Last month I launched an historic action in the federal court of Australia against the National Archives of Australia, calling for the release of correspondence between the governor general Sir John Kerr and the Queen at the time of the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

More than 40 years have passed since Kerr took that extraordinarily divisive step, and in that time the history of the dismissal has been fundamentally recast through archival revelations and posthumously released interviews. In this historical corrective no single holding has been more definitive than Kerr’s papers held by the national archives.



His papers on the dismissal were made available for public access in 2005, as required under the Archives Act, and they proved to be a spectacular addition to the historical record. Kerr’s notes, letters, journal and hand-written reflections revealed for instance the critical involvement of Sir Anthony Mason, then a justice of the high court, in the dismissal and Kerr’s collusion with the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, before and after. Although we now know so much more of this once secret history of the dismissal, the history is yet incomplete because one part of Kerr’s papers remains closed to us – the “palace letters”.



Unlike Kerr’s official records, these letters between Kerr and the Queen in the months leading up to Kerr’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam, are described as “personal papers” and closed to public access. The conditions on their release are quite remarkable – not least because they were put in place, according to Government House, the governor general’s office, “at Her Majesty the Queen’s instructions”. The letters are closed until 2027, after which the Queen retains an indefinite veto over their release.



The palace letters are extraordinarily significant historical documents. They are contemporaneous “real time” communications between the governor general and the monarch, written at a time of great political drama. How is it possible that ensuring public access to such critical historical records has necessitated federal court action, despite the clear provision of the Archives Act that commonwealth records be opened after 30 years?

The simple answer is, because of that single word – “personal”. Here is the most perplexing element in the pursuit of the palace letters, how any communication between the governor general and the Queen could be seen as “personal”. The letters were exchanged precisely because of their respective official positions and exist as formal communications between the monarch and her “representative in Australia”, the governor general. Kerr himself described his letters as his duty – and he fulfilled that duty to excess, writing dozens of letters in just a few weeks, all of which are locked away in our own national archives waiting for the Queen to grant us permission to know her role in our history.



A copy of the letter of dismissal held at the National Archives in Canberra, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 written by then governor general Sir John Kerr in 1975. Sir John dismissed the Gough Whitlam Labor government before Liberal opposition leader Malcolm Fraser was made caretaker prime minister until an election could be held.

The description of the palace letters as “personal” has created an impenetrable catch-22. Not only has it denied us access to them; it has left us with no easy way to appeal against it. Since they are not considered “commonwealth records” the letters do not come under the provisions of the Archives Act, and so the refusal of access cannot be appealed either internally or through the administrative appeals tribunal. It is a brazen sophistry that risks being seen as a subversion of the Archives Act. The only avenue left to us is the far more onerous one of a challenge at the federal court.



This case is too important for both the history of the dismissal and the principle of open access for it not to be taken. I could not be doing so without the exceptional generosity of the team of leading lawyers working on a pro bono basis. A crowd-funding campaign has also been launched through Chuffed, “Release the Palace letters”, to support the action. The response has been remarkable with more than a third of our target reached in the first week, and generating a remarkable level of interest. We still have a long way to go and I encourage everyone to support this case and help us reclaim our history.



This case is about more than just the immediate issue of ensuring public access to the palace letters, important though that is, it is also about ensuring the principle of public access to correspondence between the governor general and the monarch once and for all. Without such a case we would continue in the untenable situation for a democracy in which we do not control access to our own history.



Of singular importance in the letters, should we succeed, will be to know exactly what Kerr told the Queen. Did he set out for her faithfully and completely all that he failed to reveal to the Australian public? Did Kerr tell the Queen for instance of his secret meetings and conversations with Mason; of his meetings with chief justice Sir Garfield Barwick in defiance of Whitlam’s advice; of his secret telephone communications with Fraser which both men denied for decades?

And did he tell the Queen of Whitlam’s decision to call the half-Senate election which was to be announced in the House of Representatives on the afternoon of 11 November 1975? Did Kerr craft the same narrative for royal consumption that he established in his memoirs and his numerous apologia and which we now know, from material in his own papers, to be self-serving, specious and untrue?



Malcolm Turnbull has said that he supports the release of the palace letters and that he does not believe they are “personal”. In an unedifying display of quasi-colonial royal deference Turnbull, an avowed republican, has proposed a formal approach to the Queen requesting that she release our own records. Instead of subjecting us to such an appalling spectacle of national humiliation, I suggest that the prime minister join with me in this action in our own courts and urge the national archives to release the palace letters.

• Donations in support of the legal challenge can be made at https://chuffed.org/project/release-the-palace-letters. You can also find the campaign on Twitter and Facebook.

Jenny Hocking is a professor in the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, and author of Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History, Gough Whitlam: His Time and The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know About November 1975.