Dismissal day: ‘People very nearly fell down in the street with dismay’
It was a day of ‘stupefaction and dismay’ for Australian artists and writers - and they rallied to Whitlam in the wake of his sacking on November 11, 1975.
“Horror. Horror and stupefaction. People very nearly fell down in the street with stupefaction and dismay. Manning Clark (our most splendid historian) said he was literally sick.”
That’s novelist Elizabeth Harrower writing about the Dismissal, in an account that’s hard to beat for the sense of disbelief felt by Australia’s artists and writers as they heard the news on November 11, 1975.
The Whitlam government had appreciated and supported the nation’s creatives. Gough Whitlam himself had taken the arts portfolio and, as Harrower noted, had enacted “more legislation in that area in three years than in the past 72”.
Labor created the Australia Council for the Arts, accelerated plans to build the National Gallery and poured money into the local film industry, generating great confidence in the sector.
That financial and emotional backing was important, but not the only reason artists and writers flocked to Labor’s defence.
Many, Harrower included, had been desperate in 1972 to see the end of the ossified Menzian era; some like her great friend Patrick White had moved away from more conservative backgrounds to spruik for Labor; some like Christina Stead, the author of The Man Who Loved Children, were committed Marxists; some were or had been members of the Communist Party of Australia.
Others, too, had returned to Australia after years of working in London, buoyed by the new approach to the arts. Many of Australia’s writers and artists sat on the left of politics and had welcomed Whitlam as their political – as well as cultural – saviour.
Writer Thomas Keneally would recall decades later that: “With Whitlam, half the country was suddenly writing novels … what had been absent in Australia was the possibility of a career in letters.”
The effort to develop a distinctive arts culture here had, in fact, begun in the mid-1960s with funding initiatives from the Coalition, but it was Gough, with his personal identification with the sector who was credited with truly dragging the nation out of a cultural desert.
His demise was shocking.
Where was Harrower on the day her hero fell? Right there in Canberra, in fact, staying with her friend Stead. She had returned from a picnic outside the bush capital to be blindsided by the news, delivered by telephone to her host, of the PM’s sacking.
As Harrower would later tell another great Australian novelist, the expat Shirley Hazzard, the women “switched on radio which was dooming away in stunned voice. Chris offered gin, brandy, sherry while I paced about holding head and listening to reports. Finally knocked off some Nescafe and took taxi to Parliament House. People surged there from everywhere … The new leaders came out on the balcony and laughed like Nazis. Then our deposed mates came outside to the front steps where we all were, to talk to the crowd, and were hugely cheered. Whitlam came out and it was a relief to see him still alive and valiant in the face of all this. To say Kerr and Fraser have welded the Labor Party together is an understatement.”
The next day, Harrower and Stead joined the crowd gathered in the open space opposite old Parliament House to hear Gough and other cabinet ministers speak from the back of a truck. Harrower wrote to Hazzard: “The sun blazed down. People handed up ten and twenty dollar notes to Whitlam, who put them in his shirt pocket. I met Manning Clark. We all got sunburned. Labor staff went round handing out little squares of paper, hastily roneoed, to pin on fronts, saying LABOR WILL WIN.”
Australia was in uproar as both sides prepared for the December 13 election, and the creatives, led by people including former Bulletin editor Donald Horne and historian Manning Clark began to organise.
On November 25, Harrower, who at 47 had published four novels and was being compared with White, trekked into town for a lunchtime “Arts for Labor” rally at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre.
So did White and the painter Lloyd Rees, the writer Frank Hardy, young actors Jacki Weaver and John Bell and Ken Horler, the founder of the Nimrod Theatre (now the Belvoir).
White told the audience: “Arts have flourished in Australia as never before under Labor – if the Liberals come to power, I am afraid that we would slip back to those philistine days that we had in their previous rules … Artists have an instinctive feeling for democracy – only in a true democracy is art free to survive and flourish. When democracy is weakened, art is weakened … Our central philosophy is this: the arts are not a luxury for the privileged elite. They belong to the whole community. They belong to the whole world.”
The next month, Brett Whiteley was the main attraction at a Paddington Town Hall rally in Sydney called by Artists for Parliamentary Democracy.
“Whitlam is really a pop star,” the painter told the crowd which included many other artists. Whiteley had created two posters – one of Malcolm Fraser in a helmet; the other an “outraged” black frangipani – which were on sale for $2 each as fundraisers.
Ashleigh Wilson notes in his biography, Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, that not every painter was on Gough’s side: Margaret Olley and Robert Dickerson attended an art auction for a rival Liberal gathering that day.
The support was intense but victory for Labor proved impossible and Australians voted overwhelmingly for Fraser on December 13.
A month later, in January 1976, Horne published The Death of the Lucky Country – a sequel to his 1964 book The Lucky Country – arguing that the governor-general had “assassinated” Whitlam.
By September that year, Horne and others had formed an organisation called Citizens for Democracy and held a meeting in the Sydney Town Hall. Under the banner “Kerr and the Consequences”, a parade of artists and public intellectuals addressed the crowd: White, cartoonist Bruce Petty, Hardy, Clark, actor John Gaden, a young journalist and union education officer named Bob Carr, and, of course, Horne.
Gaden, now 84, had been in Melbourne, working with a voice coach on November 11, 1975: “I remember standing in St Martin’s Lane and being gobsmacked. We went back into the room to continue working and had to stop. It was just awful. There was terrific support for Gough.”
The PM and his wife, Margaret, were keen theatregoers – before and after their own Canberra dramas – and Gaden recalls them attending the Nimrod production of the Tom Stoppard play Travesties, in which he played the lead.
Then on the first anniversary of the Dismissal, the Citizens for Democracy organised rallies across the country.
At the Sydney Town Hall, White called for an Australian republic while Clark and Horne also addressed the crowd. In Melbourne, the speakers included a very young Gareth Evans, later to serve as foreign minister in the Hawke government.
White, who had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and was arguably Australia’s best-known novelist at the time, continued to agitate against Kerr’s actions.
In March 1977, he took part in a series of protests timed to coincide with a tour by the Queen. At rallies in Sydney and Brisbane he talked about the “disgrace” of the Dismissal and the need to drop the monarchy.
The love affair continued: in 1979, as Gough retired from politics, leading artists presented a folio of 16 new works to the Whitlams with a message of thanks “for the marks they have made on the Australian canvas”. The artists included John Olsen, Whiteley, Rees, John Coburn, Arthur Boyd and Petty.
The folio is held by the Whitlam Institute. When it went on display in 2023, Petty told journalist Troy Bramston: “We were not used to politicians being interested in the arts, but he was. There was a division between arts and politics, and Gough brought them together.”
That merging preceded the 1972 election: historian Michelle Arrow, author of The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia, notes that the Whitlam Program, developed over years in opposition and which he took to the 1972 election outlining his reform agenda, included a promise to “uplift and liberate the talents of the Australian people”.
“There was this sense that he was going to unleash Australia’s creativity and culture,” Arrow says. “He was obviously very invested in the idea of culture’s importance to nation building.
“And there was also this imperative around the idea that ‘we’re maybe not so closely tied to Britain any more; how do we find our identity in the new world?’
“Patrick White wins the Nobel Prize in the first year of the Whitlam government and there was a bit of a Zeitgeist around Australian culture which Whitlam fed and was able to capitalise on.
The dramas of November 11 may have seemed tailor-made for the movies but it would be a decade before the release of the television series The Dismissal, by the renowned production company Kennedy Miller.
The National Film and Sound Archive website notes that for five years, the Broadcasting and Television Act prohibited the dramatisation of the Dismissal because it was defined as a current event.
“Eventually the series – which, at $2.6m was the most expensive miniseries made in the country at that time – was dramatised, with a cast of some of the very best Australian actors including Max Phipps as Gough Whitlam, John Stanton as the Liberal leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, and John Meillon as Sir John Kerr. Ruth Cracknell, John Hargreaves, Ed Devereaux, Bill Hunter, Robyn Nevin and Nancye Hayes were among the cream of Australia’s acting fraternity who lent their extraordinary talents to this important series. There were 115 speaking parts and 1000 extras.”
Almost 50 years on, audiences were offered a less traditional version in The Dismissal: A Very Serious Musical Comedy, which ran in Sydney in 2023.
It featured the satirical character Norman Gunston, who had made his way on to the steps of Parliament House on November 11, 1975, to “address” the crowd ahead of the PM. Gunston, aka actor Garry McDonald, had rushed to Canberra from Sydney in a twin-prop plane after hearing Gough had been dismissed.
In 2020, he told the ABC podcast The Eleventh: “It was a great moment to be there … on a purely selfish level. The crowd weren’t ugly. I suppose I just saw an opportunity and went for it. You know, there was no great sort of extraordinary thought behind it. I had no agenda other than to be funny.”
The last laugh, however, might have been had by Clifton Pugh, the “bipartisan court painter” to pollies in the 1970s. He was painting the governor-general as the Dismissal unfolded and captured just enough of a sneer from Kerr to ensure the portrait’s place in our history.
Helen Trinca’s book Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower, is published by La Trobe University Press
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