Grattan on Friday: Watching history being made – from the best seats in the house |
The day Gough Whitlam was sacked as prime minister is one of those “memory moments” for many Australians. And those in the parliamentary press gallery had front-row tickets for the biggest show in our federation’s history, writes journalist Michelle Grattan.
In his just-released memoir, historian and former diplomat Lachlan Strahan recalls being picked up from his Melbourne primary school by a neighbour on November 11 1975, the day Gough Whitlam was sacked as prime minister. His politically active mother “was so upset she didn’t trust herself behind the wheel”.
Journalist Margo Kingston was a teenager and not political at the time. She remembers going to bed that night, pulling the covers over her head and listening on the radio. The next day, she organised a march around her Brisbane school.
The Dismissal is one of those “memory moments” for many Australians who were adults or even children when it happened. They can tell you what they were doing when they heard the news. It was an event that embedded itself in the mind, like news of US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination more than a decade earlier.
This was a life-changing day for many who worked in Canberra’s Parliament House. For Labor politicians and staffers, it bordered on bereavement. Excitement and elation fired up the other side of politics. Those of us in the parliamentary press gallery knew we had front-row tickets for the biggest show in our federation’s history.
The Dismissal didn’t come out of nowhere. It followed extraordinarily tense weeks of political manoeuvring, after the opposition, led by Malcolm Fraser, blocked the budget in the Senate in mid-October, and Whitlam refused to call an election.
Pressure points were everywhere. Would Whitlam give in? Would some Liberal senators crack? What would happen if there was no resolution before the government’s money ran out? Would Governor-General John Kerr intervene?
On the morning of Remembrance Day, Whitlam prepared to ask Kerr for an election. Not a general election, but an election for half the Senate – a course that would have little or no prospect of solving the crisis. But Whitlam had fatally misjudged the man he’d appointed........