The letters between the governor general Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace reveal strongly held views about Australian journalists and their outlets, not much of it favourable.
The Australian’s political reporter at the time of the dismissal, Paul Kelly, was described by Kerr in 1976 as “pro-Labor”, which may surprise a contemporary reader of the Murdoch broadsheet.
But Kerr praises Kelly’s first book about the dismissal, The Unmaking of Gough, as gossipy but fair.
“The best book so far written by a pro-Labor journalist is Paul Kelly’s book, which whilst being unfavourable to me, at least makes some attempt to see things from my point of view,” Kerr writes to the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, in May 1976. “He has gossip, like the others, but is fairer.”
Forty-five years later Kelly is the newspaper’s editor-at-large and is busy analysing the palace letters himself. He told Guardian Australia: “I opposed the dismissal on the day it occurred and have never changed my mind.”
He wrote in the Australian on Wednesday that the letters “tell a story of a crafty and calculating Sir John Kerr flooding Buckingham Palace with details of the running 1975 crisis and making clear, from the start, he saw dismissal as an option”.
Kerr has no praise at all for Allan Ashbolt, an influential ABC program maker and executive who is credited with establishing modern radio and television in Australia, in a long tenure that began in the mid-1950s.
A member of the left wing of the Labor party, Ashbolt wrote a highly critical article about Kerr for the New Statesman in 1975.
He said Kerr’s mind was “bloated with self-importance” and he had “delusions of juridicial propriety”. He labelled him clinically insane for sacking a democratically elected government.
A wounded Kerr wrote to Charteris: “Alan [sic] Ashbolt wrote an article in last week’s New Statesman in which he made a serious suggestion that I am mad, not perhaps clinically mad but, as he put it, at least as mad as George III.
“If you have not had the excruciating pleasure of reading the Ashbolt article in last week’s New Statesman, please get hold of it and glance at it.”
Charteris does read Ashbolt and is sympathetic in his reply to Kerr, suggesting it is the ABC journalist who is “nuts”.
“I cannot refrain from adding that I have read Alan [sic] Ashbolt’s shameful article in the New Statesman,” Charteris replies in one of the more florid exchanges, in December 1975. “If anyone is nuts he is! I am sorry you have been subjected to this monstrous attack buttressed as it is by a farrago of misrepresentation and absurdities.”
Ashbolt’s position was to the left of Whitlam, arguing in the article that he had been running a “rather tame reformist social democratic government”.
The ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams, who met Ashbolt when he was a boy but did not work with him, said he was “the great old venerable leftie”.
If HM knew nothing about Kerr’s coup against EGW then there’s no connection between smoking and lung cancer
— Phillip Adams (@PhillipAdams_1) July 14, 2020
“He was the eminence grise of leftwing journalism and he was the father of modern radio and television at the ABC,” the host of Late Night Live told Guardian Australia.
Ashbolt was not afraid of upsetting the establishment and famously made programs about the lobbying influence of the Returned and Services League and entrenched racism in the northern New South Wales town of Moree, according to the former ABC broadcaster Stan Correy, who was hired by Ashbolt.
The palace letters will almost certainly stoke the culture wars. The News Corp columnist Gerard Henderson has written extensively about how Ashbolt stacked the ABC with leftists, creating a culture that he says still exists.
Kerr and Charteris give a running commentary on the validity of various sources, describing the Canberra Times as a “responsible high quality paper” and the the Guardian as getting “much of it just wrong !” in a report about the removal of a state governor.
A book by the journalists Andrew Clark and Clem Lloyd, which revealed that the chief justice of NSW Sir Laurence Street had advised Kerr not to dismiss Whitlam, was the subject of much discussion between the palace and the governor general.
Kerr, who blamed Whitlam for leaking snippets to the newspapers, sent the palace a letter from Street in which the chief justice denied having any discussion with him about the dismissal.
