After 212 Palace Letters, Are We Any Closer to the Truth About 1975?

Geoffrey Chen

Australia, One Record at a Time · Season One, Article 7

In July 2020, the National Archives of Australia released six files containing 212 items of correspondence. Written between 15 August 1974 and 5 December 1977, most passed between Governor-General Sir John Kerr and Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s Private Secretary. Attachments included press clippings, speeches, legal opinions, statements and pamphlets. They became known as the Palace Letters because public attention concentrated on one question: how much did Buckingham Palace know before Kerr dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975?

Archival release appears to promise a conclusion. Open the sealed letters and the dispute will end. Reading them produces a more complicated result. They add decisive evidence about how Kerr understood the crisis, how he represented people and events to the Palace, and how the Palace responded. They do not turn 1975 into a drama explained by an omniscient narrator, and they cannot decide whether the Governor-General’s conduct was justified.

The letters bring us closer to a verifiable process. “The truth” is not a concluding sentence waiting in a 213th letter.

Why the letters were not initially treated as public records

During Kerr’s term as Australia’s eighteenth governor-general, he sent regular reports to the Queen about political developments and vice-regal duties. Official Secretary David Smith deposited the correspondence with the National Archives in 1978. Although produced and kept through the Governor-General’s office, it was long treated as Kerr’s “personal and confidential” material, with release also dependent on consultation with the Sovereign’s Private Secretary.

Historian Jenny Hocking requested access in 2016. The Archives refused on the ground that the letters were not Commonwealth records under the Archives Act. Litigation eventually reached the High Court. On 29 May 2020, a majority held that correspondence sent and received in the performance of the Governor-General’s office, retained by the Official Secretary and deposited through that office was the property of the Commonwealth or the Governor-General’s official establishment. The access request had to be reconsidered as one concerning Commonwealth records.

The case did more than release famous letters earlier. It asked whether records formed while a public officer performs constitutional functions can leave public accountability through the classification “private correspondence”. Paper may be personally possessed while the function, custody and lawful power of control remain institutional. The public character of an archive does not begin only when a box reaches a repository. It is shaped when records are created, kept and controlled.

The 212 letters are not 212 independent witnesses

A large number can create an impression of authority and variety. In reality, these records largely represent one stable channel: Kerr reported to Charteris, who usually answered on the Queen’s behalf. The files contain other people’s letters and press reports, but they remain organised through the Governor-General’s selection, wording and frequency of communication.

The collection therefore shows first how Kerr wanted the Palace to understand Australian events. He described the parliamentary deadlock, Loans Affair, public opinion, legal advice, meetings with Whitlam and Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser, the pressure he felt, and his understanding of the Governor-General’s reserve powers. Attachments make the account extensive, but the choice of article or opinion to send to London was itself part of an argument.

This does not make the letters false. Correspondence always combines information with position. Kerr was both a participant in the crisis and its first recorder. Before the decision he explained possible choices. Afterwards he justified his reasons and monitored public reaction and the possibility of his resignation. The reader encounters an actor’s developing account of himself, not a camera outside the event.

What did the Palace know?

The letters establish that the Palace was kept informed during the crisis. From mid-October, Kerr reported frequently on the Senate’s deferral of supply, the parties’ positions, constitutional options and reserve powers. Charteris confirmed that the Queen was following events closely and commented on constitutional questions. His reply of 4 November noted that the Queen had read the material and addressed reserve powers; another response followed on 5 November.

This evidence defeats any suggestion that the Palace knew nothing about the developing crisis. It also supports a narrower conclusion: before acting, Kerr brought the institutional context in which vice-regal power might be used into his correspondence with the Palace.

Knowing about the crisis and available powers is not identical to approving the specific dismissal in advance. The Archives’ summary records that, after acting on 11 November, Kerr asked David Smith to telephone the Palace with the news. Kerr then sent the dismissal letter, his public statement, Chief Justice Garfield Barwick’s advice and Fraser’s undertaking to secure supply and advise a dissolution. The sequence distinguishes prior discussion of possibilities from subsequent reporting of the decision.

Precision matters. To convert continuous knowledge into a claim that the Queen ordered the dismissal goes beyond what the documents establish. To say that the Palace had no influence because there is no written command also ignores constitutional dialogue between a governor-general and the monarch’s private secretary. Influence may operate through confirmation, advice, the language of convention and an ongoing relationship. Its weight requires argument rather than a label.

Why the letters did not settle the controversy

The controversy of 1975 was never only a secret fact awaiting discovery. Could the Senate use supply to force a government from office? Should a governor-general exercise reserve powers while the government retained confidence in the House? Should Kerr have warned Whitlam? Might Whitlam have advised the Queen to remove Kerr? Was it appropriate for Barwick to advise the Governor-General? These are questions in which law, convention and political judgment intersect.

Archives establish sequences, communications and stated reasons. Facts do not automatically generate a single normative answer. Two readers may agree that Kerr discussed reserve powers with the Palace in October and disagree about whether that communication was prudent or damaged the prime minister–governor-general relationship.

The short dismissal letter proves that Kerr invoked section 64 to terminate Whitlam’s appointment. It does not prove by itself that dismissal was the only lawful option. Kerr’s longer statement of 11 November is his argument, not a neutral judgment. The House then passed a confidence resolution for Whitlam, and the Speaker wrote to the Queen requesting his restoration. Those are also records of political legitimacy.

“Closer to the truth” should be divided into different questions: what happened, what participants knew, why they acted, whether conduct was lawful and whether it was justified. The letters materially improve evidence for the first three. For the latter two they supply evidence but cannot replace judgment.

Release became part of the history of 1975

Had the correspondence opened quietly, it might simply have enlarged the historical source base. Because it passed through refusal, litigation, a High Court decision and worldwide attention, release became another public event about ownership of national memory.

The case changed how closure could be understood. A date of access was no longer merely administrative, and the categories “personal” and “Commonwealth” no longer appeared self-evident. Who decides when official correspondence may be read affects when a society can test its constitutional history.

Release does not mean all relevant evidence is complete. A political crisis is distributed through Cabinet files, legal advice, diaries, parliamentary records, journalism, diplomatic correspondence and later recollection. These sources have different survival and access conditions, and authors may revise their accounts. Completeness is not a property held naturally by one collection. It is a provisional result of comparison.

Absence sets the boundary of the archive

The Palace Letters preserve elite constitutional communication in unusual detail. They say much less directly about how voters, public servants, organisations dependent on appropriation or protesters experienced the crisis. They show how national leaders monitored opinion, which is not the same as preserving the voices being monitored.

High-level records can make institutions appear to move through a handful of letters. Supply bills, Senate procedure, party discipline, public administration and the 13 December election also constituted the event. Kerr, Whitlam, Fraser and Charteris mattered because each occupied an office situated within rules and organisational relationships.

That is one of the most important lessons of reading the whole correspondence. It does not reveal a single operator behind the system. It shows actors within a system perceiving risk, seeking authority, anticipating one another and preparing records that would justify their choices. Individual intention and institutional structure are not alternatives. In the letters, each repeatedly becomes a condition of the other.

What are we closer to?

We are closer to the sequence of Kerr’s thinking before and after the dismissal. We can see that the Palace was kept informed and distinguish discussion of reserve powers from the post-decision report of the specific action. We also have an important public principle: records formed in the performance of the Governor-General’s functions and controlled by the official establishment do not automatically escape Commonwealth archival law because they were addressed to the Sovereign.

We have not obtained a letter that adjudicates 1975 for everyone, or an automatic answer about democratic legitimacy and constitutional convention. The mature use of an archive is not to expect the last closed box to abolish political judgment. It is to make judgment answerable to more testable evidence.

The 212 letters did not end 1975. They changed the range within which debate can honestly continue. Some speculation no longer holds. Some claims must be expressed more carefully. The hardest questions stand revealed as institutional and evaluative rather than disguised as secret facts still waiting to be found. That may not be “final truth”, but it is a reliable form of progress that a public archive can offer a democracy.

Primary record and further sources

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