By Jenny Hocking
Continued from Part 1
After years of legal action, still absent from public view are crucial documents from a most contentious time in British imperial history: the 1947 and 1948 diaries covering the Mountbattens’ shared involvements in pre-Independence India, transition and partition, among “scores of other files” not yet released. These remain locked away, and Lownie has spent £250,000 of his own funds in pursuit of public access to papers which constituted a purportedly public archive, while the Cabinet office has spent £180,000 keeping them secret. Particularly disquieting is Lownie’s recent claims that he has himself become the target of security surveillance as he continues to pursue the closed Mountbatten files. Somewhere among those voluminous Mountbatten papers are letters between Mountbatten and the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, about the dismissal of the Whitlam government. These letters were briefly cited by Mountbatten’s authorised biographer Philip Ziegler in which Mountbatten declared that he “much admired” Kerr’s “courageous and constitutionally correct” action in dismissing Gough Whitlam.Several years ago, I visited Southampton University hoping to see Mountbatten’s dismissal correspondence with Kerr since, as discussed below, bizarre circumstance means that it no longer exists in Kerr’s papers in the National Archives of Australia. Although Ziegler had been granted access and had quoted from Mountbatten’s congratulatory letter to Kerr, I was denied access to the diaries and letters. Instead, I was handed some thin, rather desultory files containing a handful of itineraries, dinner placements, menus, and invitations to Mountbatten during his visit to Australia. No diaries and certainly no letters between Mountbatten and Kerr.
The denial of access to royal archives shields the activities of the monarch, the royal household, and the broader royal family, from the consideration of history. It functions quite simply, by ensuring their collective absence from the public record; “the effect being that public knowledge of key constitutional and political events is limited.” This royal absence inevitably constructs a distorted history, promoting what Elkins terms, “imperial fictions”. This dynastic power to suppress vests the monarchy with a unique capacity to craft its own narrative and to control its history – our shared history.
The recent, reluctant, incomplete release of the Mountbatten archive does more than just shed important light on the political involvements of senior members of the royal family. It highlights the immense barriers to accessing our documentary history in relation to royal matters, through the claimed “convention of royal secrecy” which imposes strict control over royal archives across the Commonwealth. This putative convention is effected in practice by the use of the label “personal” for royal records, thereby removing them from the remit of statutory public release provisions which relate only to official “Commonwealth records”.
In relation to Kerr’s secret correspondence with the Queen, “the Palace letters” regarding the dismissal, it was the use of this uniquely powerful word in the archival lexicon – “personal” – that had placed the letters outside the reach of the Archives Act 1983 and necessitated an arduous Federal Court action to challenge their continued closure. Livsey notes in relation to the migrated Kenyan archive that the construction of “regimes of secrecy” in which the label “personal” was used to control access to and knowledge of British colonial practice; “files labelled ‘Personal’ could be consulted by white British officials only and ‘should not be sighted by local eyes’”. Likewise, Dr Henry Kissinger took US State Department transcripts of all his telephone conversations with him when he left office, claiming they were “personal” and not official, a controversial decision upheld by the Supreme Court.
Lownie’s now four-year legal battle has been described as eerily similar to the Palace letters legal action which I took against the National Archives of Australia in 2016, arguing that the Queen’s correspondence with the Governor-General was not personal, and seeking its release. The case ended in the High Court in 2020 with a resounding 6:1 decision in my favour, the Court ruling that the Palace letters are, as I had argued, not personal and that they are Commonwealth records and come under the open access provisions of the Archives Act. The letters were released in full in July 2020, in a striking rebuff to the claimed convention of royal secrecy on which the Archives had in part relied.
The two cases intersect in their mutual efforts to overturn a denial of public access to critical archival documents relating to the royal family, documents which in both cases ought already to have been in the public domain, and which the archival authorities claimed were “personal”. And both cases were taken by self-funded litigant historian-biographers facing immense institutional barriers – the archives, the royal family, and the government – to bring those documents to public knowledge. This is profoundly wrong. It should not be for individual historians to undertake lengthy and onerous legal action simply to ensure that major archival repositories actually release historical documents when required to do so.
At its most significant, the denial of access to royal documents as “personal” enables the sophistry that the monarch remains politically neutral at all times to persist, if only through the opacity of instances where it does not. Political neutrality is the defining feature of a constitutional monarchy within a parliamentary system and the essential means of resolving the inherent contradiction at the heart of a constitutional monarchy between a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy on the one hand and an unelected hereditary monarchy on the other. It sits together with the “cardinal principal” that the monarch acts on the advice of their responsible, elected, ministers as the cornerstone of that curious amalgam of inherited title and responsible government that constitutes the Westminster system.
Although the Queen was publicly a careful adherent of that core requirement of neutrality, something the “meddling Prince” Charles most assertively was and is not, Hocking argues that “the much vaunted political neutrality is a myth, enabled and perpetuated by secrecy”. Professor Anne Twomey similarly notes that “If neutrality can only be maintained by secrecy, this implies that it does not, in fact, exist”.
Our own history gives us a powerful example of the way in which archival secrecy functions as a Royal protector, casting a veil over breaches of the claimed political neutrality of the Crown, in the changing historiography of the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Gough Whitlam came to office on 5 December 1972 following the election of 2 December, ending twenty-three years of coalition government, and had been re-elected at the double dissolution election of 18 May 1974, just eighteen months before his dismissal by the Governor-General on 11 November 1975.
For decades, the dismissal history was constrained by the impenetrable barrier of “Royal secrecy” which denied us access firstly, to any of Kerr’s correspondence with the Queen, through her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, and Prince Charles, about the possible dismissal of Whitlam and the use of the reserve powers, and second, to his discussions with others about those royal exchanges. This denial extended even to Kerr’s own autobiography which, as I later discovered from Kerr’s papers, had been vetted by Buckingham Palace prior to publication to ensure that Kerr omitted any reference to his exchanges with Charteris.
The absence of publicly accessible documents suggesting otherwise had cemented the view that neither the Queen, nor any member of the Royal household, had any part to play in Kerr’s decision to dismiss the Whitlam government. Even as the evident flaws in the received history of the dismissal became apparent, the view that the Palace was in no way involved in Kerr’s decision was one of the few constants. And for many years this remained a seemingly unassailable position.
Sir John Kerr’s abrupt dismissal, without warning, of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 just as Whitlam was to call a half-Senate election, was an unprecedented use of the Governor-General’s reserve powers and “one of the most controversial and tumultuous events in the modern history of the nation”, as the Federal Court described it.
These powers, derived from those of an autocratic Monarch untroubled by parliamentary sovereignty and even less by the electoral expression of the popular will, had not been used in England for nearly two hundred years, and never in Australia. At the time of the dismissal many legal and political theorists considered the reserve powers an interesting yet obsolete relic of colonialism, having lapsed into desuetude both through inaction and their fundamental incompatibility with Westminster-style democratic practice; “Today his principal powers are exercised and functions performed, probably without exception, on the advice of his Ministers”.
The Commonwealth Solicitor-General at the time of the dismissal Sir Maurice Byers, told Kerr directly, on 6 November 1975, in giving at Whitlam’s request the formal view of the government and Kerr’s chief legal advisor, that “the mere threat of, or indeed the actual rejection of, Supply neither calls for the ministry to resign nor compels the Crown’s representative thereupon to intervene”. Byers was later even more emphatic, describing the reserve powers as, “a fiction. They don’t exist”:
The reserve powers can’t exist [because] you can’t have an autocratic power which is destructive of the granted authority to the people. They just can’t coexist. Therefore, you can’t have a reserve power because you are saying “the Governor-General can override the people’s choice”. […] And that’s nonsense. […] Reserve powers are nonsense.
Regardless of their view on the existence of the reserve powers, few theorists or commentators accepted Kerr’s decision to dismiss the government without warning while it commanded the confidence of the House of Representatives. Bagehot’s dictum of the right of the Crown “to be advised, counsel, and warn”, necessitates at the very least a warning, if not a frank discussion, with the Prime Minister of the situation. As Byers noted; “the Governor-General had obligations to warn the various parties about what they should do in order to prevent a dissolution”.
Kerr’s decision not to speak to the Prime Minister, “to remain silent” to him on this very question was simply preposterous, an impossible position for both Governor-General and Prime Minister to be in. Kerr should at that point have resigned, being no longer able to fulfil his most basic responsibilities as Governor-General, in which as his predecessor Sir Paul Hasluck noted in his important Queale lecture, “frankness and friendliness, to question, discuss, suggest and counsel” were fundamental.
Continued tomorrow: Part 3
Illustration: ‘Jeanie d’Archives’. Concept/Creative designer Tess Lawrence. Production Daniel Jaap. Built upon the beautiful work of Touraine’s Hennes Poulvoir. Medium: Paint on ceramic. Copyright: Tess Lawrence.
Jenny Hocking is emeritus professor at Monash University, Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University and award-winning biographer of Gough Whitlam. Her latest book is The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. You can follow Jenny on X @palaceletters.
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Point 15, rather interesting that this me seems to lend itself to something that people think is rather archaic – fascism!
The main ideas of fascism from google search are “Common themes among fascist movements include: authoritarianism, nationalism (including racial nationalism and religious nationalism), hierarchy, elitism, and militarism”.
That HRH had a definite inclination towards that via The Crown towards Australia is undeniable and that predilection was evident if you have paid attention to the Dismissal and the history of The Royal family.
The sooner that this country becomes a Republic, the better.
Freudian slips and intentions emerge, eventually no matter how much energy is applied to pervert what is already known.
We studied and taught Bagehot’s views long ago, those then being old but generally accepted. The late Queen coud always have “said” anything to be absorbed and followed. It would be absurd, still today, to imagine a G-G might have reserve powers equal to, say George III or some dim past figure. George III might have been overthrown, killed, just for thwarting sense and drive, for the successful Americans after 1776 had no doubts about their rights and decisions. Kerr was a fool, unblanced, inflated, aggrieved, ambitious to get into the books, as say, Jack Howard; let nobodies rise to fame! A republic for us then, or from now, is surely necessary, for a fair fight…
I will never forget the day when I, living in a country area, ran to answer a phone call. It was my mother, in the faraway city. And I’ll never forget her exact words: “The queen’s man has sacked our elected Prime Minister!”
My Mum summed it up. Later, I have realised that this was a case of the UK government toeing the line of the USA government, and making sure that Australia got that USA military intelligence hub, Pine Gap.