Historian appeals court ruling on Queen’s letters

AUSTRALIA: A historian is appealing an Australian court ruling that continues to keep secret letters that might reveal what the Queen knew of her representative’s plan to dismiss Australia’s government more than 40 years ago.

The National Archives of Australia has categorised the correspondence between the Queen, Australia’s constitutional head of state, and Governor-General Sir John Kerr as ‘‘personal’’, and the letters might therefore never become public.

The Federal Court last month agreed that the letters were ‘‘personal’’ and not state records, dismissing Monash University historian Jenny Hocking’s application to have them made public.

Hocking said yesterday she had lodged an appeal to the full bench of the Federal Court.

‘‘Our legal team believes that there are strong grounds for appeal, and we look forward to the full bench of the Federal Court considering this important matter,’’ she said.

‘‘The outcome of this will determine access to key documents in our history, held by our own National Archives, and yet embargoed by the Queen.

‘‘It is time for that obscure quasi-colonial control over our historical knowledge to end.’’

Justice John Griffiths acknowledged in his judgment last month that there was a legitimate public interest in the letters, ‘‘which relate to one of the most controversial and tumultuous events in the modern history of the nation’’.

The letters would disclose what, if anything, the Queen knew of Kerr’s plan to dismiss Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s government in 1975 to resolve a month-old deadlock in Parliament.

Hocking, who has written an acclaimed biography of Whitlam, described the ruling as ‘‘a disappointing decision for our history, specifically for the history of the dismissal, which has long been cast in secrecy’’.

The fall of Whitlam’s government is the only time in Australia’s history that a democratically elected federal government was dismissed on the British monarch’s authority.