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As bad as the Parliament House crisis was, it could easily have been worse-- and over the years since Gough Whitlam was ousted as Australia’s prime minister alternate history buffs on both sides of the Pacific have devoted considerable time to exploring just how much worse it could have gotten. Books, movies, TV shows, plays, websites, games, and comic strips have been built around the idea of exploring the countless ways in which the already horrendous events of the standoff could have been still more terrible; the main Sydney outlet for Australia’s most popular nationwide bookstore chain has an entire corner of its historical literature section devoted solely to “what if” books focusing on the Parliament House crisis and its repercussions.

   Some Australian writers were contemplating the “what might have beens” of the Parliament House standoff even before Whitlam’s jailers were done escorting him to his cell. A left-wing poetry magazine devoted its first issue after Whitlam’s arrest to printing a compilation of poems inspired by the dramatic end to the Parliament House crisis; the best-known of all these works, and according to most literary scholars the earliest known published AH work in connection to the crisis, was a free verse creation titled “The Glorious Rebellion”, which imagined the entire Australian Army turning against Kerr and Fraser at the height of the crisis and arresting them while cheering crowds followed Whitlam back to the Lodge to celebrate his ultimate triumph. It was, to stay the least, a stark contrast with the reality of Whitlam’s fate. Some of Whitlam’s staunchest supporters took to the streets of Australia’s cities on the day he died and read excerpts of the poem aloud both as a tribute to his memory and as a protest of what in their eyes was Malcolm Fraser’s “tyranny” in prosecuting him for treason.

The first prose work to explicitly use the Parliament House standoff as a vehicle for “what if” speculation was the 1977 novel Let Justice Be Done, which portrays a thinly disguised version of Whitlam being targeted for death by a rogue Australian Army general who regards the protagonist’s defiance of orders to vacate Parliament House as an unforgivable personal slight. Most of the book’s chapters are devoted to the tension between the general, the fictionalized version of Whitlam, and a Malcolm Fraser-type VIP known only as Fulton; the novel’s ending is a chilling one to say the least, as two of the three principal characters end up dying in a torrent of gunfire and the third is carted off as a raving lunatic. The real Malcolm Fraser was said to have had nightmares for three days running after he finished reading Justice, which is hardly a surprise given the nature of the book’s narrative. Nor was Fraser alone in having such an experience; a literary critic for The Australian confessed in the first paragraph of her review of Justice that she had endured many a sleepless night while reading the novel’s closing chapters.

    As unnerving as Justice was, it looked like a lighthearted romp when compared to a short story published the following year in Australia’s top SF magazine. Titled “The Diary Of Robert S.”, the story showed the faceoff between Whitlam and Fraser not only escalating into civil war in Australia but also serving as the catalyst for devastating global conflict; the last line of the story, in fact, implies nuclear holocaust has turned Australia into an uninhabited(and uninhabitable) wasteland. So grim do things become over the course of the story that the title character’s final entry in his journal tells of his intention to commit suicide rather than endure any of the horrors facing him in a post-nuclear world.

    But not every “what if” book dealing with the Parliament House crisis would be so dark; some, in fact, have taken a downright cheeky attitude on the subject. The 1981 picture book Gough’s Very Unfortunate Day turns the standoff into a literal playground spat, recasting Whitlam and Fraser as a pair of quarrelling boys who get in a fistfight after one of them(Whitlam) refuses to let the other(Fraser) play on his favorite swing. Conceived and written by one of Australia’s most popular early ‘80s satirists, the book was wildly popular with Australians and also sold its fair share of copies overseas.

    And if that’s not irreverent enough for you, you might try the 1996 satirical novel On A Whim, in which Whitlam and Fraser are re-imagined as gay lovers and the Parliament House standoff is recast in the light of a romantic spat. While the book triggered widespread outrage when it first came out(no pun intended), today it’s hailed as a modern literary classic and there are plans to adapt the book into a movie musical. A theatrical version of Whim played to packed houses in Sydney and Melbourne during the spring of 2007 and drew enthusiastic reviews from American theater critics when it played on Broadway the following year.

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    As we have previously noted a steady flow of Parliament House crisis AH literature has been making its way onto Australian bookshelves nearly from the minute Gough Whitlam was arrested, but it was in the late 1980s when the subgenre really began to take off. The exoneration of Hayden and Cairns combined with good old-fashioned hunger for something new in books fueled an explosion of “what if” Parliament House crisis novels and short stories from Australian writers. 1986 alone saw the publication of a dozen Parliament House AH-themed novels, the most popular of which was the tense political thriller The Lodge; within a week after it first hit bookstores it had already tied or surpassed a number of Australian book sales records and publishers in New York, London, and Mumbai were expressing interest in buying the overseas rights to the novel. Told mainly through the eyes of a Sydney television reporter, Lodge reads like an Australian reboot of 24 or Scandal; alliances are made and broken in the blink of an eye as Fraser tries to oust Whitman from Parliament House and Whitlam in turn fights to keep his post as prime minister. The novel ends on a quite tragic note as an assassin’s bullet meant for Fraser instead hits the reporter and leaves her paralyzed from the waist down. Many otherwise very stoic people admit to openly weeping at Lodge’s final scene; one of them was the director of the 1990 movie adaptation of the novel.

   1990 also saw the release of the first volume in a four-book series that was based on the unlikeliest of Parliament House crisis-related AH scenarios-- that of Gough Whitlam simply giving in to Sir John Kerr and accepting his dismissal as prime minister of Australia on November 11th, 1975. Titled A Man’s Reach, it was widely criticized by reviewers as well as history and political schools as being seriously implausible in many respects; millions of readers, however, eagerly snapped it up and it made quite a few Australian bestseller lists. It even managed to secure one or two award nominations at the height of its popularity.

   Reach marked the beginning of what would eventually be known as the “Australia Reborn” series; by the time the finale of the quartet, Outback Spring, was published in 2002 the series was being applauded as one of the most imaginative AH book series ever to be printed anywhere. Reach and its sequels, in fact, would eventually serve as the basis for a six-episode TV miniseries. As of the time this article goes to press, three top Hollywood studios are in talks with the author’s estate to adapt all four books into feature films.

   In the mid-1990s the most controversial Parliament House-related series of graphic novels since 2-12 hit the shelves with the release of the nine- issue saga Cry Havoc. As bloody as 2-12 had been, it seemed almost genteel compared to the Quentin Tarantino-level violence which unfolded on Havoc’s pages. The debut issue alone contained enough bloodshed for four Tarantino movies-- in the first three pages a protester was shot through the eye, an Australian Capital Territories police officer got his head smashed in by a brick, and a journalist sent to Parliament House to cover the standoff was blown to pieces by a Molotov cocktail. Havoc depicted an Australia tearing itself apart at the seams as it lurched towards civil war. By Issue No. 3, that civil war was going full-blast and bodies were falling like ninepins, often in ways that led self-proclaimed defenders of public decency to call for the series to be heavily censored or even booted off bookstore shelves completely.

    Havoc’s defenders, in an effort to refute the would-be censors’ claims that the series celebrated violence, argued the comic was in fact a subtle manifesto against violence. Their central argument was that by showing all those horrendous murders and acts of war, the series’ creators were trying to encourage readers to turn away from violence as a solution to political problems-- an argument bolstered when Havoc’s writing team got together to draft a special editorial column for the Sydney Morning Herald titled “Why We Use Images Of War To Call For Peace”. Though their arguments might have fallen on deaf ears with the self-proclaimed moral watchdogs, most of the rest of Australian society seemed to agree with Havoc's writers as far as the “Images of War” editorial's main points were concerned; following its publication sales of the series doubled and a number of prominent cultural and social commentators spoke out in support of the comic.

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     In 2000, just in time for the quarter-century anniversary of the Parliament House crisis, a veritable tidal wave of Parliament House AH literature hit Australia's bookshelves. The last bits of New Year's Day confetti had barely been swept up before three new Parliament House AH- themed hardcovers went into print; the second of these hardcovers would turn out to be the most notable of the trio. Titled A Change In The Air, it stood out in the Parliament House AH subgenre not only because of its choice of protagonist but also because of its decidedly upbeat spirit, a marked contrast to the pessimistic mindset of many other such novels. The heroine of the saga is a sixty-something Melbourne seamstress who decides to take matters into her own hands after losing her patience with Whitlam and Fraser for repeatedly interrupting her favorite TV soaps with endless news reports about the standoff between the political rivals; she travels to Canberra intent on setting them straight. In a comic sequence of events that make the loopiest Monty Python sketch look sedate by comparison, the seamstress is transformed into a national heroine and ends up becoming the new Australian prime minister while Whitlam leaves the political arena for the bucolic joys of a new life as an Outback rancher and Fraser emigrates to Los Angeles to put his executive skills to lucrative use as a Hollywood movie mogul.

    Change was not only a bestseller in hardcover and paperback, it helped inspire one of the most popular Australian TV sitcoms of the last decade. A devoted fan of the novel, who also happened to be a writer with one of the country's largest satellite networks, sat down to write up the initial draft for a series pilot whose main character was reminiscent in some ways of Change's heroine; presently the author of the original book contacted the writer and the two of them started to collaborate on a rewrite of the pilot script. From that rewrite soon emerged the debut episode of what is now an Australian TV and pop cultural institution, Mrs. Brickland(which as of the time this article goes to press has just been renewed for a twelfth year).

    While Change In The Air was climbing up to the top of the bestseller lists in the book world, the creative teams behind 2/12 and Cry Havoc were joining forces to produce what one reviewer would later call “a watershed moment in pop culture’s portrayal of recent Australian history.” The fruit of their labors was the four-part graphic novel miniseries Can The Center Hold?, an ambitious attempt to not only flesh out a plausible alternative history for Australia post-1975 but to also look at actual history from a different perspective than that most readers were accustomed to. While it might not have been perfect, it was certainly done well enough to achieve four-star ratings or better from most critics that reviewed it as well as garner massive reader sales on both sides of the Pacific; in Toronto, the first Canadian printing of Center sold out within just over 48 hours after it first hit bookstore shelves, while New York City's largest comics store had to recruit private security guards to prevent overeager customers from making off with advance copies of the first U.S. edition.

     The events of 9/11 would have a considerable influence on the next major AH work related to the Parliament House crisis, a four-part cable TV miniseries titled Insurrection: The Collapse Of Australia. The miniseries started up with a literal bang, showing a bomb leveling the Sydney Opera House; the bombing, as viewers would quickly learn, was part of a timeline in which Whitlam's treason conviction and the controversy surrounding it had put Australia on a downward spiral towards dictatorship and civil war. A Sydney Morning Herald TV critic described Insurrection as "chilling” in his review of the miniseries, and he wasn't alone in those sentiments: the miniseries’ own executive producer kept having nightmares about the Opera House bombing scene for weeks. Some scenes were so graphically disturbing that when the DVD box set of the miniseries was released on home video in 2004 the maker of the DVD collection banned it from being sold to viewers under 16 in response to concerns from parents’ groups that the segments in question might be too traumatic for children and early teens.

     A year after Insurrection came out on home video a less gruesome but equally controversial take on Parliament House crisis-themed AH generated a tidal wave of buzz in the theater world with the premiere of the one-act play Miranda’s Grave. Set six months after Gough Whitlam's death, the play focuses on an ex-Capital Territories policeman visiting his sister's grave following her suicide; most of its script is composed of monologues by the policeman in which he mourns not only the title character's death but also the condition his country's in as a result of the Parliament House crisis. As he's talking, the audience learns through his comments that Australia’s teetering on the verge of outright revolt and the protagonist blames Gough Whitlam for both his sister's suicide and Australia's impending collapse.

     Both defenders and critics of the late Gough Whitlam have blasted the play for various reasons. Whitlam's defenders view it as little more than a thinly veiled slander of the late former prime minister; conversely, the more vocal of Whitlam's detractors ironically accuse the play's creator of attempting to whitewash his mistakes as prime minister-- a strange charge, to say the least, given that the main character's bitter denunciations of Whitlam throughout the play and his enraged monologue against the ex-prime minister during Grave’s closing scene. However, it should be noted at this point the play has a surprisingly large body of advocates among Whitlam’s former associates; these defenders have suggested the play is not a direct attack on Whitlam himself but rather a reflection of how thoroughly anti- Whitlam propaganda from the more extreme quarters of the Australian right colored popular perception of the former prime minister in the wake of the Parliament House crisis.

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     In 2005, thirty years after the Parliament House standoff triggered the collapse of the Whitlam government, plans were announced to adapt Let Justice Be Done as a feature film. This wasn't the first time that such an announcement had been made; the idea of bringing Justice to the big screen had been bandied about to one degree or another nearly from the minute the first copies of the novel came off the press. What was different this time was that for the first time serious money and resources had been put forth in order to make the project a reality. The list of names being considered for the Justice film adaptation read like a roll call of Australia and New Zealand's most famous movie figures. To cite just one example, Australian director Baz Luhrmann was deemed as the early favorite to helm the screen version of the classic novel; New Zealander actor Temura Morrison was cast in a small but meaty role as an ASIO agent working undercover in the ranks of Whitlam's security detail.

      As it turned out, however, the producers decided to cast the movie largely with newcomers-- which proved to be a smart decision. When Justice was released in theaters in August of 2006 it was a box office hit on both sides of the Pacific, making $270 million in its maiden theatrical run and winning the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. As of press time for this article, the DVD of Justice has earned an additional $500 million in worldwide sales and two sequel novels have been published with a third due for publication in the coming year.

     In 2015 it will have been four decades since the Parliament House crisis erupted and pushed Australia to the brink of civil war. It seems only natural that interest in alternate history pertaining to the crisis is mushrooming as the 40-year anniversary approaches. At least eight new novels with Parliament House-themed AH are set for publication during the coming year, a new edition of "The Glorious Rebellion" will be issued on the fortieth anniversary of the notorious Kerr letter to Whitlam, and an Australian Broadcasting Corporation made-for-TV documentary analyzing the possible consequences of a hypothetical 1970s civil war in Australia has just gone into post-production; on the Internet a new message board which deals exclusively with Parliament House crisis-related alternate history is already up to more than three million subscribers after just a month in operation. There are even plans on the drawing board at this moment for a first-person shooter video game based on Cry Havoc.

     Much as Watergate changed the consciousness of the American people, so too has the Parliament House crisis left its mark on the individual and collective psyches of the Australians. Even today it's not hard to imagine Whitlam's ghost still roaming the hallways of Parliament House-- nor is it an exaggeration(or at least not a significant one) to suggest said specter will continue haunt the Australian national memory for years, and possibly generations, to come.

The End