and Barwick didn’t initially want that to be released, but it was after the dismissal when Kerr faced the great anguish from so many people that he prevailed upon Barwick to release it which he did.
But he also prevailed upon Mason to let his – his advice and his name and his role be known. There’s many, many references to that throughout the Archives, and Mason did not want his – his involvement known at all and kept that secret. And just on the fact that the Labor Government – the Hawke Labor Government appointed him as Chief Justice, after this came out one of the Hawke ministers in particular spoke to me with some distress and said that they would never have made that appointment had they known of the role of Mason in the demise of the previous Labor Government.

KERRY O’BRIEN: But you have to wonder whether there wouldn’t have been pressure on Mason to actually resign from the High Court if this had been – if this had come out.

JENNY HOCKING: Yeah, I think…

KERRY O’BRIEN: I don’t there can be much of an argument mounts that it compromised him and virtually out of his own mouth when he said he could have ended up hearing this – he would have had to recuse himself if it came to the High Court.

JENNY HOCKING: The fact that he removed himself from the ANU…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yeah.

JENNY HOCKING: ..meetings certainly suggests that.

KERRY O’BRIEN: But those other conversations were compromising.

JENNY HOCKING: Yes, and…

KERRY O’BRIEN: And the advice.

JENNY HOCKING: Absolutely. And in particular the advice. But I think they tried to work around that by saying, “It could never have come to the High Court”, which is just not correct. I mean, most of these things – I don’t think there’s any basis for saying categorically it could not have come to the High Court.
And equally with Barwick, you know, all of the – there’s no special position for the Chief Justice in that sense. It was known since, I think, the 1920s that the – from another rule that the High Court did not give advisory opinions and that had been the case for – since then.
And, you know, there’s no reason why he couldn’t equally have gone, for example, to Lionel Murphy who was on the High Court and he would have received a very different opinion from him. So he knew what he was going to get from Barwick and…

KERRY O’BRIEN: And Barwick was a former Attorney-General in a Liberal Government to Menzies. So there’s another kind of part of the trail.
And then, of course, there’s Kerr and Prince Charles. You learnt about that, I think, through the – through the Kerr papers, right?

JENNY HOCKING: Yes, look some of – a lot of this material actually all ended up in our evidence book That went to the Federal Court initially and ultimately to the High Court because trawling through Kerr’s papers, but other papers as well…

KERRY O’BRIEN: So these are the papers you were able to get…

JENNY HOCKING: Yes, that’s right. The one…

KERRY O’BRIEN: But not…

JENNY HOCKING: The ones that were actually open and there was a huge amount open in Kerr’s papers that not only shed light on the dismissal but which shed light on the Palace Letters and by getting some opening on the Palace Letters was a very important part for mounting a court case subsequently.
But some of the material was there’s a Journal from Kerr in 1980 where he actually talks about the Palace Letters. He records some of them. He refers to them. He’s visiting the palace over this time while he’s in exile in England desperately trying to get the Palace Letters released. So the really strange thing is they’re meant to be his personal papers, he wants them released, and he can’t actually release them. So this was very important for our court case.
I also found extracts from about seven of the letters, they were unidentified. They just said, “Extracts from letters”, and you were meant to sort of figure out who they were to and from. But from matching quotes he had from the Palace Letters elsewhere in his papers, I was to ascertain that they were, in fact, extracts of about seven of the letters and there’s a really critical document I think which is a list which Kerr prepared just headed – I think it’s headed “Handwritten Notes On Dismissal” and they’re enumerated and there are several points in the dismissal that he there lists and one of those is the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, who wrote the letters.
Kerr has written, “Charteris’ advice to me on dismissal”, and it’s critical because Kerr clearly felt that whatever communications he was having with Charteris constituted as a form of advice. So we put a lot of these things together including other letters between David Smith and Kerr into our book that went to – went to the Federal Court.
One other thing that I think was very important that hadn’t been picked up before was actually in Lord Mountbatten’s biography by Philip Ziegler which is that Mountbatten wrote to Kerr in the week – only a week after the dismissal in the most glowing terms praising him for his correct and courageous action in dismissing the Whitlam Government. He actually came out to Australia a few months later, stayed with Fraser, and – and went to visit Kerr again to personally congratulate him on – on his action.
In language that we now know is very, very similar to the language that Prince Charles used when he also wrote to congratulate Kerr after the dismissal. So no doubt we were getting a sense that the Palace was at the very least not unhappy with what had happened with the dispatching of Gough Whitlam by the…

KERRY O’BRIEN: But come back to Charlie. So there’s a whole – I mean, all of the players pretty much, all of the players in the subsequent dismissal go to Port Moresby for the independence celebrations – independence celebrations? Yes – for the independence celebrations and the independence has basically come about because the Whitlam Government had made it so.
So they’re all there including Prince Charles representing the Crown. So Charles and Kerr have a conversation.

JENNY HOCKING: That’s right.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Kerr goes looking.

JENNY HOCKING: This is in Kerr’s Journal. It’s all reported there because it relates to one of the Palace Letters. But what he recount there is was quite astonishing that he had a conversation with Prince Charles in September, it was, September 1975, so it was sort of this very Shakespearean set where all of the key protagonists are actually there, Barwick is there, Kerr is there, Whitlam is there, and, of course, Prince Charles is there as you said. Kerr confides in him that he’s concerned that if supply is blocked and it hasn’t yet been blocked, it’s another month – three weeks before it’s blocked, but he’s concerned that he may need to dismiss the Government and his greatest concern to Charles as he recounts it in his Journal is that he’s fearful that Whitlam will in turn hear of this and seek Kerr’s recall.
Kerr was always utterly obsessed about the possibility he’d be recalled as Governor-General. This comes through again and again. And he told Prince Charles this. It’s quite an extraordinary conversation. Now, up to that point, we only had his recollection of it through his journal that he had this conversation,that Charles had then spoken to the Queen about it, and that Sir Martin Charteris wrote to Kerr about that question of whether Whitlam might seek his dismissal, in effect as Governor-General.
But that was an extraordinary moment because if that was verified by the letters, which it has been, that showed that the palace was aware from September…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yes.

JENNY HOCKING: ..that Kerr was considering dismissing the government. Again, the Palace knew what our Prime Minister did not and I think that is really stark. All of these things were beginning to come to the fore, but many of them were still to be confirmed or otherwise by the letters.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And so just – just to see this mosaic, while Fraser is having his own dialogue with Kerr, perhaps working each other, and this is my considered opinion having read all of this now, this is the picture that really emerges – and then you have got – so you got that game going on within the Liberal opposition and the build-up there. Then you got Kerr who has already since March that year been drawing other people in, Anthony Mason, these academics, these senior constitutional law academics at ANU all in secret.
In September he’s had the conversation with Prince Charles expressing his fears he might be sacked by the Queen if he wants to – that Gough will ask for his sacking if he moves on him. All of these things still even in September, before there is an actual crisis, this is all in Kerr’s head. He’s the one person it would seem who sees this coming with such clarity that he’s got this small private army of people that he’s advising.
So now the letters themselves. You lost your first – you have realised that these – that this correspondence exists. The Archive – and we’ll come to their role shortly – but the Archive says, “No, you can’t have this, it’s embargoed.” You take it to the Federal Court. A single judge in the Federal Court, you lose that case. You then go to the full Bench of the Federal Court. You lose again.
Your final throw of the dice, the High Court appeal. How hard was it to keep it going at this point because this is taking place over years? Was it, the whole process, four years?

JENNY HOCKING: Four years. It was a remarkable court case, absolutely fascinating and extremely daunting at the same time. So let me just say from the outset how grateful I am and that we all must be to the extraordinary legal team who all worked on a pro bono basis. We had Antony Whitlam QC at the Federal Court, Bret Walker SC at the Full Federal Court and the High Court instructed by Corrs Chambers Westgarth, and Tom Brennan SC throughout the whole case. And they were just phenomenal. They worked for four years all pro bono. They’re absolutely dedicated and wonderful.
And the case really came about because after all of this work that Kerry’s discussing, I happened to read and there’s a fortuitous circumstances happened so often in this case, I happened to read an online blog that Tom Brennan, a Sydney barrister, had written, “Australia owns its history”, and it was about the Palace Letters. And it said that we should have access to them because under our Archives Act, he argued, they should be released.
So I contacted him and said, “Yes, I quite agree.” And we arranged to meet and, you know, if there’s a motto in the story is don’t go and see a Sydney barrister with a great idea because you might end up with a High Court action.
(LAUGHTER)

JENNY HOCKING: And it was a fascinating conversation and he said to me, “Look, go away and write for me the four or five major points why these are not personal letters between the Governor-General and the Queen. What is your strongest evidence, the strongest…? This is where all the archival research came in. So I wrote that for Tom. He agreed to write an opinion pro bono and it really – it really came out from there. But it could never have happened with pro bono legal advice.
Because the other side Of the Archives calling them this ludicrous title “personal” as if letters between the Governor-General and the Queen at the apex of a constitutional monarchy during a dismissal of a Government could be personal.
The other side of that is that they don’t come under the Archives Act. And that means there’s a legal catch 22. You can’t appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal which is under the Act. You can only take a Federal Court action and I now know just how expensive that is because the High Court – the National Archives got a cost order for every one of my costs and – and – so it’s onerous. It’s completely onerous and impossible if you do not, as I did – as we all did – the wonderful legal team that was prepared to work on a pro bono basis. I think that’s a really important aspect of the Archives Act that needs to be looked at and changed.

KERRY O’BRIEN: But as a very quick aside, that – the significance of the High Court ruling doesn’t just relate to Australia, it relates to the Commonwealth, doesn’t it?

JENNY HOCKING: Mmm.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And the Queen’s capacity to retain secrets.

JENNY HOCKING: Absolutely. This – this thing that that I was never fully aware of until the court case is that there is this absolutely impenetrable band around any royal documents called “A Convention of Royal Secrecy”, and it’s astonishing how much that is still in place and still presumed without question by our archives and certainly by Buckingham Palace and it means that until this court case, nowhere in the Commonwealth countries have you been able to access royal material unless the royal family says you can.
And some of you will be familiar with Julia Baird’s recent book on – a couple of years ago now on Queen Victoria. Going back, you know, well over 100 years, and she tells the remarkable story of trying to get Queen Victoria’s letters from the royal archives in the UK. But this was run repeatedly through the court case by the National Archives legal team, simply stating the convention of royal secrecy. And we were able to, through a whole lot of circumstances of what I found in the Archives, be able to unravel that because normally it’s impossible to run a court case around secret royal documents because you have never been able to see anything about them.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yes.

JENNY HOCKING: That’s the nature of royal secrecy. Instead we had Kerr’s papers on lots of different levels pointing us to what was in the letter.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And he had actually – he had actually ordered his personal secretary to make him a copy.

JENNY HOCKING: Yes.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Of these highly secret files presumably when he was working on his book.

JENNY HOCKING: That’s right. That’s right.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Now you actually stumbled on that, didn’t you?
JENNY HOCKING: I did, after the court case began, actually and they’re fascinating letters between David Smith, the official secretary, and Kerr while Kerr’s in France just having left office and he wants a complete set of the Palace Letters. And that’s the other thing that actually was really important in the court case. We originally asked for two sets – the originals and the copies – and it was the copy file that enabled me to actually take the case through a complicated set of reasons.
But, yes, Smith was – it’s quite an amusing set of letters because the differential nature of it is extraordinary. But also Smith is doing this after-hours on the Yarralumla photocopier because he’s meant to be working for another Governor-General by then. So he writes to Kerr full of apologies that because of these voluminous letters which we now know Are 212 – I didn’t know that at that time – there’s 200 pages, poor old David Smith is taking out the staple s, removing the…

KERRY O’BRIEN: There’s some small justice in the world.

(LAUGHTER)

JENNY HOCKING: And he’s unfolding all of the attachments, photocopying them all meticulously and ends up taking him more than six months.
(LAUGHTER)

JENNY HOCKING: But when he finals write s…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Sir John would have had a few drinks in that time. The…

JENNY HOCKING: Can I just say one more thing, Kerry about that? The wonderful thing about the Smith-Kerr letters is these actually became really important in the High Court decision in our favour because the High Court, we argued all along, this shows that they were always under the control of the official secretary, they were under formal official control. If they’d been personal letters he would have just taken them with him, He wouldn’t have needed to have David Smith photocopying all night and that was actually referred to in the High Court decision. So I was very pleased to see that circularity as well.

KERRY O’BRIEN: OK. The letters – you say the Palace was complicit and that’s contested. You say that the letters contained a smoking gun. Now, how clear is that to you?

JENNY HOCKING: Well…

KERRY O’BRIEN: The smoking gun is the conclusive proof.

JENNY HOCKING: No, the words “smoking gun” is – is actually not my term. What I have always said is the letters show that the Palace was involved in the decision that Kerr made and there’s absolutely no question about that. These letters constitute that role and that’s the terms of Buckingham Palace has always put it in in terms of their denial – they denied at the time of the dismissal they had any role or any part to play in the Dismissal of the Government.
After the letters came out, and interestingly not after the High Court decision, they made no comment of that, but after the letters came out they very quickly within about five hours released a statement in two parts. Firstly say that they still maintain that letters between the Queen and Governor-Generals are personal, which I thought was very interesting given That our High Court had just found otherwise. But also saying that the letters show that neither the Queen nor any member of the royal household had any part to play in the decision that Sir John Kerr made. That’s what I contest totally and absolutely. And that’s what the letters show is simply not the case.
There are several points through the letters where Kerr actually asks Charteris to make comments for him to take into account when he says, “When I make the decision that I must make during the blocking of supply”, so it’s clear that this is an active role in terms of Charteris’ replies to Kerr. Malcolm Turnbull says in his excellent forward to my book, The Palace Letters – and it is a marvellous forward – he says that Kerr makes it very clear to Charteris that he is contemplating dismissing the Government and Charteris – and he said, “Not only does Charteris not attempt to dissuade him or not attempt to point to the need to follow the advice of the Prime Minister, but he says some to have letters can be taken as encouragement of him to do so.”

KERRY O’BRIEN: So is it clear to you that – that when Charteris actually agrees that the reserve powers do, in fact, exist and points Kerr in the direction of a constitutional expert in Canada and his arguments for the reserve powers as supportive reading. Now, is it clear – is it really clear that in doing that this makes Charteris complicit? Is there a sort of implicit encouragement there? Is that what you would argue?

JENNY HOCKING: Oh, absolutely. In fact, you could say it’s more than implicit. The pointing to Eugene Forsey is extremely important and Charteris does that in a letter in October and – and it’s when Kerr is considering very openly which Charteris he’s going to have to make a decision and should he follow, as he says, the usual constitutional conventions.
Charteris – Forsey was someone who was known to be a stalwart supporter of not only the existence of the reserve powers but the use of the reserve powers. So it’s a very specific theoretical position he’s placing – he’s pointing Kerr to. Now, after the letters came out, I actually accessed Forsey’s papers in the Canadian archives. They arrived fully digitised in astonishing time, given that I had been waiting for nine years for some material from the Australian Archives, and they were fascinating because Kerr and Forsey then struck up a friendship through letters And Kerr lays quite bare how important that simple comment from Charteris was. He refers to it in one of the letters and he says after that he goes and gets Forsey’s Pork, that it was extremely important to him. So it’s a clear reference.
But there’s another reference to the Canadian situation in the final letter that Charteris writes and if you doubt the notion that there’s an encouragement here, that final letter is very telling because it – it again refers to the reserve powers and Charteris knows that Kerr is very concerned that any action he may take as he said in an earlier letter may have negative implications for the monarchy and Australia. And Charteris assuages that concern and he says, “If you do, as you must and you constitutional must, that you can have no fear that this would do the monarchy any avoidable harm. In fact, the chances are it will do it good.”
So it’s a very clear statement that Charteris is not concerned about the direction that Kerr is going in at that point and that’s the final letter before the dismissal. So I have no hesitation in saying that Kerr found these, as he himself said, advice on dismissal.
The critical factor about the question about the reserve powers is that both Kerr and Charteris know that Kerr is at the same time waiting for the formal advice of the legal officers in Australia on that very question and that Kerr is expecting he’s already written to Charteris and says that he expected the law officers, that is the Solicitor-General and the Australian Attorney-General, to tell him that there is no place for the use of the reserve powers at that particular point and in relation to the blocking of supply. Which is exactly what they do advise him on the 4th – I think it’s 6 November 1975 – so five days before the dismissal.
Charteris cuts across that and says, “No question, the reserve powers do exist.” That’s – that is the critical set of letters.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And all of this is happening without the knowledge of the Prime Minister to whom Kerr was supposed to be taking all of his formal advice from. And the one thing you might acknowledge for – for Sir Anthony Mason is that at least Mason, while he was engaged in all of those conversations with Kerr, at least he said that he believed that Kerr should inform Whitlam to at least give Whitlam the opportunity knowing that – that if – if Whitlam was not to call an – if Whitlam was not prepared to call an election himself – I’ll rephrase this.
That if Gough could not break the deadlock of supply and keep the money flowing, that he should know that Kerr would dismiss him if that – if – if he was not prepared to go to an election, that Gough could at least then call the election himself as the Government and go to the election as the Government which was a massive advantage over an opposition.
But Sir Martin Charteris did not say to Kerr, “You should, of course, inform the Prime Minister if you’re intending to dismiss him.”

JENNY HOCKING: Well, absolutely. That’s the great gap in these letters is the question of – the constitutional principle, as it’s called in the imperial conferences and elsewhere, this is the constitutional principle of acting on advice of elected ministers. That’s what responsible government is.
And the cardinal responsibility of a Governor-General is to act on the advice of their ministers and to counsel and to advise and to warn.
Now, Kerr had already said that he was not speaking to Whitlam about these matters, that he was not revealing any of these intentions to Whitlam and he had told Charteris that. The Palace was aware of his silence to the Prime Minister on the most critical constitutional issues facing a Governor-General, certainly in our lifetime.
So that was the prior knowledge of the Palace and I think the lack of candour of the Governor-General and, in fact, the misleading of the Governor-General of the Prime Minister is now roundly seen as his – Kerr’s great moral failing. This was his enormous most significant failure is that he did not warn the Prime Minister and the shocking thing, of course, is that the Palace is aware of that.
There is nothing in the letters from Charteris indicating that he must, of course, speak to the Prime Minister or indicating that he must take the advice of the Prime Minister. He doesn’t even ask him after Kerr has said, “I am waiting for the formal advice and opinion of the law officers”, he never once asks him, certainly not in these letters, “What was that advice?”, and yet he cuts across it and tells him quite different advice himself.
So I think with the Mason commentary, which, of course, came – I mean, I’m prepared to be ambivalent about that whether Mason ever actually said that to him for this reason: Mason says once all of this came out, of course, 37 years later an office, I think roundly recognise that Kerr ought to have at the very least warned Whitlam, Mason immediately said, “I told him that he ought to have warned Whitlam, he would be at risk of being seen as deceptive if he did not.”
However, against that is that Kerr doesn’t mention in his letter – in his notation which isn’t, I suppose, perhaps…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Self-serving.

JENNY HOCKING: ..yes, it’s self-serving, but Mason did draft a letter of dismissal for Kerr knowing that he hadn’t warned Whitlam. So there’s – I think there’s still a question mark over that and ultimately it doesn’t matter – he should have, there’s no doubt about that.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And also tellingly, Charteris directly addressing Kerr’s question of – of Gough possibly racing Kerr to the Palace to get the Queen to dismiss Kerr before Kerr could dismiss Gough, Charteris says, “Look, you know, there would be some argy-bargy, but in the end the Queen would have to take the advice of the Prime Minister and essentially sack Kerr.”
Now, when I read that, I thought so is Charteris saying this to – to send a signal to Kerr that actually Gough does, you know, they should both be taking advice from the – from the elected Prime Minister or is – or is Charteris sending Kerr a warning…

JENNY HOCKING: Well…

KERRY O’BRIEN: ..that he better have in mind in the actions he’s taking to take them in such a way that the Queen doesn’t have to decide on a request from Gough?

JENNY HOCKING: That’s right. This is the critical conversation because it does confirm what Kerr had described in his journal – the communication he had with Prince Charles in September 1975. I find that letter deeply troubling for the following reason: That it not only says there would be considerable comings and goings, I think is the term, but in the end the Queen would, of course, as a constitutional monarch have to take the advice of the Prime Minister as she must.
It’s the considerable comings and goings or toings and froings, whatever the word is, but at the end of the road she must take that advice because the context of that conversation, we know from Kerr’s other papers, is the context in which Kerr is considering dismissing the government.
And the other part in that letter that’s important is that Charteris says, “If Whitlam sought your recall, she would, of course, be most unhappy – take most unkindly to that.” Now the key thing is that a constitutional monarch must remain above politics at all times, that’s fundamental, that’s critical. And it’s so important to the nature of a constitutional monarchy, we’re always told the Queen does not involve in political matters, does not comment on political matters, never becomes involved in domestic political matters. It’s so important that’s even on the Buckingham Palace website. You can see this referred to as a critical part of the Queen’s role.

KERRY O’BRIEN: If it’s on the website, it must be true!
(LAUGHTER)

JENNY HOCKING: Well, what the letter s show us is that in several instances, it’s not – it’s not true. It’s maintained through secrecy. By making a comment on whether the Queen would be happy or otherwise about a decision of the Prime Minister in relation to the tenure of a Governor-General shows a political involvement and that can only have been taken by Kerr with some degree of – of positive because there’s a contest here between his own dismissal and Whitlam’s. There’s no comment in the letter about the possible dismissal of Whitlam, there’s only a comment about the possible dismissal of Kerr.
And the other thing I’ll say this as a political scientists – is that from the 1930s Imperial Conference, this question about who advises whom in relation to the appointment or removal of a Governor-General was established, it was finalised, there’s one person only and that is the Prime Minister who advises the Palace. And the action is solely and it says the channel of communication is solely between those two. They had no right and no propriety to be discussing this with Sir John Kerr himself. The only people they should have discussed Kerr’s tenure with was Gough Whitlam.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And that would have just fed Kerr’s paranoia about Gough sacking him and would have cemented in him his determination to do this without telling his Prime Minister.

JENNY HOCKING: Exactly. That’s certainly how Malcolm Turnbull interpreted it in his forward, is that he said it would have said to Kerr, “If you are to remove Whitlam, then you do it in silence and in stealth and you act quickly.” As he did.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Yeah, now, before you came along with volume 2 of the Whitlam biography and your subsequent publications, The Australian’s Paul Kelly pretty much commanded the field in terms of historical interpretations of the dismissal and he did do a lot of good work.

JENNY HOCKING: He did, he did.

KERRY O’BRIEN: He’s long maintain that Kerr owned the decision to sack Gough Whitlam, that the Palace’s hands were clean. In fact, they believed Kerr had acted prematurely, that a political solution was still on the cards. Kelly still holds to that view and fundamentally disagrees with your interpretations of the Charteris letters.
Now, you still to some extent do have to read between the lines in the correspondence, but what is your fundamental – and I know there was that celebrated exchange on Q&A a couple of weeks ago, but can you just very quickly, because we’re going to get pushed for time, just give me your brief response to Paul Kelly.

JENNY HOCKING: Well, it just doesn’t – it just doesn’t conform with the history as we now know it. I mean, there’s so much vast material which I have to say the High Court found compelling about the official nature of these communications that it’s impossible to take the line that the Queen has zero involvement whatsoever.
I mean these letters were central to Kerr’s decision to dismiss the Government. Of course, the decision was Kerr’s, I mean, that’s never been in dispute. It was – it was Kerr who dismissed Gough Whitlam in the afternoon of 11 November in his study, you know, never been suggested the Queen was hiding behind the curtain somewhere.
So, you know, I think, that the problem with the analysis that Kerr and his cowriter are putting through their latest book is that it reduces to really denigrating a different interpretation of the letters as either conspiracy theory or putting in the extremist possible terms as the queen politically liquidating Prime Minister s, which is just absurd. It doesn’t engage with this in a historical sense and it doesn’t really advance our understanding of the letters.
The letters are clear that Kerr has informed the Palace in advance of each of the key steps that he then has to take. He’s flagged with them the possibility to have acting against the advice of the ministers. In fact, he does that from the earliest letters. He flags with them the fact that he will potentially not take the advice, the formal legal advice, of the law officers as indeed he doesn’t. And he flags with them the prospective use of the reserve powers at a time when the law officers are advising him that the law officers either do not – that the reserve powers do not exist, certainly the Attorney-General was of that view or in Sir Maurice Byers’ view are not applicable in this instance.

Byers Later came out much more strongly, the Solicitor-General, and said the reserve powers are a fiction, they do not exist and they cannot exist because they counterman the view of the people expressed through the electoral process. So it is around the question of the reserve powers that I think it is simply untenable to claim that there was any – that there was absolutely no involvement.
The complicity lies in their awareness that Kerr is deceiving the Prime Minister and at no point saying to Kerr, “Have you spoken to your Prime Minister about it?” Certainly Mungo MacCallum wrote a wonderful piece soon after the letters came out with that heading and said that it was unconscionable that for a constitutional monarch to know that the Governor-General was not speaking to the Prime Minister about these matters and not to say anything either to him or the Prime Minister.

KERRY O’BRIEN: So to just very quickly recap – you have got this – I mean, and it’s hard for me not to see Kerr as being at the centre of a web-like the spider and he’s weaving this web and he starts – he starts by drawing in Anthony Mason and he draws in the academics and he draws in Charlie and he draws in Barwick and he draws in Fraser who didn’t wait to be drawn in.

JENNY HOCKING: No.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And Fraser was another ruthless and willing participant who was so hungry for power that he was prepared to see the constitution torn up in a sense. He was prepared to see that that kind of extraordinarily divisive moment in Australian politics to get to an office that he was probably going to get to anyway, almost certainly going to get to, because the Whitlam Government was so scandal-racked by that stage so that even if the election hadn’t come for another 12 months, and the Hayden Budget of 1975 was such a credible document that Malcolm Fraser left it intact when he became Prime Minister. So Fraser’s part in this should never be underplayed.
But I want to come now to the role of the National Archive. How have these actions sat with the Archive’s mission of disclosure?

JENNY HOCKING: Not very well.
(LAUGHTER)

JENNY HOCKING: I mean, there are some things which I detail in this book which people have written to me about and said is absolutely, you know, eye-popping and quite shocking and I didn’t write about them at the time of the court case because I followed Antony Whitlam, Gough’s eldest son, who was our barrister in the Federal Court, and his advice was always to not unsettle the judge and so very good advice, but – and it was not about the judge, it was about the Archives, not unsettle the case in particular and I didn’t want to write about this at the time. I waited until the case was over.
But there were several things that took place during the trial which were quite shocking. The first is that when I asked for I’d ask for the copy files in 2011, I was told that they – even though they were on Open Access, and I thought I found a way into the Palace Letters, I was told that they were not available for public access contradicting what was said on file.
And then pre-emptively telling me they, in fact, removed them from public access. During the court case we asked to see the basis for that decision and basically, not to put a finer word on it, they – I had been misled, perhaps I could say lied to, because the relevant instrument of deposit did not say that at all. It said they should have been released and that was five years before I took legal action. So that was the first shock.
The second shock was that having released – having appeared now to have to release the copy file, we received an affidavit just the day before, I think, the court case telling us that that instrument of deposit had been changed overnight and with that, half our legal action fell apart. That was done by the Archives and Sir John Kerr’s stepdaughter to change those conditions whilst the case was in train.
So some really troubling actions by the Archives who worked determinedly to keep these letters secret. Kerry and I were talking just previously about the extraordinary fact that the Director-General of the National Archives actually put forward a secret submission, a closed submission, to the court arguing why they shouldn’t be released and…

KERRY O’BRIEN: That you weren’t allowed to see.

JENNY HOCKING: I never – we never saw it. My lawyers couldn’t see it, I couldn’t see it. I still haven’t seen it. And yet he calls himself the head of a pro-disclosure organisation. So, and look…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Sounds like they have absolutely captured the spirit of the current national security climate in Australia generally.

JENNY HOCKING: But the worst thing about the Archives, Kerry, is the extraordinary cost of this from their already strained budget. They spent a million dollars on their own legal fees and having lost at the High Court, they were then in receipt of three cost orders against them paying my costs, as I said, all the way back to the Federal Court which was close to another million dollars. So they have spent $2 million fighting to prevent access to some of the most marvellous and rich historical documents we have in our National Archives. It’s just extraordinary and at a time when they have been cutting resources and staff repeatedly over the last decade.
So I think there’s some very troubling aspects to the Archive’s behaviour to this.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And again very briefly, so the High Court rules that you are to be given access to those letters and the National Archives response is, “Well, we’ll take a look at this and it could take 90 days and we’re in the sure whether we should have – might not have to redact some of it.”

JENNY HOCKING: Yeah, the immediate response from the Archives, I have to say, was disappointing. It was that, yes, that they were claiming it could take them 90 working days that they had to reconsider my application. We actually – my lawyers always said that that was a misreading of the High Court decision, it was not a new application as they were treating it as, it was a reconsideration and that required within 30 days – 30 working days. And also reading the judgments, not just the orders of the court, but reading the judgments made it very clear that they would be hard pressed to make redactions.
Interestingly, three days before they actually did release them, I found out from a journalist who rang me and said, “What do you think of the fact that the Archives is releasing the letters in fall?” And I said, “It’s wonderful, but thanks for telling me.” And I was not told at all and they’d been telling my lawyers – in fact, we were about to launch a writ under the High Court order for their release because we had nothing but difficulty and – from the Archive. So it was disappointing. It was disappointing when they did release them they did not have a single historian there which I think was – made that presentation very problematic.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Now, one thing we haven’t got to at all and we won’t – it’s going to be a very passing reference, and it’s – it may remain one of the – one of the great unknowns of this whole saga and that is the claims of conspiracy involving the CIA who – who clearly did regard the Whitlam Government as a security risk because it’s many writing that they did. They actually – the – they sent a letter to the acting head of ASIO at virtual the same time raising their concerns about the possibility of Australia having to be taken out of the so-called Five Eyes, I think was so.
And then, of course, in 1977 in July of ’77, Gough Whitlam was called to a Sydney airport meeting with Warren Christopher, who was Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State or Assistant Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific, on his way to an ANZUS Meeting in New Zealand and he came via Sydney Airport to meet with Gough to give Gough – Gough by this stage is opposition leader – to give Gough a personal message from Jimmy Carter of apology and said that America would never – and his assurance that America again would never again interfere in Australian politics. That’s where it sits – attempts by various people including me and you to find out more from the Carter Archive have met with a blank wall and maybe one day we’ll know something more about that. Was that just the hostility of the Nixon Government generally or was there something more to it? Quick comment on that?

JENNY HOCKING: Well, it’s one of the – there’s a lot of remaining unknowns, I’m sure, but that certainly is one of them. It coincided with the time frame in that Whitlam had uncovered or been revealed to him that there were CIA operatives working at Pine Gap, that he’d not been told of and there is a list through which they’re meant to be informed of these things and he was going to make an announcement on that on November 11, 1975, in the Parliament.
So there’s always a view that there’s more on that front. With the dismissal, I never say never. Anything is possible because of the sorts of things that have been revealed in the last few years. But I do think with a history like this that is so distorted, so uncertain that it’s taken so many years to come out through deep archival research and so on, it’s really important to stick with what the documents tell you and at the moment, you know, there aren’t the sorts of documents that lead down that path and I know that Guy Rundle, in particular, has been very hot on that on following that up.
But I think, you know, there’s more than enough material to show that it was at the very least a far more complex web, as you said before, of people involved in Kerr’s decision than the simple solo act of a lonely and agonised Governor-General that we were told in 1975.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And I think we can now safely say, yes, it was a coup.

JENNY HOCKING: Well, you know, in the sense that this was determined behind closed doors with complete secrecy from the Government of the day, it’s hard to call it anything else, yeah.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Jenny Hocking, thank you very, very much for the work that you have done and the revelations that have come as a result of your extraordinary doggedness and thank you very much for sharing with us tonight.

JENNY HOCKING: Thank you, Kerry. Thank you, everyone.

(APPLAUSE)

In this conversation, recorded live as part of Byron Writers Festival’s out-of-season program, author and academic Jenny Hocking joins celebrated journalist Kerry O’Brien to discuss her revealing new book The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. In this ground breaking account, Hocking discloses the obstruction, intrigue and duplicity she faced during her 10-year campaign to expose the truth behind the dismissal.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Listen Now

In this Conversations from Byron podcast, Jock Serong speaks with Chris Hanley about his new book The Burning Island. They discuss creating in the time of Covid-19, while Jock walks us through some of his researching and writing habits. Delving into the book itself, Jock explains where the idea for the story originated and its relationship to his previous novel Preservation. They go on to discuss some of the numerous themes present in the novel, from seafaring to parent-child relationships and problems of addiction.

About the book

Eliza Grayling, born in Sydney when the colony itself was still an infant, has lived there all her thirty-two years. Too tall, too stern—too old, now—for marriage, she looks out for her reclusive father, Joshua, and wonders about his past. There is a shadow there: an old enmity.

When Joshua Grayling is offered the chance for a reckoning with his nemesis, Eliza is horrified. It involves a sea voyage with an uncertain, probably violent, outcome. Insanity for an elderly blind man, let alone a drunkard.

Unable to dissuade her father from his mad fixation, Eliza begins to understand she may be forced to go with him. Then she sees the vessel they will be sailing on. And in that instant, the voyage of the Moonbird becomes Eliza’s mission too.

Irresistible prose, unforgettable characters and magnificent, epic storytelling: The Burning Island delivers everything readers have come to expect from Jock Serong. It may be his most moving, compelling novel yet.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

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In this Conversations from Byron podcast, Mirandi Riwoe speaks with Melanie Cheng about her experience of researching and writing about the Australian gold rush. They discuss Chinese-Australian history and its place within our broader colonial literature, and explore how stories like this one can help bring the once invisible and voiceless to the forefront of our imaginations.

About the book

Family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in Australia. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown. Once there, Lai Yue gets a job as a carrier on an overland expedition, while Ying finds work in a local store and strikes up a friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with her own troubled past. When a serious crime is committed, suspicion falls on all those who are considered outsiders.

Evoking the rich, unfolding tapestry of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, Stone Sky Gold Mountain is a heartbreaking and universal story about the exiled and displaced, about those who encounter discrimination yet yearn for acceptance.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

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Nazeem Hussain is a grown man whose Mum won’t let him go to Sri Lanka. At least, not without her by his side. But he’s just had a kid, and he’s started thinking ahead to the questions his son might ask him one day, like ‘why are we brown?’ So Naz flies to Sri Lanka with the echoes of his Mum’s protests in his ears.

In his new Audible Original Podcast, Rogue Son, we follow comedian Nazeem Hussain as he journeys through his ancestral lands, considering what life would’ve been like had his parents not migrated to Australia. Naz tours Sri Lanka at a pivotal time for the country, politically and culturally. A new government is elected while Naz is in the air, so he lands in a strange atmosphere of confusion and change.

In this Conversations from Byron podcast Nazeem talks with friend and fellow comedian Matt Okine about the making of the podcast. They discuss race, identity and the experience of returning to your place of heritage as a first generation migrant.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

To listen to the full podcast series of Rogue Son, head to audible.com.

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Kindred, Kirli Saunders’ debut poetry collection, is a pleasure to lose yourself in. Kirli has a keen eye for observation, humour and big themes that surround Love, Connection & Loss in an engaging style, complemented by evocative and poignant imagery. Kindred talks to identity, culture, community and the role of Earth as healer. It has the ability to grab hold of the personal in the universal and reflect this back to the reader.

In this Conversations from Byron podcast, Ellen van Neerven chats with Kirli Saunders about the moments that inspired Kindred, about her role in the Poetry in First Languages project, and about her own personal journey to reclaim language.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

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‘It seems that every generation needs to be told why Black Lives Matter. Here we are again.’ 

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S. Shakthidharan’s award-winning play, Counting and Cracking, is a story about Australia as a land of refuge, about Sri Lanka’s efforts to remain united, and about reconciliation within families, across countries and generations. Shakthi’s latest play, The Jungle and The Sea, was due to open on the day of this interview, but has been put on hold due to Covid-19 restrictions.

In this Conversations from Byron podcast, Shakthi talks with Sunil Badami about what makes an Australian story. They discuss multiculturalism throughout our nation’s long history, and explore themes of family, identity and migration. Shakthi also tells us about his path to playwriting, his love of community arts practice, and the realities of making theatre in the time of Covid-19.

Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

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Thanks to Delta Kay, Arakwal Bundjalung woman, for the Welcome to Country on this podcast.

Listen Now