The Queen talks with the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, in 1977. Credit:Fairfax Media Next month, the Federal Court will hear a challenge against the National Archives of Australia by historian Jenny Hocking, who is arguing they are important historical documents that should not be withheld from the public. It is an action that also reminds us there are practical implications to Australia's decision to remain a constitutional monarchy, and that a 91-year-old woman who lives 15,000km away can still exercise her power to prevent Australians from knowing about the events leading up to what still remains the greatest constitutional crisis in Australian political history. Hocking, a research professor with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, says the letters are not simply private correspondence but documents exchanged "between people of extraordinary significance, status and power". Professor Hocking has taken legal action after being denied access to the letters by the National Archives of Australia and unsuccessful freedom of information requests to the Office of the Governor-General.

In happier times: Sir John Kerr arrives at Parliament House to be sworn in as governor-general in 1974 as prime minister Gough Whitlam looks on. Credit:Capix "That means people can't access them. It's a very, very important principle about our control over historical records," Professor Hocking explains. "There's effectively an embargo that's still at the Queen's discretion. This is wrong. It should not be for the Queen to decide when we can know and have access to critical documents in our own history. We all deserve to know the truth of the dismissal and what really happened at that time." Historian Jenny Hocking is taking court action to gain access to letters between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace about the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government. If the letters remain locked away in a climate-controlled room Australians would remain ignorant about whether the Queen's representative in Australia warned Her Majesty ahead of time of his consideration of dismissal as a possible course of action.

Professor Hocking's award-winning biographies of Gough Whitlam have previously revealed Sir John Kerr considered the former chief justice of the High Court, Sir Anthony Mason, to be the key influence who "fortified" him during the crisis that followed the coalition's refusal to pass supply bills in the Senate. The discovery prompted Sir Anthony to break his decades-long silence on his role in those tumultuous events to reveal he advised Sir John to warn Gough Whitlam of his intention to sack his government in 1975. It is a position shared by Malcolm Turnbull, who said on the 40th anniversary of the dismissal, just weeks after becoming prime minister himself, he still believed "that Sir John should have given Whitlam notice of his intentions". "His justification that if he had – which he gave to me some years later when I met with him, and he's obviously written himself – that if he had done so he feared that Whitlam would sack him first, I don't think is an adequate justification for that failure of notice," Mr Turnbull said in November 2015. Professor Hocking is certain the Queen knew what might happen to the government well before it happened – unlike Whitlam, who was caught completely off guard by the actions of November 11, 1975.

"[Sir John] was, at times, writing to the palace several times a day in the weeks leading up to the dismissal. He considered himself close to Prince Charles in particular," Hocking says of her research into Sir John's private papers from the time which revealed the fact of the correspondence but not the correspondence itself. "This is Kerr letting key people in key institutions know of his thinking about what he might do … That he's laying out his plan is staggering. He's trying to flag to the palace what might happen to him." The critical thing the letters would reveal is whether Sir John was, in effect, asking for the Queen's permission to dismiss the Whitlam government, and what the Queen's advisers told him in response. "I think that's the precise point," Hocking says. "Whitlam was completely in the dark. I think it's really critical and it does raise serious questions about what we understand our position as a colony to be. This is a quirky pocket of residual control."