Keynote Speakers

The ASSLH’s 19th Biennial Conference, The Spirit of 1975: Transformations in Australian Labour History, will be held in Melbourne, on 26 – 28 November 2025. Our keynote speakers are Michelle Arrow, Frank Bongiorno, and Jenny Hocking:

Michelle Arrow

Turn on the Lights or Use Your Vote for Women’s Rights? Gender and the ‘spirit of 1975’

2025 marks the 50^th anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government, perhaps the most notorious episode in Australian political history. The first Labor government in a generation lasted less than three years before being dismissed by the Governor-General on November 11, 1975, and while ousted Prime Minister Gough Whitlam urged Australian voters to ‘maintain your rage and your enthusiasm’, they failed to meet his call at the ballot box, overwhelmingly rejecting the Whitlam government on December 13, 1975. Malcolm Fraser, who had played a crucial (and controversial) role in the constitutional crisis that led to Whitlam’s dismissal, campaigned on the slogan ‘turn on the lights’, promising to end the ‘chaos’ and rapid change that had taken place under his opponent’s time in office. 1975 was also International Women’s Year (IWY), and the federal election arrived at the tail end of IWY’s extensive focus on women’s rights, citizenship and creativity. The Whitlam government funded a generous program of grants and public events to mark the year. One of the flagship events was the Women and Politics conference, held in Canberra in September 1975, which was designed to not only encourage women’s political participation, but to initiate a broader reconceptualization of Australian politics. 

In the historiography of Australian politics and of ‘second wave’ feminism, 1975 is regarded as a turning point: the dismissal, famously, has a large (and ever-expanding) historiography. Historians of Australian feminism have positioned 1975 as a pivot point in the movement’s history. The rise of what Marilyn Lake has dubbed ‘state feminism’ seemed inextricably intertwined with the fate of the Whitlam government: what would Whitlam’s decline mean for the women’s movement’s hard-won gains? 

This paper will investigate the significance of 1975 to the Australian women’s movement: from the impact of the Dismissal and the December 13 election to the new emphasis on women as gendered political actors during International Women’s Year. What impact did the events of 1975 have on Australia’s distinctive form of state feminism, but also on the women’s movement more broadly? And how did the women’s movement’s successes (and shortcomings) reshape Australian politics in the wake of 1975?

Frank Bongiorno

The Dismissal From Below: A Labour, Social and Political History

Millions of words have been written about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government on 11 November 1975. Almost all have told that story via an account of the major players – politicians, judges, the Governor-General and the Palace – and in relation to constitutional law, parliamentary convention and high politics. Accounts of the Dismissal ‘from below’ – for instance, the march, demonstration or meeting – have appeared, but are less common. This lecture seeks to recapture the Dismissal as an event that engaged the emotions and commitments of ‘ordinary Australians’ – on both sides of the controversy – and to explore its role in mobilising social movement, interest group and political protest (and affirmation). Its aim is to recover the Dismissal less as a unique constitutional event, than as an emblematic and supremely important example of the wider political mobilisations characteristic of Australia in the 1970s – an era that witnessed vigorous labour, environmental, Indigenous, women’s and gay political mobilisations, as well as the crystallisation of a conservative protest politics that often drew on similar techniques, arguments and affects. 

Jenny Hocking

‘The decisions I had to make were to protect the Crown and the Monarchy’: A historical reappraisal of the vice-regal dismissal of the Whitlam government

It is a rare historical event that continues to fascinate and polarise even 50 years later, yet the governor-general, Sir John Kerr’s, dismissal of the Whitlam labor government does just that. On 11 November 1975, Kerr dismissed without warning the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, who retained a majority in and the confidence of the House of Representatives, just as Whitlam was to call a half-Senate election. Kerr appointed the leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser, whose party had lost the previous two elections, as Prime Minister and commissioned a coalition government without the confidence of the House of Representatives. It has been described as ‘the most tumultuous episode in the history of the nation’.

The dismissal breathed new life into the arcane ‘reserve powers of the Crown’, a colonial relic long thought obsolete as the fabric of democracy now infused the Westminster system. Mungo MacCallum called it ‘a reassertion of the divine right of kings’. The history of the dismissal is a dynamic and evolving one. It was 37 years before the pivotal role of High Court justice, Sir Anthony Mason, was discovered, and 45 years before the role of the Queen and Prince Charles, now King Charles III, was revealed. This paper takes us through the trajectory of revelation and reinterpretation in the shifting dismissal history. In this process of historical recalibration, the ‘Palace letters’ between the Queen and Kerr have been critical, demolishing the insistent claim that the Queen played no part in Kerr’s decision. Geoffrey Robertson KC describes Royal approval evidenced by the Palace letters as the ‘sine qua non of the dismissal’.

As a result of these episodic revelations the dismissal as we know it today, in all its complexities, collusions, and intrigue, is vastly different from its earliest schematic depictions. This dynamic interplay reflects the essential fragility of historical representation which, particularly for a contested event, is neither static nor unitary. This is history as process, not outcome, in which as Hilary Mantel described it; ‘the past and present are always in dialogue – there can hardly be history without revisionism’.