Pearls and Irritations

And it is not just Gough Whitlam’s ASIO file that has been “culled” by the National Archives of Australia. The relevant Government House Guest Books at the time of the Dismissal have disappeared and the entire archive of Kerr’s prominent supporters, including  Lord Mountbatten, was accidentally burnt in the Yarralumla incinerator.

I was made sharply aware of the conceptual and physical fragility of archives as historical representation 20 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 40 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” (https://www.naa.gov.au/help-your-research/getting-started/commonwealth-record-series-crs-system), 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.

The Lost Archive: Government House Guest Books

In 2010, I first requested access to the Government House guest books held by the Archives, which provide the details of visits and visitors to “their Excellencies” at Yarralumla. The catalogue lists a total of twenty-nine files, enumerated consecutively, constituting visitor books from May 1953 to February 1996. The guest books appear regularly from July 1961 until July 1974, before stopping altogether until December 1982.

The Archives insisted that the guest books for this period had never been transferred from Government House and they now appeared lost since neither institution claimed to hold them. What is puzzling in this regard is that Archives’ enumeration system, which numbers each file consecutively, has two consecutive numbers assigned yet not included in the catalogue corresponding to the missing dates, suggesting two missing files given identification numbers by the Archives which are no longer listed. The only other gap in these books, for a much shorter period between 1960 and 1961, has no such missing consecutive numbers in the catalogue which might accommodate a lost file.

In June 2023, the Archives submitted a “s40 access application” to Government House requesting the delivery of the Government House guest books for 1974–75. Government House replied that “it does not hold any guest books, visitor books, guest registers or visitor registers from 1975 as defined by the Archives Act 1983”. It should be noted that Government House is required under the Act to place the guest books as Commonwealth records in the Archives, which it had done for the previous decade and which it was the responsibility of the official secretary to deliver. The guest books for 1975 are now officially lost.

These missing guest books add fuel to the longstanding speculation that security and defence officials, notably the Chief Defence Scientist Dr John Farrands as the recognised authority on Pine Gap and the Joint Facilities, had briefed Kerr in the week before the dismissal about mounting security and defence concerns over Whitlam’s exposure of CIA agents working at Pine Gap, and his planned Prime Ministerial statement on this in the House of Representatives on the afternoon of 11 November 1975. This claim, driven largely by journalist Brian Toohey, that Farrands provided a briefing for Kerr was emphatically denied by Farrands and the Head of Defence, Sir Arthur Tange. Farrands threatened to sue Toohey and The National Times, although the Vice-regal Notices show that he had met Kerr on 28 October 1975, not the week before the dismissal.

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”.

These are extracts from Professor Jenny Hocking’s essay ‘Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 11 April 2024

Open access publishing facilitated by Monash University, as part of the Wiley – Monash University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.

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