By Jenny Hocking
Continued from Part 4
On the afternoon of 11 November 1975, Kerr revealed that he had secretly met with the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Garfield Barwick, the previous day against the express advice of the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. The significance of Barwick’s intervention was made clear within days, with the publication of his letter to Kerr before the dismissal affirming his view that the reserve powers are extant and Kerr’s action legally sound. Although Barwick seemed content to carry the mantle of legal eminence gris behind Kerr’s decision, only decades later did it emerge that in fact, he was not.The critical revelation in this transformational history was of the previously unknown role of then High Court justice, Sir Anthony Mason, as Kerr’s secret confidante and guide over many months, “fortifying me for the action I was to take”, as Kerr described it. Mason’s “critical part in my thinking” as Kerr wrote, was unknown until I located Kerr’s eruptive archival record of it nearly forty years later. It was only with the discovery of this record which Mason did not want released, “he would be happier […] if history never came to know of his role”, that his pivotal role became clear. And the dismissal history pivoted with it.Mason had even drafted a letter of dismissal for Kerr which he neither divulged to his fellow High Court justices at the time, nor to our history since. Mason’s view, as he told me was, “I owe history nothing”.
The discovery of that single file, “a discovery of historical importance”, effected a seismic shift in the dismissal historiography, after which the dismissal as previously understood changed irrevocably. Kerr’s insistence that this had been a solo act, that he had neither consulted with nor revealed his intentions to others, was now a very different story of collusion and deception. The Age concluded that Mason’s statement is the final piece in the dismissal jigsaw and, rather than vindicate Sir John’s actions, it makes plain that Sir John deceived Mr Whitlam”.
The revelation of Mason’s role after nearly forty years exposed significant gaps in historical representations of the dismissal. Since Fraser’s prior discussions with Kerr were by that stage also known, the collusive aspects of the dismissal were now unassailable; “The engineers of the Dismissal were among the most senior officers in the peak institutions of our democracy”. While the Mason revelations were described as “the final piece in the dismissal jigsaw”, they were not. A series of unresolved archival encounters point to other dismissal archives that, for very different reasons, continue to evade the scrutiny of history.
The Unattainable Archive: Destroyed, Lost, and Burnt
Gilliland and Caswell describe the “absent or unattainable archive” as one we know of and cannot access, both known and yet unknown, whose erasure is filled only with speculation, a form of “truth” insisted upon by absence. These absent archives give rise to what Gilliland and Caswell call “individual and collective imaginings of the unattainable” – a powerful process of speculation and imagined archival content in the absence of fact.
Once this speculative meaning takes hold, it is extremely difficult to dislodge, and this is so even after the release of a previously unattainable archive which may reveal no such thing, requiring what Gopal calls “a sustained unlearning”. In this way, an unattainable archive can create its opposite – certainty out of doubt, and “truth” from the unknown. I will describe three types of archival encounters evidencing the unattainable archive and its consequences for historical inquiry: destroyed, burnt, and missing archives. Each of these constituted an evidentiary absence with varying impact on the dismissal history.
The Destroyed Archive: Gough Whitlam’s Australian Security Intelligence Organisation File
I was made sharply aware of the conceptual and physical fragility of archives as historical representation twenty years ago through a chance encounter, or more precisely a lost encounter, with Gough Whitlam’s Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) file. I had stumbled onto Whitlam’s security file quite unexpectedly through a reference to it in another, unrelated, file. Clearly, any file maintained by the domestic security service on Gough Whitlam would be a critically important historical record in itself, and even more so given the Whitlam government’s fractious relationship with the security services and the well-known surveillance excesses of ASIO and the state Special Branches at that time.
To find evidence of the existence of an ASIO file on Whitlam that I had never expected was a rare moment of archival anticipation. That anticipation was dashed four months later when the Archives informed me that, having maintained this security file for nearly forty years, it had been destroyed in a routine culling, just weeks before I requested it. Although archives assured me that, according to ASIO’s records, the now destroyed file “contained material of a vetting nature only”, this is now impossible to verify. A request for access to the ASIO documents referred to in this response and on which this claim about the nature of the file was based, went unanswered.
As a former Prime Minister, Whitlam was a recognised “Commonwealth Person”, for the purposes of the Archives management systems. These are “individuals who have had a close association with the Commonwealth” and whose records are therefore expressly collected and preserved for history. Notwithstanding that acknowledged significance, the Archives had issued an authorisation for ASIO to destroy Whitlam’s security file within weeks of my request to view it. It brings to mind Blouin’s arch observation that “a historian working in state archives, particularly on topics related to the recent past, is constantly engaged in some way in a struggle with the politics of state-protected knowledge”.
The misplaced destruction of Whitlam’s security file compounds the unsettled history of the dismissal by allowing the circulation of competing speculations over its coincident erasure: was this a vetting file as ASIO stated, did the file identify agents or surveillance methods, would its release have led to files on other members of the Whitlam government? This latter is no idle speculation. ASIO was already monitoring deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns, whose ASIO “dossier” was sensationally leaked to The Bulletin in 1974, causing immense damage to the Whitlam government and to Cairns personally. The possibility of security files on other ministers and even on Whitlam himself is only stirred by the deliberate destruction of ASIO’s vetting file. In the absence of the file itself an already clouded history becomes further compromised.
It was this episode that introduced me to the force of what Elkins terms “archival scepticism” in archive-based research. Whatever the reason for its apparent destruction, the Archives had successfully removed Whitlam’s ASIO file from public view and therefore from the consideration of history. In doing so it had played an important role in the construction of the dismissal in history, in which a security file on Gough Whitlam does not and cannot now feature. This underscores precisely, if there were any doubt about this, that archives are not neutral replicators of documented history, but politicised re-creators of it.
Concludes tomorrow: Part 6
This essay was originally published on Wiley Online Library.
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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Will Australia ever be allowed, by USA, to have a genuinely independent Prime Minister? Trump doesn’t need to take Australia over. We already belong to the USA government.
That whole Archives department needs a cleanout from top to bottom. They fought you tooth and nail to stop the release of the palace letters and whoever is running the archives is ‘protecting’ someone at the cost of the truth. A similar situation to our legal system that has no justice attached to it and ‘innocence’ is commensurate to your ability to afford representation.
Maintain the rage comrade
Archives seem to have become the place where old records are kept until they can be destroyed, rather than the place where important items are safely preserved for future study and considerations. When someone tells you your file has been archived, it is clear that it will not be retrieved for your information, even if it is the evidence for an appeal.