Cirrus@Austlit

'As we enter the final week of the election campaign with its scrappy debates and breathlessly seized “gotcha” moments, the impact of Gough Whitlam’s electoral reforms can be seen at every stage.'  (Publication summary)

'In 1975 the governor general, John Kerr, removed a democratically elected Labor government, amid great intrigue and subterfuge. The dismissal of the Whitlam government remains one of the blights on our democracy – perhaps the most controversial event in Australian political history. And yet the full record of what happened in the weeks and months leading up to the dismissal is still unavailable to Australian citizens because of the intransigence of Queen Elizabeth and the expensive lengths to which the National Archives of Australia have gone to suppress access to John Kerr’s correspondence with Buckingham Palace.' (Introduction)

'Forty-five years after they were written, hundreds of previously secret letters between the queen and the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, relating to the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 will be released in full by the National Archives of Australia this morning.'

'What role did the queen play in the governor-general Sir John Kerr's plans to dismiss prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, which unleashed one of the most divisive episodes in Australia's political history? And why weren't we told?

'Under the cover of being designated as private correspondence, the letters between the queen and the governor-general about the dismissal have been locked away for decades in the National Archives of Australia, and embargoed by the queen potentially forever. This ruse has furthered the fiction that the queen and the Palace had no warning of or role in Kerr's actions.

'In the face of this, Professor Jenny Hocking embarked on a four-year legal battle to force the Archives to release the letters. In 2015, she mounted a crowd-funded campaign, securing a stellar pro bono team that took her case all the way to the High Court of Australia.

'Now, drawing on never-before-published material from Kerr's archives and her submissions to the court, Hocking traces the collusion and deception behind the dismissal, and charts the private role of High Court judges, the queen's private secretary, and the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, in Kerr's actions, and the prior knowledge of the queen and Prince Charles.

'Hocking also reveals the obstruction, intrigue, and duplicity she faced, raising disturbing questions about the role of the National Archives in preventing access to its own historical material and in enforcing royal secrecy over its documents.' (Publication summary)

'The Indigenous game of marngrook and its claimed connection to Australian rules football has provoked unusually intense debate.1. Dismissed as ‘an emotional belief’, ‘falsifying history’, ‘lacking any intellectual credibility’—who could have imagined that the seemingly innocuous matter of an Indigenous game of football would meet with such invective.' (Introduction)

'The much-anticipated second volume of former labor prime minister Gough Whitlam's biography.
'In the first volume acclaimed biographer Jenny Hocking illuminated Whitlam's path to power, and here she recreates the excitement of Whitlam's historic win in 1972, the forces that never accepted his ascendency and the tragedy that followed. Drawing on previously unseen archival material, extensive interviews with family and colleagues as well as exclusive interviews with the man himself, this second volume finally exposes the truth about the Whitlam years.' (Publisher's blurb)