April and May of 1976 were two of the most turbulent months in modern Australian history. Outside the Canberra courtroom where Gough Whitlam was being tried, the Australian Labor Party he had once led was tearing itself to piece; inside the courtroom his political legacy was under attack by prosecutors portraying him as a 20th-century Guy Fawkes who had tried to figuratively blow up his own country for the sake of holding on to the prime minister’s seat. Whitlam’s supporters, though they might be dwindling in number, were still vocally defending him to anyone who would listen and starting a plethora of arguments in the process. Those arguments could(and sometimes did) escalate to all- out physical violence, and when they did the government had its hands full trying to contain them. As one Melbourne wit said at the time, it seemed like there were more police officers than there were people to be policed. And he wasn’t too far off on that point: many local police forces in Australia had called retired officers back to active duty in order to meet the urgent need for trained personnel to keep the peace in the face of simmering tensions over the Whitlam treason case.

Like a World War II bomber with two engines on fire and a third engine stopped dead, the ALP was trying desperately to somehow limp to safety only to find itself getting closer every second to a final and possible fatal crash. In an Economist magazine article published three days after the British High Commissioner’s cable to London warning of an imminent ALP final breakup, a senior party official speaking on the condition of anonymity admitted in a New York Times article that party morale was at an all-time low and getting lower by the minute. On the same day the Times article was published Toronto police found the body of an Australian expatriate in an alley behind Maple Leaf Gardens; the post-mortem autopsy found he’d died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, having apparently been driven to suicide by despair over the seemingly inexorable disintegration of his party and his country. An Australian Communist Party delegation visiting Hanoi to participate in ceremonies marking the reunification of North and South Vietnam was peppered with questions about their views regarding the crisis facing the ALP.

One British newspaper editorial columnist wrote in a Daily Telegraph article in early April of 1976 that the ALP was in danger of becoming a political April Fool’s joke. He wasn’t that far off the mark; as the Whitlam trial progressed and the political fallout from Whitlam’s indictment for treason continued to spread, the once- robust party was stumbling about like a boxer who was on the ropes and vulnerable to the knockout blow. There was hardly a single day when the Australian media didn’t come out with at least one story, and often more than one, of a major ALP figure deserting the party in shame or disgust over Whitlam’s actions and their consequences. Few people wanted to be associated with a political party whose most prominent figure was a turncoat.

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While Malcolm Frasier’s own involvement with the Whitlam trial didn’t extend much beyond giving a written deposition and approving the supplemental budgets which supplied much of the funding for both the prosecution and the defense, Frasier’s aides testified extensively at the trial during its second phase. His chief of staff in particular was an almost daily presence in the courtroom, his testimony painting an unflattering (to say the least) portrait of Whitlam’s behavior and state of mind during the Frasier government’s failed effort to achieve a negotiated end to the Parliament House standoff. Whitlam’s defense team, terrified at just how effective a witness that Frasier’s chief of staff was turning out to be for the prosecution, tried desperately to undermine him on cross-examination-- but to their dismay the chief of staff remained unruffled, barely even blinking in response to their frantic attempts to discredit him.

By the time the judge dismissed Frasier’s chief of staff from the witness stand on his final day of testimony, Whitlam’s already slim hopes of acquittal by the jury in his trial had diminished even further. Now speculation in the Australian press began to shift away from whether he would be convicted or acquitted to whether or not he would be given the maximum sentence for the crimes he’d been charged he’d been charged with. One notorious Perth bookmaker actually ran a betting pool on how long a sentence Whitlam would get and took in at least $300,000(Au) in wagers before police finally arrested him.

Another critical witness in the prosecution’s case was an ASIO operative who’d managed to infiltrate Parliament House at the height of the standoff and sent coded reports to Frasier detailing what was going on in Whitlam’s meetings with his senior deputies. Although for national security reasons the full details of the agent’s mission had be kept secret from the public, what he did reveal further bolstered the government’s contention that Whitlam was guilty of treason. While Whitlam’s defense team did their best to try and discredit this agent, they were no more successful where he was concerned than they’d been with Frasier’s chief and staff-- in fact, some observers at the trial were inclined to think the defense counsels’ actions might have well had the opposite effect and made the prosecution’s case stronger. As one American news correspondent later put it: “They(Whitlam’s defense attorneys) aimed and shot from the hip only to find the guns had been pointed at their own feet.”

The prosecution delivered its closing argument on May 3rd the defense began calling its first witnesses a week later. Few people in the courtroom on either side of the case realized that while they were listening to these witnesses’ testimony, the tensions which had been simmering in the Australian Labor Party since Whitlam’s arrest were about to reach the boiling point. A special conference of party leaders and membership had just been called in Perth; that conference would see the ALP pushed to the brink of final collapse....

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May 12th, 1976 has long been referred to in certain Australian political circles as “Black Wednesday”, because it saw the last thin shreds of unity in the Australian Labor Party fray in the face of the near-constant infighting that had been the prevailing condition among its members since the Whitlam government’s collapse. Ironically, the conference now viewed by most historians as the final step toward the ALP’s demise had originally been called for the purpose of rekindling party unity.

Originally the conference organizers had expected 500 people to attend, but when the gavel rang to call the meeting to order only 220 ALP members were present, and the number would drop still further as partisans from each side were summarily ejected for heckling speakers from the other. By the time the stormy conclave finished nearly eight hours later, there were only eleven people left at the conference to hear the closing speech by Whitlam’s former defense minister pleading for the men and women of the ALP not to let the party die. While the venerable leftist organization didn’t entirely become extinct, it was reduced to a shadow of its former robust self. The morning after the last-gasp summit, a two-paragraph statement telegraphed to all major Australian media outlets and printed in the Sydney Morning Herald made the startling announcement that a third of the ALP’s remaining members would secede from the party to form a new political organization that was to be known henceforth as the Federal Union Party; much like the National Reform Party had drawn a substantial number of leftists away from the ALP mainstream, the Federal Union Party would become a haven for the more right-leaning dissidents. Over the coming months the two breakaway parties would embark on a fierce rivalry for the hearts and minds of centrist voters-- a competition which is still going on more than three and a half decades later.

Even the most jaded political commentators were shocked by the events of Black Wednesday. Never in anyone’s wildest fantasy had it been considered possible that the ALP would be so quickly and severely eviscerated. True, there had been a substantial number of defections from the party’s ranks since Whitlam was arrested, but nobody had ever imagined the party itself would be reduced to such a pitiful state of affairs. Malcolm Frasier, in spite of his previous quarrels with Gough Whitlam, was utterly flabbergasted when he saw how thoroughly the ALP had imploded. Seemingly overnight one of Australia’s most influential political parties had been diminished to a rump faction, a casualty of the anti-Whitlam backlash triggered by the Parliament House standoff.

Press commentators were at a loss for words trying to summarize exactly what effect the ALP’s collapse would have on Australia’s long- term political future. Even celebrated Nine Network newsreader Peter Harvey was caught off-guard by the news of the Federal Union Party’s creation; when Harvey received a copy of the press statement formally announcing the new party’s establishment, he literally did an on-air double take. “We couldn’t have been more surprised if you told us the Martians were landing at Sydney Opera House.” one of Harvey’s fellow news anchors would recall in an interview for The Australian fifteen years later.

In fact, by an interesting coincidence a UFO-themed cartoon was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald two days after Black Wednesday that neatly summed up how far the ALP had fallen. The black and white four-panel drawing shows an extraterrestrial emerging from his flying saucer outside the party’s headquarters and starting to say “Take me to your leader” only to find the building completely deserted; with a shrug, the ET climbs back into his saucer and flies off. The same day the cartoon was published, the ALP executive leadership began making arrangements to relocate the party’s central offices from the massive suites they’d previously occupied to a smaller building befitting the party’s newly assumed more modest status...

To be continued