The eleventh day of the eleventh month used to just mark the day World War I ended. In 1975 Remembrance Day became something else: the day a governor-general sacked Australia’s elected leader and replaced him with his opponent.
I apologise in advance for allowing the personal to enter this narrative. Still in my impressionable 20s at the time of “the Dismissal”, I felt a personal stake in how my country was governed. The drama of that day was mind-bending and life-shaping.
My probably-selective memories are that I drank fair bit of alcohol with friends that night, Gough Whitlam’s call to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm” ringing in my ears, before getting caught up in a fairly boozy, losing election campaign.
At the time, Whitlam was to me the wronged statesman, Sir John Kerr (the “Sir” was important to him) was the back-stabbing arch-villain, and Malcolm Fraser the ruthless opportunist. “Nothing will save the Governor-General,” said Whitlam that afternoon, and Kerr’s harried, isolated later life seemed to bear that out.
There’s still some truth in those labels, but time has changed perceptions.
In 1975, Whitlam’s once-inspiring leadership was gone, his stumbling government held together by a sense of grievance at what seemed to be entitled patricians wanting to resume the power they enjoyed for an eternity under Bob Menzies. On the actual day, Whitlam’s failure to consult led to his senators allowing passage of the money bills that sealed his fate.
Public hostility led Kerr to resign in 1977 and to decline Fraser’s offer of a role as UNESCO ambassador in Paris. It would have been galling for him to see Whitlam take that plum job in 1983 when Labor returned to power under Bob Hawke, but for Whitlamites (including me at the time) it was sweet revenge.
Kerr’s public life was soon over. After living in exile in London he died in Sydney in 1991, an event his family kept secret until after his funeral. I despised Kerr for his 1975 actions but took no pleasure from that concealed departure, though it seemed in keeping with the man’s style.
Looking back, Kerr did his country a favour. His action tested reserve powers of the governor-general previously taken for granted, and the reaction has since been a flashing light to successors. Today’s incumbent, Sam Mostyn, says she would not act against a prime minister without warning.
On the afternoon of his dismissal Whitlam declared to an angry Canberra crowd that Fraser would go down in history as “Kerr’s cur”. But Fraser and history tell another story.
Fraser the “patrician” became a voice for refugees from war and for the aspirations of post-colonial peoples. On the environment front he ended 200 years of Australian whaling and in 1982 tried to stop Tasmania from building the Gordon-below-Franklin dam, a project terminated a year later by Hawke and the High Court.
As the years passed a remarkable thing happened: Whitlam and Fraser became friends. In 1991 – the same year Kerr died – the two old foes held hands aloft on the back of a truck in Melbourne to declare their joint opposition to foreign ownership of what was then Fairfax Media.
Fraser, angered by the Liberals’ anti-refugee policies, threw in his party membership when Tony Abbott became leader in 2009.
In May 2012 I had a brief encounter with Fraser and wife Tamie at, of all places, the site of China’s ancient terracotta army near Xi’an. I and my wife Sandy spotted the unmistakeable contour of the man, towering above throngs of tourists, and we enjoyed a friendly exchange about China and other things before his diplomatic escort moved us all on.
A month later Fraser gave the annual Whitlam Oration at Western Sydney University, in which he spoke of the pair’s mutual belief that “too much reliance on great powers for one’s security is not wise”. A sense of dependence on Britain and the US had dogged Australia since Federation and damaged our regional relationships, he said. He urged his country to “grow out of it.”
Whitlam, who in 1971 was the first Western leader to visit China after the 1949 revolution, would have raised a smile. Both now nearing the end of their lives, the old adversaries were fully reconciled in opposition to their country’s dependence on US power – a warning that has a special resonance in these years of AUKUS and Trump 2.0.
We still call the Dismissal a crisis. It seemed so then, but alongside the tumult of Donald Trump’s America it was a mere blip. The structures held, the opposing forces maintained their civility (if not their rage) and life went on. I call that a win for Australian democracy.