From the Archives, 1983: At last... The Dismissal

First published in The Sun-Herald on March 6, 1983
Ten’s Dismissal: TV drama at its best

At last... The Dismissal

After two aborted attempts to screen it, third time lucky and at 8:30 tonight, tomorrow night and Wednesday night Channel 10 will show The Dismissal in two-hour episodes. Even if you’re up to here with politics, don’t miss it.

Gough Whitlam (Max Phipps) in “The Dismissal”. March 06, 1983. Credit: Network Ten

Probably more has been said about this six-hour series than any other Australian production. Political writers have done their bit and so have TV critics, the producers, writers and directors.

After its screening this week, there will be more. Those portrayed in the series will want their say.

As a production it is an extremely important Australian television drama. As A Town Like Alice did a couple of years ago, it shows that we can produce television on a par with the best of the Beeb.

The story, a dramatisation of the events leading to the November 11, 1975 sacking of the Whitlam Government by Sir John Kerr, is one that touched every Australian.

It’s because of where I was - or rather, where I wasn’t - on that November 11 that previewing The Dismissal has been transcribing an enlightening and extraordinarily emotional experience; an education and an entertainment rolled into one.

On November 11, 1975, I was in Singapore, coming home after eight years away and only a seven-hour flight away from Australia...

Sir John and Lady Kerr (John Meillon and Robyn Nevin).Credit: Network Ten

Spain, December, 1972. The news filters through to the little Menorcan village of Llucmassanes where we lived that Gough Whitlam had been elected Prime Minister.

We stopped the local bus and the passengers shared out bottles of champagne.

Menorca, and in particularly our end of it, had been republican-minded in the Spanish Civil War and although the Menorcians couldn’t make much sense out of our wretched Spanish, they understood the words “cambio de govierno”. After all, they had had Franco for 34 years.

It was time for a change and so, we thought, perhaps it was also time to go home. But we got waylaid along the way and left our return too late. We missed it all by a day.

We came home, not to The Lucky Country, but to one torn apart by bitterness. And what should have been a joyous family reunion was instead soured by the events of November 11. Even now, seven years later, the rifts haven’t completely healed.

“Maybe now we can understand, and to understand is to forgive...” says the series’ narrator, Peter Carroll, as black and white newsreel footage takes us through the years of Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate. There are the years of the civil rights protests, the election of Whitlam in 1972, his re-election in 1972, Whitlam’s appointment of Sir John Kerr as Governor-General to where the series begins with the arrival in Australia of Tirath Hassaram Khemlani, a year to the day before Whitlam’s dismissal.

Cleverly, producer/writer Terry Hayes introduces the actors alongside footage of the people they portray. The likenesses are uncanny. As the series rolls on and the characters are fleshed out with voices, mannerisms and personalities, the players become the people and none more so than John Stanton as Malcolm Fraser.

Fraser is the most familiar of the characters. After all, he has been (was? By the time you read this he could be history) PM for seven years.

How much do you portray such a high profile person without it becoming parody? With difficulty, obviously, but Stanton creates the illusion that he is Fraser so skilfully that the shock comes at the end when the real Fraser, by way of newsreel footage, stands up.

John Stanton as Malcolm Fraser.Credit: Network Ten

Close your eyes when Stanton talks and you’ll swear it’s Fraser. Open them and it’s the same tight, cold smile, the same arrogant tilt to the head, the same eyes that avoid confrontation.

Bill Hunter is most moving as Rex Connor, Whitlam’s Minister for Energy, a man whose obsession about buying back Australia led to his downfall.

“I’ve spent a lifetime getting to this office - and I haven’t got time to waste,” he explains to Khemlani at the start of what was to become The Loans Affair.

The third in the series’s trio of award-deserving performances comes from John Hargreaves as Treasurer Jim Cairns, a man portrayed as an idealist who had obviously never learnt that the rules are different in Parliament.

I was a bit disappointed with Max Phipps as Whitlam though my sympathies are with Phipps. His was an impossible task.

Whitlam had such a developed sense of the theatrical that he’s too big an act to follow, even for someone of Phipps’s talent.

He gets there in the end but mostly what we get is an actor playing an actor and although a fairish physical likeness is achieved it ends at the neck. Whitlam is such a big man, not only in height but also in breadth and depth and Phipps lacks the stature.

Sir John Kerr, played by John Meillon, is also portrayed sympathetically; in a kinder light than expected is perhaps a better description. He’s been the villain of the piece for so long that 1 almost expected him to have horns.

Kerr is shown as a rather pathetic, lonely figure, as (glass always in hand) he ponders the role of a Governor-General during a constitutional crisis.

Dr. Jim Cairns (John Hargreaves) and Junie Morosi (Neela Dey).Credit: Network Ten

An eye-opener for me was how much pressure newspapers put on him to act. I had always thought he just upped and sacked Whitlam out of the blue.

But was Kerr — as he is portrayed — just a weak man trying to be strong? Could it be so, considering he was a man who started life as the son of a Balmain boiler-maker, one who fought his way right to the top and who numbered among his friends people like Jim McClelland?

Despite Meillon’s sensitive performance and writer Hayes’ determination to present his characters and their viewpoints as fairly as possibly, Kerr remains a puzzle — but only because of my own prejudice.

Peter Sumner as Bill Hayden, Ed Devereaux as Phil Lynch, Stewart Faichney as Bill Snedden, Harry Weiss as Khemlani, Sean Scully as Doug Anthony, Tom Oliver as Reg Withers, David Downer as Tony Staley ... they are all impeccable.

Not all, of course, are particularly flattering portrayals. Many of the Labor people come across as fools and as for some of the Liberal MPs, even if they were as devious, as cut-throat, as sinister, as they are characterised, I couldn’t help but cringe (well, just a little) for people like Staley.

We seldom see ourselves as others do and how awful to be faced with such an ugly and public mirror.

But then perhaps pollies see it differently. Ruthless ambition is strength to them and niceness is a weakness.

“Bill’s so nice he’s grotesque,” says a Liberal MP of Billy Snedden. I don’t know whether these were Hayes’ words or whether they were actually said but they demonstrate what a different world Canberra is.

We see the pollies at their play time and again throughout the series — the power games, the manipulations, the talk of loyalty always to the Party but never to the people, and the scenes in the House itself where grown men shout and stamp their feet like rowdy schoolchildren. If you have ever spent a day in the public gallery or listened to parliamentary broadcasts you know it’s just like this.

Applause for fine acting is extended to those who play minor roles as well — particularly Tony Barry as Geoff Gleghorn, Cairn’s press secretary, Neela Dey as Junie Morosi, and Nancy Hayes (stunning) as Joan Taggait, Connor’s secretary.

Making The Dismissal was such a monumental task, fraught with so many legal potholes, it’s a wonder it ever got made. That Hayes and his five directors, George Miller, Phil Noyce, Carl Schultz, John Power and George Ogilvie made it so marvellously, well, they have my unstinting admiration.

Am I going overboard? I think not. The Dismissal is more than just an entertainment, to watch, to enjoy - and to eventually forget about.

While some may argue about the accuracy of some scenes, particularly those behind closed doors, no-one can deny the essence of the story — that a man unelected to an office dismissed a Government elected by the Australian people, using powers which even the Queen (whose representative he was) didn’t have.

“Those who forget the past are bound to relive it...” quotes the narrator at the end of The Dismissal. And that, in a quotable nutshell, is what The Dismissal is all about: a precedent has been set and even now, seven years later, nothing has been done to rewrite, amend, or change the Constitution to ensure that the Australian people will not have to relive another November 11.