Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government (Part 1)

Gough Whitlam was deeply committed to the preservation of history and keenly attuned to the importance of the documentary record in the writing of it. For Whitlam, the written record – the contemporaneous documentary record of government activity – was pivotal in the production of historical knowledge and the “verification” of history. As he reflected on the release of his government’s 1975 Cabinet papers; “the publication of these records confirms my belief in the contemporary document as the primary source for writing and understanding history.”

Whitlam’s commitment to the textual record as the central pillar in historical construction is reflected in his favourite incantation to those undertaking research into his government: “Go to the documents; check the chronology”. It is an exhortation that bears uncanny resonance for any study of Whitlam himself and specifically, of the 1975 dismissal of his government by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. While historians will recognise in this entreaty an outmoded Rankean privileging of the documentary text in historical representation, in the case of the dismissal and its shifting historiography, it is entirely apt. For it has only been through a series of archival revelations, many of them from Kerr’s papers in the National Archives of Australia (NAA), that the received dismissal history slowly fractured, precipitating a comprehensive recalibration through which a very different story has emerged.

This paper takes us through the evolving historiography of the dismissal of the Whitlam government. From its earliest incarnation as the unproblematic lonely, isolated, decision of a solo Governor-General who made up his mind “for my own part” and who could see no other option but to dismiss the government, to what we now know as a more Byzantine, shared, and determined action, organised with the secret “fortification”, “advice”, and “encouragement” of key individuals at the apex of our system of governance.

At the same time, this is necessarily also a reflection on the role of archives in the writing and rewriting of history, recognising as Peters does, that the construction of an archival record is at every level “a deeply political act”: from decisions about retention, storage, cataloguing, and most importantly access, to its impact on the history of a particular event, and even on what constitutes the basic facts and interpretative context about it. This is particularly so for contested and polarised episodes, of which the dismissal is the Australian exemplar, for which archival revelations have proved transformative. The most significant of these revelations in turn generated identifiable historiographical shifts in our understanding of the dismissal, which this paper will discuss.

That these revelatory archives were publicly available and therefore conducive to historical (re)assessment, is central to recognising the role of archives as public repositories, dedicated to equitable open access, when assessing their significance as both holders and constructors of history. As the vast range of archival material about the dismissal was brought into the public domain over the last decades through research into Kerr’s and other papers, the archives shifted from functioning as the keeper of historical secrets to providing a pathway to a more complete knowledge about the dismissal and ultimately to a powerful historical corrective, even as significant lacunae in the records remain.

Drawing on Gilliland and Caswell’s discussion of the “unattainable archive”, this paper explores some critical archival encounters along that two-decade research journey – archival revelations, obstructions, missing archives, even burnt archives – which simultaneously obscured, distorted, and recast the dismissal history. From the destruction of Gough Whitlam’s security file to the missing Government House guestbooks, the lost Yarralumla telephone logs to the burnt letters of royal support for Kerr’s actions “accidentally” turned to ash in the Government House incinerator, not to forget the NAA’s four years, $1.7 million, fight against my High Court action to release the Queen’s secret correspondence with Kerr about the prospective dismissal, the “Palace letters”.

These encounters illuminate the critical relationship between archives, access, and history, which continues to shape our understanding of the dismissal of the Whitlam government. In doing so, they exemplify the role of the archives as “loaded sites […] that produce realities as much as they document them”, through their decisions over which parts of a documented history ever see daylight.

Ultimately, this is a paean to archives, a recognition of their singular importance in our on-going tussle with history, enabled always by the critical element of public access. Access is the pivot through which an unknown and unattainable archive becomes public and takes its place in an evolving history. Without access there can be no historical reckoning.

How do we write history when evidence central to it has been destroyed, concealed, or even confected? Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins, whose searing account of British atrocities across its fading imperial domains, most notably but not only in Kenya, posed this question in relation to the disappearance and destruction of troves of colonial archives evidencing that end of empire horror story, which the “Whiggish tradition of imperial triumph” had at best downplayed, if not denied.

Elkins’s research in Kenya with survivors of the British administration’s torture, massacres, and detention camps, documenting their oral testimonies and pursuing their stories through heavily filtered archives, was central to a later successful legal challenge by five elderly survivors, reluctant acknowledgement by the British government of both the atrocities and the documents evidencing them, compensation, and a profound historical reset. Perhaps most shocking for historians in that imperial “sanitisation” of history was official confirmation that an entire set of vetted colonial archives from the time of independence had been removed from Kenya and sent to England, forming a false trail of British activities in the remaining post-independence Kenyan archives.

In a systematic cover-up known as “Operation legacy”, two parallel archives were created, one to remain filleted and sanitised for Kenyan authorities, the other to be sent back to the imperial centre. Many thousands more were simply destroyed, most commonly incinerated, or dumped at sea. Thousands of boxes of the original files documenting the atrocities and the cover-up were spirited out of Kenya and into the United Kingdom just as independence loomed, forming what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) termed a “migrated archive”. Once in England they were stored not in the UK Archives as required for government records, but away from any possibility of unwelcome public access in the defence and security establishment’s Hanslope Park, safely behind its sixteen-foot-high fences topped with razor wire.

There they had remained for nearly sixty years, hidden to all but the most trusted researchers and denied by the British government even during legal proceedings until, faced with mounting evidence of their existence, the government was forced to acknowledge them and released hundreds of files. The systematic programme of concealment and destruction of Operation legacy was not limited to Kenya and was implemented prior to independence as a routine part of decolonisation. That official acknowledgement and the production of the files not only validated Elkins’s research, published in her landmark Britain’s Gulag, it also ensured the success of the survivors’ legal action.

Remarkably enough, Elkins’s work, for which she won a Pulitzer prize, had previously earnt her the dismissive critiques of some erstwhile colleagues piqued at the powerful revisionism of her research, as well as those still clinging to the myth of a benign British imperialism which her work had so adeptly confronted. Elkins’s latest work, Legacy of Violencebroadens that historical reframing from Kenya across the British empire, in a stunning work of revisionist scholarship in which extensive research across the colonial archives and access to them have been pivotal. The discovery of the assiduously reconstructed archival memory of the colonial “W” or “watch” files and their counterpoint, the tightly guarded “migrated files”, constitutes a stark and quite shocking official historical “fabulation”. The fundamental issues this dark episode raises, of archival secrecy and destruction, the denial of public access to records, and the resultant distortions of history, are by no means isolated to this most conspicuous and egregious example.

For several years the British historian, Andrew Lownie, has been seeking access to the diaries and letters of Lord Louis Mountbatten, advisor, mentor, and close relation of the royal family, held at Southampton University ostensibly as public records. Although Lownie’s initial Freedom of Information request, made in 2017 while he was researching his biography of the Mountbattens, was successful the University refused to open the archives claiming there was a Cabinet directive preventing it.

The most extraordinary aspect of Lownie’s long-running case is that Southampton University had bought the Mountbatten collection, the Broadlands Archives, for £2.8m in 2010 using public funds from the National Heritage Memorial Fund promising to “preserve the collection in its entirety for future generations to use and enjoy” and to “ensure public access”. The University’s catalogue states that the Broadland Archives were “open on transfer”, and yet a Cabinet directive had, apparently, reached into this publicly funded archive to keep some of the most significant and controversial aspects of Mountbatten’s long public life from history.

Southampton University then ignored an order from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to release the archives, until a swingeing report from the ICO warned that it would issue “unprecedented” contempt of court proceedings if it did not do so, which the university promptly appealed. Finally, after twenty-two MPs signed a motion tabled in the House of Commons calling for “their publication without further obfuscation and delay”, the University capitulated and released many, although not all, of the Mountbattens’ correspondence and diaries. The historically critical and most controversial among these records, however, remain closed.