The Palace Letters and The Truth of the Palace Letters

Abstract

The National Archives of Australia has already been busy telling its own story of what happened in the Palace Letters affair. Visitors to an exhibit at its Canberra East Block headquarters will learn that ‘[o]n 14 July 2020 that the National Archives of Australia released, without exemption, a collection of papers known as the “Palace Letters”’. More cryptically, it then refers to ‘a series of court challenges and appeals’. What it fails to say is that the Archives, and eventually the Attorney-General too, fought tooth and nail and spent a vast sum of taxpayers’ money in a vain attempt to ensure the public never got to see this material. Nor does it mention that it was through a tenacious effort by Professor Jenny Hocking of Monash University, supported by pro bono assistance from lawyers and a crowd-funding campaign, that ‘[t]he letters can now be viewed in full online and in the Research Centre here at the National Archives’. As an example of historical veracity, this is worthy of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Hocking’s thoroughly gripping account in The Palace Letters leaves the Archives’ claims to be a ‘pro-disclosure’ organisation in tatters. The Palace Letters are the subject of these two books, Hocking’s, and another by Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, journalists at The Australian. All authors have published books on the dismissal before; Kelly reported on it and wrote one of the earliest accounts, The Unmaking of Gough, in 1976. Hocking has produced a page-turning courtroom drama, but her book is also something more than that: The Palace Letters is a study of the way those who have power seek to keep information from those who don’t. And it is a striking feature of the documents themselves that they live up to many of the expectations that Hocking and others had invested in them. The hot takes from journalists on the letters’ release predictably often missed the point. Were they really expecting a letter from Kerr to the Palace saying ‘Dear Lilibet, I’m going to sack Gough tomorrow. Yours, John’? The letters – mainly between GovernorGeneral Sir John Kerr and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris – matter most because they reveal that the claim the Palace had no involvement in the dismissal is now unsustainable. The Palace was indeed a player, not least because Kerr went out of his way to make it so. This is not a view that Kelly and Bramston would endorse, yet the evidence they present – indeed, the very existence of these hundreds of pages of letters – discloses Palace involvement, even if the primary purpose of that paradoxically was to keep the monarchy as far removed as possible from the crisis. This is ‘involvement’, even if it is not ‘intervention’. To say as much is different from suggesting the Queen, or her courtiers, or the British government, were involved in a conspiracy to remove the Whitlam government. This would be going too far. The most significant point at issue is whether the Palace was a key player. That it was a player is beyond question. Kerr kept up a barrage of letters to Charteris for the same reason that he consulted with two High Court judges: he wanted fortification for what he was about to do. Charteris generously offered it, in a series of letters that reassured Kerr of the fine job he was doing, as well as of the convenient existence of those reserve powers. Both Kelly and Bramston, and Hocking, see the dismissal as a conspiracy. For the former,