The High Court has ruled that hundreds of letters between the Queen and former governor-general Sir John Kerr before the dismissal of the Whitlam government are public records, paving the way for the release of the potentially explosive documents.
Professor Jenny Hocking, a political historian who has written extensively on Labor figures including former prime minister Gough Whitlam and his attorney-general Lionel Murphy, fought for a decade for access to the letters to help shed light on what Buckingham Palace knew before the Dismissal in November 1975.
Her fight included a three-and-a-half-year, million-dollar legal battle with the National Archives, which insisted the letters were "personal" records that sat outside a statutory regime providing for the release of Commonwealth records after 30 years.
Professor Hocking said the historic decision ends "decades of residual British control over Australian archival material, kept from us in the name of the Queen through the exercise of an alleged Royal veto".
PM Whitlam at time of his dismissal
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