Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Not the queen herself, however. Her Majesty had a local representative. He was a former boilermaker’s son from Sydney named John Kerr, a cherubic but leonine figure who had worked his way up through the Australian education system to become one of the country’s prominent labor lawyers. To add irony to this particular situation, he had been appointed to be the queen’s man in Australia, the governor-general, by none other than the politician who was now at the center of this imbroglio, Gough Whitlam.

  The office of governor-general—a figure who in Australia is splendidly uniformed and copiously bemedaled, and has a flag of his own, an emblem of his own, a fleet of large cars without license plates, a flotilla of boats, the use of a private aircraft, and servants staffing a pair of fine and opulently furnished houses—is one peculiar to the collegial and world-girdling body known as the British Commonwealth. All the countries with a governor-general today are former British territories that have chosen to retain the British monarch as head of state. In other words, they have opted not to become republics, with presidents of their own, heads of state who are homegrown and homemade. And the Pacific, as an earlier chapter has demonstrated, is amply supplied with such former British possessions: notably Australia, Canada, Fiji, Hong Kong, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. Only four of these, however (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the Solomon Islands), still recognize the queen of England as head of state. So only these have governors-general as Her Distant Majesty’s local representatives.

  And only one of these, the eighteenth governor-general of Australia—who in full was in 1975 titled “His Excellency the Right Honourable Sir John Robert Kerr, AK, GCMG,2 GCVO, QC, of Government House, Canberra and Admiralty House, Sydney”—ever had the temerity to wield the ultimate reserved power of his office. And he shocked the world by doing so.

  In normal circumstances an Australian governor-general—usually a white man, until 1965 wellborn and British, only once a woman (named Quentin), and thus far not even once an aboriginal—does little more than put on fancy clothing and wander about opening things. Technically he is the country’s head of state, so he receives foreign ambassadors, represents the country on overseas excursions, and is the commander in chief of the armed forces.

  Yet, technically, while he is the representative of the British monarch, and is bound to perform the monarch’s wishes, he also wields some power of his own, as an Australian. And this power can be considerable. In particular he has what are known as reserve powers, one of which is the ability, under certain constitutionally defined circumstances, to sack a serving prime minister.

  Which is what Sir John Kerr did—and to the very man who had appointed him. He put the boot in shortly after lunch on Tuesday, November 11, 1975.

  This would have been a busy day in ordinary circumstances: it was the day when Angola, on the far side of the world, became independent from Portugal; the day when Australia marked the anniversary of the 1880 hanging of its most notoriously romantic criminal, the armor-wearing Ned Kelly; and the day when millions would stand in silence to remember the dead of various world wars, the eleventh day of the eleventh month having been chosen to mark the memorial of all.

  But for this singular Australian crisis, the date remains seared into the soul of every Australian living at the time. For no one imagined this would or could ever happen.

  Whitlam and Fraser had been sparring in complicated and deviously political ways for several days. On that Tuesday morning, Whitlam insisted that if no money was forthcoming, he would, in fact and at last, call an election. He telephoned Kerr to make a formal appointment to come and tell him so. Kerr, however, decided to act preemptively on his own—being only too aware that Whitlam might well telephone Buckingham Palace and have the queen remove him, Kerr, from his job, as Whitlam had every right to do. So, in his view, he had no alternative but to remove Whitlam from his job first, before Whitlam could possibly move against him. He accordingly telephoned Fraser in his capacity as leader of the opposition, and told him to report to Government House (the governor-general’s official house), clandestinely but immediately. It was all memorably Machiavellian.

  So Fraser was already there, carefully hidden away in an outer room, when Gough Whitlam, fifteen minutes late and quite unsuspecting, arrived for his own appointment. He was shown into Kerr’s official study, saying he had the documents for signature calling for the long-awaited election. Kerr said that before he would look at those documents—which in any case he could not sign because an election could not be held until the money supply was restarted—would Whitlam kindly read the letter he now handed him. Whitlam sat back and read the four-paragraph document, with mounting astonishment.

  “Dear Mr. Whitlam . . . In accordance with Section 64 of the Constitution,” it began, and with much highfalutin quasi-colonial rigmarole went on to authorize the “dismissal of you and your ministerial colleagues . . . great deal of regret . . .” and ended, with magisterial defiance: “I propose to send for the Leader of the Opposition and commission him to form a new caretaker government, until an election can be held.”

  Such a thing had never happened before in Australian politics, and in modern times, seldom before anywhere. It was the modern version of the ax and the block: sudden, swift, and dramatic.

  So there was much spluttering. Whitlam first tried to telephone Buckingham Palace, to demand that, instead, Kerr be sacked. But it was 2:00 a.m. in London, and no one answered the phone. Whitlam left Government House shaking with rage. Fraser, waiting sheepishly in an anteroom, was then ushered into Kerr’s office and told that, provided he untied the cords of his reticule and permitted the flow of money to resume, he would now be Australia’s prime minister. He agreed, wrote and signed a letter, and was formally sworn in just after lunchtime that very day.

  Word leaked out within moments. Radio stations broke into their regular programs. Crowds began to gather. Fraser, it was widely assumed, had played a dark game, and stones were thrown through the windows of his political party headquarters in Melbourne. Dockworkers immediately went on strike, and all the country’s ports were promptly closed to foreign trade. Australia briefly shut itself down. People spoke of a coup d’état. Whitlam put out an inflammatory statement, urging his supporters to “maintain your rage.” The capital, Canberra, was in an uproar, and in a flurry of frantic activity, votes were being called, statements were being made; the House of Representatives refused to accept Fraser’s elevation, and then refused to adjourn itself; and it was only when the Senate accepted the transfer of power and passed the money supply bills to get the nation under way once more that some sort of legislative calm settled on the nation.

  The silver-haired lawyer-politician Gough Whitlam at the moment of his dismissal as Australia’s prime minister at the hands of the Queen’s local representative. The event proved a watershed in the governance of this former British possession.* [National Library of Australia.]

  The drama’s final act played out on the steps of Parliament, with a bemused Whitlam, jostled by scores of heavily sideburned reporters (this being the mid-seventies; no doubt their trousers were flared), listening to an icy, unsmiling civil servant, David Smith, who had been deputed to read out the governor-general’s formal proclamation. Whitlam, with his swept-back mane of silver hair, stood tall, cutting a praetorian figure. When finally Smith ended his peroration with “God save the queen,” Whitlam drew himself up still more majestically and rumbled famously into the microphones, “Well may we say, ‘God save the queen,’ because nothing will save the governor-general.”

  This was followed by disturbances and marches and protests of one kind and another—“We Want Gough!”—for several days to come. But the deed was done. When the election was held the next month, Fraser won the country by a thumping majority, the largest in the country’s history thus far, and he ruled through three further elections, until 1983.

  Though Whitlam had once called Malcolm Fraser “Kerr’s cur,
” the pair became firm friends in the aftermath of the affair, and when Whitlam died in 2014 (just a few months before Fraser himself died, in 2015) his successor had the kindest of words to say of him. Whitlam, indeed, was viewed as an elder statesman, a man whose three years of policies had changed Australia for all time. “He had the sense of Australian identity,” said Fraser. “He had the vision for an independent Australia. He had a grand idea for the country.”

  Other former prime ministers agreed. “A true internationalist and regionalist,” said one of them, Bob Hawke. “He helped Australia earn the world’s respect,” said Paul Keating, another. “The country came very close to the same marginalization that South Africa experienced over racial discrimination—our salvation from that occurred through and with Gough Whitlam.”

  And most agreed that the Dismissal eventually achieved the opposite of what John Kerr had intended, which was to remind the country that he, the queen’s man, still wielded in extremis, and on her behalf, the ultimate authority over her faraway dominion. For the office of Australian prime minister has since become hugely enhanced, London’s authority has dwindled to little more than a vague notion, Canberra’s power as a federal capital has been greatly magnified,3 and the endless disputes among the country’s various states and territories have been generally reduced to a dull roar.

  Coincident with this affair, Australia’s presence in the Pacific, and as a regional power, has become steadily more visible. The Australians’ vocal determination that no such thing as the Dismissal should ever happen again appears to have triggered a sense of national resolve, an empowerment that has advanced the country and its standing in the world no end.

  The luckless John Kerr himself was to be the butt of hostility and acrimony for the rest of his days. At almost every occasion, when he was asked to cut a ribbon or lay a foundation stone, he was mobbed by demonstrators or subjected to a withering barrage of catcalls. He took first to drink, and then he took to London, and he ended his days miserably, staggering and disdained. When he died in 1991, his family buried him quietly and in secret, sparing the government of the day—by now Labour once again, just as Gough Whitlam’s government had been in 1975—from having to contemplate a state funeral. It almost certainly would have denied such an honor to one of the most despised men in recent Australian history.

  If the crisis of 1975 provides a convenient marker year for Australia and for its standing as a Pacific regional power, then there was something else about the mid-seventies, something less specific, less amenable to definition, but nonetheless wholly recognizable. For the time can perhaps also, if very roughly, be said to have ushered in a sense of a quite new Australian style, a phenomenon that promptly (and at last!) lent a touch of swagger to the country’s newfound authority.

  Even Australia’s most ardent admirers would probably admit that style was a commodity not much in evidence in the country’s immediate postwar years. This, after all, was a nation that for decades had displayed cultural cringe prominently on its sun-bronzed forearm, and seemed to wish to bask in intellectual underachievement and a mulish incapacity for any kind of distinction, except in matters relating to sport. The reputation that Australians had then was one born of a gallimaufry of clichés: of meat pies; of grubby pubs; of kangaroo hunters, perpetual sunburn, the outback, larrikins, a brutish kind of football, poisonous spiders in the dunny, Anzac biscuits, Vegemite and lamingtons, Castlemaine XXXX, the tall poppy syndrome, blackfellas, barbies, “G’day, sport,” an enviable competence at cricket, an enviable concept known as mateship, the White Australia Policy . . .

  Yet if anyone dared be critical of such things, or cringed at their existence, then all and any of the ill will such as these provoked would be quite trumped by one other singular and undeniable fact: the Aussies’ singular courage and determination in war, and the simple sad affection of their countrymen and -women who sent them off to fight. At Gallipoli the no-nonsense nature of the memorials to the eight thousand Australians who fell to the Turkish machine guns make this point with a special eloquence. A passerby will find, instead of grand marble graves tricked out in gold, small cards leaning by more modest tombstones, many a one left there by a mother, or else by friends who came when the mothers couldn’t afford the fare. “You did your best, son,” the cards say, or something like it. Or else there are notes placed by their mates, who had come from back home: “Good on Yer, Billy-boy,” or “You done good, Jack.”

  A kindhearted country, a visitor would be likely to say—on visiting both the country and, more decidedly, the country’s faraway memorials. A goodhearted, kindly people. And if with not too much style about them, then so be it.

  But come the mid-1970s, a new affect began, if timidly at first, to edge out the old. Australia started to present itself in a quite different manner. Within just a few months of each other in 1974 there appeared two markers of note: one that served to remind outsiders, if only satirically, of the adherent nature of the old Australian ways; and the other that, in a far more substantial manner and not satirically at all, delightedly and majestically exalted the new.

  The first—and it has to be stressed that this is satire writ large—was the unanticipated appearance on the world scene of an antipodean archetype: the entirely memorable Australian diplomat named Sir Leslie Colin Patterson—Les Patterson, as he would genially remind his audiences, for short.

  I first encountered Sir Les in Hong Kong in the autumn of 1974, when he made a speech in the swanky comfort of the Mandarin Hotel, formally announcing his appointment as Australia’s cultural attaché to the Far East. He had been officially sent out from Canberra “to impugn,” as one commentator had it, “the fundamental refinement of the Australian character.” He was just thirty-two years old, with a career already hinting at greatness.

  Thanks to family connections from his schooldays in Taren Point, in the southern Sydney suburbs, he had been plucked out of a soul-destroying job in the Literature Division of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Office, and given the portfolio of “shark conservation minister” in the government of Sir Robert Menzies. He adroitly managed to survive the change to Gough Whitlam’s Labour government and became “minister of drought.” Next came his appointment as a cultural attaché, from which he would go on, two years later, to be posted in this capacity in London, then recalled to be chairman of the Australian Cheese Board, to become founder of a private school of etiquette, and later to be given the title of “adviser on etiquette and protocol” to the Australian federal government.

  Sir Les’s sense of vision was evident even during his youthful first appearance in Hong Kong. That evening, if I remember correctly, he wore a vividly iridescent blue suit, with a yellow check lining, which had clearly seen many better days. His tie, the wide style of which owed much to cinema noir films of the 1940s, bore encrusted evidence of his many earlier dining experiences. His teeth were long, and they protruded, and they were stained the same coppery color as his fingers, which seemed always to be clutching a cigarette from which dangled an ash of improbable length. His hair, long and amply greased, hung over the none-too-well-laundered collar. One of his shoes was missing a lace.

  He appeared that evening to have had a fair amount to drink and needed some support from diplomat colleagues when attempting to stand. He was easily tempted into making remarks about human reproductive activities, and made it clear he was not in favor of men lying with men. However, he had no particular problem with women lying with women, since he could not entirely understand what they did when they lay together, and no one in his various Roman Catholic schools back in Taren Point had ever found the time to explain it to him.

  He was by all appearances overfed; was often overcome with what appeared to be libation-triggered tiredness and emotional excess; and to judge from his utterances, was evidently wildly oversexed. His outbursts caused many of his more sensitive listeners to recoil. His favorite nonsexual pastime, which he often indulged in while giving the very speeches that so
marked his career, seemed to be either nasal excavation and gastronomy or competitive wind breaking. He was a caricature, in short, of a certain kind of Australian of old, an amalgam of bronzed ocker and working stiff, of corrupt pol4 and journeyman sheep stealer. I daresay some, even in the eighties and nineties, when he was most visibly on the world speaking circuit, imagined that he did represent some kind of an Australia that still existed, if only just.

  Les Patterson was, of course, entirely fictional—a character created by the writer, comedian, and artist Barry Humphries, whose other alter ego is the somewhat more lovable and acceptable Dame Edna Everage. It would be idle to read too much into what is essentially and only a fictive creation of contemporary comedy. Yet Sir Les Patterson, who performed for more than thirty years after his creation, well into the twenty-first century, is still quite recognizably emblematic of an Australian type—a type that most modern Australians hope is fading in the rearview mirror as the country eases itself steadfastly into the more respectable and respected role that it increasingly likes to play today.

  A role that owes much to, and is symbolized by, the creation of one quite remarkable building, and one that happened to be completed at almost exactly the same time that Sir Les Patterson first made it onto the stage. This structure is the Sydney Opera House, and it was formally opened in October 1973 by Queen Elizabeth, in her role as queen of Australia. The American architect Frank Gehry once said it was a building that, quite simply, “changed the image of an entire country.”

  Until that moment, Australia did not possess one national construction that the world would see and instantly mouth, “Australia!” There was of course the immense sandstone upwelling of Ayers Rock, Uluru, which spoke of outback, of remoteness, of the aboriginal peoples and the continent’s serene inner space. But other nations that had natural wonders on a similar scale had man-made marvels, too. America had its Grand Canyon and its Empire State Building. Britain had both its White Cliffs of Dover and Stonehenge. Egypt had the Nile and its Pyramids. Australia did not.