Australia’s national archives set to release palace letters by end of July
An archive of letters between the Queen and Governor-General Sir John Kerr includes attachments that could shed more light on who else was implicated in PM Gough Whitlam’s dismissal.
World
Don't miss out on the headlines from World. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A potentially damaging archive of letters between the Queen and Governor-General Sir John Kerr in the lead up to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s dismissal include “very important” attachments.
The historian who fought for the public release of 211 letters which could shed more light on the 1975 constitutional crisis says the attachments could implicate other significant names in the Dismissal.
Professor Jenny Hocking recently won a four-year legal battle to access classified letters between the Queen and Kerr who dismissed Whitlam in November 1975.
Despite her High Court win in May granting her access, last month the National Archives of Australia director-general David Fricker flagged months of delays.
But on Wednesday Mr Fricker told Prof Hocking to expect a decision on the release of The Palace letters by the end of July.
Prof Hocking tonight revealed together with the “absolutely astonishing number” of letters the archive includes attachments “which are very important”.
She hopes the attachments will include other peoples’ letters to Kerr other than names previously made public including the Queen’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and Prince Charles.
“That will be absolutely fascinating. Who else was writing to Kerr?,” she said.
“Was Robert Menzies writing to Kerr?”.
Prince Charles and Kerr discussed the dismissal of Whitlam as early as September 1975, a journal kept by Kerr has previously revealed.
But Prof Hocking does not believe the archive will implicate Prince Charles further.
The award-winning biographer said Kerr wanted the letters released “very, very badly.”
“Kerr wanted them released because he believed they would validate what he wrote in his book about the dismissal,” she said.
But they were kept private because of a single word – “personal”.
“These letters were letters between the two people at the apex of a constitutional monarchy and couldn’t be considered personal and yet that is the description placed over them,” Prof Hocking said.
“It was entirely because of that single word ‘personal’ that the Queen had been able to place conditions of access over them.
“Effectively those instructions were at least until 2027.”
Buckingham Palace has not commented on the matter.
But a submission from Government House made to the Federal Court not to release the letters included letters from Buckingham Palace.
“Buckingham Palace had written to and from Government House – and here was Buckingham Palace at its most imperial best, telling us in no uncertain terms why it was absolutely vital that these letters, The Palace letters, not be released, that it will damage the dignity of the monarch,” Prof Hocking said.
A member of the Australian Republican Movement, the professor said she was taken aback by the volume of letters.
“When I first started looking at this I thought that maybe at a pinch there might be 40 or 50 letters if we were lucky, I was really stretching that a bit, because back then at that stage Governor-Generals reported back to the Queen … but they did that, if at all, quarterly, so you might have expected to find four letters from Kerr during a single year period.”
She believes the release of the letters will have a significant baring on how the monarchy are viewed.
“There was a great number who saw this, quite correctly, as a question of control over our history. How is it possible that key documents in our National Archives in Canberra were kept secret from us for decades and what’s more were kept secret from us because of an embargo from the Queen?,” she said.
On Wednesday, Professor Hocking said she was “looking forward to the release of all 211 of these historic letters”.
She has begun writing a “thriller” on her fight for the classified documents at the heart of one of Australia’s biggest political crises.
She’s hoping to release The Palace letters in October, ahead of the 45th anniversary of the Whitlam government dismissal in November 1975.
Prof Hocking said she thinks legal cases can become interesting narratives.
“I’m not a lawyer, it’s not a lawyers’ book,” Prof Hocking said.
“I think it’s a bit of a political thriller. That’s the way I look at it.”
She has already penned a two-part biography of Mr Whitlam and another on the declassified material about the dismissal.
“There are some very fundamental issues at stake here about our capacity to know our history, our control over our own archives but also the right to know,” Prof Hocking said.
In May, the High Court overturned a Federal Court decision that the letters between the Queen and Sir John Kerr during the time of the dismissal were personal.
The Federal Court’s decision meant they couldn’t be released until 2027 and even then, only with permission from the Queen.
But the letters still remain under lock and key at the National Archives.
Prof Hocking said the case could become part of the argument about the monarchy’s role in Australia.
“It has surprised many people, that there was still such a clear area of royal control,” she said.
“It’s effectively over our knowledge of history and that’s troubled people.”
– with AAP