Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government (Part 6)

The Burnt Archive: Sir John Kerr’s Prominent Supporters

In 1978, soon after Kerr left office, a cache of letters “of outstanding value” to Kerr was accidentally reduced to ashes in the Yarralumla incinerator. The usually punctilious official secretary, David Smith, wrote to Kerr expressing his dismay at having so carelessly left this box of significant letters unattended in the photocopying room, from where an errant cleaner, according to Smith, had inadvertently thrown the entire contents into the incinerator.

Kerr had sought these congratulatory letters for use in his forthcoming autobiography Matters for Judgement. Among his correspondents was the Queen’s second cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle and King Charles III’s great mentor; the former Governor-General and distant royal relation, Viscount De L’Isle; and other prominent individuals supporting Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam. These names alone indicate that these burnt letters were as important to history as they were to Kerr. Were it not for this secondary file of correspondence between Smith and Kerr detailing the saga of the “burnt letters”, the existence and apparent inflammatory end of Kerr’s correspondence with his minor aristocratic supporters would never have come to light. The letters themselves now never will.

Philip Ziegler’s authorised biography of Mountbatten, however, gives just a glimpse of this story. Ziegler recounts that Mountbatten wrote to Kerr days after the dismissal, congratulating him on his “courageous and correct action” in dismissing Whitlam. It was a remarkably partisan royal intercession, and Mountbatten was not alone among Kerr’s royal supporters. We now know, thanks to letters released in 2020 following the High Court’s decision in my legal action, that King Charles also fully supported Kerr’s actions. Charles’s letter to Kerr, written in starkly similar terms to Mountbatten’s weeks after the dismissal, leaves no doubt of Charles’s support for Kerr; “What you did […] was right and the courageous thing to do”.

As Kerr later wrote to the South Australian lieutenant-governor, Sir Walter Crocker, “I never had any doubt as to what the Palace’s attitude was on this important point”.

For over forty years the “Palace letters” between Kerr and the Queen had been held in the National Archives in Canberra and embargoed at Kerr’s wishes, according to the Archives. This was not true. It was only in 2018 during legal proceedings that the Archives acknowledged that the letters were in fact embargoed by the Queen, who had “instructed” a change in Kerr’s original access conditions after his death and whose private secretary retained an effective veto over their release. The power of the Monarch over the archival record seemed all encompassing.

Until their release in 2020 following the High Court’s decision in the Palace letters case they constituted the most significant “unattainable archive” in the dismissal panoply of secrets. The release of the letters signalled a rare moment of forced archival transparency in the face of determined refusals of access, and the harbinger of a significant historical re-evaluation of the dismissal in which they played a pivotal role.

What is critical for this discussion is that the closures of these otherwise public archives, both the Mountbatten papers and the Palace letters, were enabled by and remained hidden because of a claimed “convention” of Royal secrecy. This “convention” is hardwired in every archival holding across the Commonwealth such that any communications relating to the royal family are routinely termed “personal” and closed until the Monarch decides otherwise.

“Personal” is an archival sophistry, the means used routinely through which any potentially embarrassing, salacious, or merely politically uncomfortable Royal documents could evade the Archives Act and Freedom of Information laws across the Commonwealth.

And so, this was how Kerr had labelled his letters to and from the Queen, as they had always been labelled, as “personal”. The only way to challenge the denial of access to personal records was to take a Federal Court action, a daunting and lengthy process. In 2016, with the support of a pro bono legal team, I commenced proceedings against the National Archives of Australia in the Federal Court, arguing that these Palace letters were not personal and should be publicly available, and seeking their release.

Four years and three court hearings later, the High Court found in a 6:1 decision that the Palace letters are not personal, leading to their release in full. The High Court’s decision was an emphatic and explicit assertion of Australian law over the wishes of the Queen, and a resounding rejection of the claimed convention of royal secrecy. The National Archives, Australia’s major national repository of historical records, which describes itself as a “pro-disclosure organisation”, had fought for the letters to remain secret to a cost of almost $2 million, causing it significant reputational as well as financial damage.

The Palace letters are now open, and with their revelations the shifting historiography of the dismissal shifted once again. This time most dramatically. The involvement of the Queen and Prince Charles in Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam, from their first discussions in September 1975 about that possibility and the use of the reserve powers to do so, is now undeniable. The letters reveal that involvement and are themselves constitutive of it. As one legal commentator remarked; “Buckingham Palace gave Sir John Kerr a green light to dismiss the Whitlam government only a week before November 11”.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull concludes that Charteris’s letters “can be read as encouraging Kerr” to dismiss Whitlam. How else to read Charteris’s final two letters before the dismissal assuring Kerr firstly, that the reserve powers existed and were available to him, “those powers do exist […] that you have the powers is recognised”, contrary to the advice Kerr had just received from the Solicitor-General Sir Maurice Byers; and second, that if he exercised those powers, “you cannot possible [sic] do the Monarchy any avoidable harm […] the chances are you will do it good”.

This final historiographic shift was transformational, a revisionist history which ruptured the narrative of the dismissal as a solo act by the Governor-General in which he “protected the Queen from getting involved”. The Palace letters give the lie to that enduring foundational myth. As NSW Solicitor-General, Michael Sexton QC described; “Kerr’s likely course of action was known to the Palace and so to the Queen, but completely secret from Whitlam and his ministers”.

A more complete history of the dismissal has emerged in fragments, still marred by partisan recollection, misplaced archives, and continuing secrecy. First, that Kerr was in secret contact with Fraser before he dismissed Whitlam; second, the definitive role of High Court justice Sir Anthony Mason, and finally, only in the last decade has the extent of royal involvement in Kerr’s decision become clear. The discovery of Sir Anthony Mason’s role from among Kerr’s archives was the first of two great waves of archival revelation in this evolving history – the second being the release of the Palace letters which once again turned that history on its head.

This episodic reappraisal of the dismissal history has been possible only because of public access to the archives that revealed its historical invisibilities to us. The trajectory of its changing historiography correlates at those key moments with archival revelations which drove an historical re-evaluation. If those archives had remained closed, as they had been for decades, the history of the dismissal would have stalled with them, incomplete and unchanged from 1975. The continued closure, destruction, and loss of archives relating to the dismissal only generates renewed historical distortion by their absence.

In this long pattern of denial, secrecy, and fabulation the release of the Palace letters is a rare example of the recovery for public access of an “unattainable archive” after decades of closure. And the dismissal history is richer and far more complex for it. It is an intriguing archival paradox that while archives and denials of access to them were central to the depredations of the dismissal history, they have also been fundamental to its eventual correction.