Cirrus@Austlit

Biographer, academic, and political commentator.

In 2018, Jenny Hocking was Research Professor and Australia Research Council Discovery Outstanding Research Award (DORA) Fellow with the National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS) at Monash University. She has been involved with teaching and research in Australian studies for many years and is a previous Director and Deputy Director of NCAS. In 2013, she was appointed the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute, University of Western Sydney.

She has been a member of the executive board of the International Australian Studies Association and a series editor of the Journal of Australian Studies. She is also a widely published author of political biographies, including works on Lionel Murphy, Frank Hardy, and Gough Whitlam.

In 2017 and 2018, Hocking undertook legal action to prompt the release of the 'palace letters', correspondence between Queen Elizabeth II and Sir John Kerr regarding the dismissal of Gough Whitlam: Hocking disputed the National Archive's designation of the letters as 'personal', rather than as Commonwealth records (which, under the Archives Act, should be released after a period of thirty years). the ruling, which came down in March 2018, upheld the designation of the letters as personal, continuing the embargo against their release.