While John Kerr was dismissing my father as prime minister on November 11, 1975, I was lunching on Sydney Harbour with my high school chum Jim Spigelman. About to turn 30 and two years married, I had lived overseas for the previous 12 years – first at university and then as an international banker. I was returning to Camelot.
Judy and I had arrived in Sydney just five days previously. This was a new country for my English rose. The city was hot and humid, and summer was well and truly under way. On the radio, coming back from lunch in a taxi, I heard news of the Dismissal. At first it did not fill me with any great alarm: with a vote of no confidence in Malcolm Fraser being put to the House of Representatives, it sounded to me as though my father would be back in power before the day was out. But then John Kerr prorogued parliament.
My parents had quickly decided that Gough would stay in Canberra and that he would squat in the Lodge until there was an election result. Our mother had been in Sydney on that fateful day and was planning to stay the night in Kirribilli House, which had become their Sydney base. It is technically a government guesthouse. Wanting to be seen to be out of Kirribilli by midnight, however, Margaret asked us to come over to help her pack up. At dinner that night I took the opportunity to make a dent in the stocks of the house burgundy (Vosne-Romanee and Romanee St-Vivant) that a previous occupant, probably Billy McMahon, had wisely accumulated.
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Enemies begin to emerge
The Tories were insufferably triumphant in the following days and they got worse once they’d won the December election. The family hung together. My parents moved into a small flat they had recently bought in Darling Point.
People show their true colours in these situations. Some pre-Dismissal “friends” made themselves scarce. Judy is outgoing and generous, and this was a nasty introduction to a new country. She soon found some true friends, not least a similarly lively and social woman with whom she shared the vicissitudes of their respective married lives over the future years. Self-appointed enemies began to emerge.
Only twice in my life have I had my hand refused, on both occasions by Liberal Party functionaries: the first offender, Sir Robert Crichton-Brown, turned his back on me and Judy at Bruce and Anne Gyngell’s 1975 Christmas party; years later another knight, Sir William Pettingell, refused to take my hand when I was asked to attend a meeting with Neville Wran. I had never met either man before these insults and, happily, I never came across them again.
Taking it out on the dog
It did not stop with our immediate family. The most bizarre insult involved our innocent labrador, Clarence, the local service station proprietor and an unnamed customer. Judy had taken Clarence and the proprietor’s dog for a walk. This was witnessed by the outraged customer, who barked at the poor man: “How can you let your dog go with a Whitlam dog!” Seriously.
Fifty years on, I still get people coming up to me, usually women, saying how their free university education had been life-changing. And it is a matter of great pride to know so many of the Whitlam government reforms have become permanent, even those challenged in the courts, and that they enjoy bipartisan political support. Plenty of people now tell me they voted Labor in 1975; if that were true, my father would have won in a landslide.
Nicholas Whitlam is Gough Whitlam’s second son.
