The newly released ‘Palace letters’ have revealed then governor-general Sir John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government in 1975 without giving advance notice to the Queen, because “it was better for Her Majesty not to know”.
The 211 letters exchanged between Sir John and the palace at the time of the dismissal have this morning been released online by the National Archives of Australia, in Canberra.
The letters, penned between 1974 and 1977, had been locked up and labelled as private documents, but a High Court decision in May deemed them to be the property of the Commonwealth and thus able to be released.
Many hoped the correspondence would answer some of the long-standing questions surrounding Australia’s biggest constitutional crisis.
But, due to interest in the letters, the National Archives’ website struggled to cope with the number of people trying to access them online. The Archives later made the Palace letters available to download as PDFs.
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Sir John ‘could not risk the outcome for the sake of the monarchy’
The released letters reveal, on the day of the dismissal — November 11, 1975 — Sir John alerted Buckingham Palace to his decision to sack prime minister Gough Whitlam.
“I should say that I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance because, under the Constitution, the responsibility is mine and I was of the opinion that it was better for Her Majesty not to know in advance,” Sir John wrote.
Then, more than a week after the dismissal, on November 20, Sir John clarified further, writing that he had to act without giving Mr Whitlam a chance to call an elect