The Australia of 1985 was a vastly different country from the one which had existed when Gough Whitlam made his fateful decision not to comply with Sir John Kerr’s call for him to resign as prime minister. If he’d come back to Earth, he would have found it tough to recognize the nation of which he’d once been the leader. The idea of a political coup was no longer dismissed as fantasy by the average Australian; in fact, some of Malcolm Fraser’s sternest old foes darkly insinuated a coup was precisely what had happened when Kerr appointed Frasier to be the new prime minister and Fraser dispatched troops to arrest Whitlam at the climax of the standoff.

For that matter the idea of civil war in Australia had ceased to he unthinkable. If anything, there was a veritable cottage industry of novels depicting the Australian government locked in a struggle to the death against an insurgent army. Some of these novels were total and unredeemable dreck; others were beach reading, good for a lark but not necessarily high literature; and a rare few were outstanding works of writing. One such work that drew particularly acclaim from critics and readers was the young adult thriller Tomorrow When The Battle Starts, a taut portrayal of three Sydney high schoolers’ efforts to survive in the chaos of a civil war in Australia in the year 2002.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the Australia that had existed at the time of the Parliament House crisis and the one which Australians lived in ten years later was this: no longer was it taken for granted that Gough Whitlam had committed treason when he refused to comply with Sir John Kerr’s call for his resignation. With federal courts having overturned the guilty verdicts in the Cairns and Hayden trials, pressure had been steadily building for a posthumous judicial review of the prosecution of Whitlam. If prosecutorial improprieties had helped to put Cairns and Hayden behind bars, the logic went, there was hardly any good reason to think similar improprieties hadn’t been committed during Whitlam’s trial.

The push for an inquiry into possible prosecutorial misconduct in Gough Whitlam’s treason conviction began kicking into high gear during the first week of June 1985. Around that time the magazine News Weekly printed an interview with a former assistant federal prosecutor who’d been heavily involved with the Whitlam trial; speaking on condition of anonymity, the ex-prosecutor dropped a bombshell-- one of the critical prosecution witnesses at the trial had been secretly bribed to conceal evidence that might have helped clear the former prime minister of the charges against him. This revelation not only reinvigorated all of the old conspiracy theories regarding Frasier’s actions during the Whitlam trial, it helped foster at least a half-dozen new ones-- including one which made the far-fetched and easily disprovable claim that Frasier’s aides had secretly encouraged Whitlam to make his defiant stand inside Parliament House in order to create a convenient pretext for Kerr and Fraser to act harshly against him. Even Fraser’s most severe critics rejected the idea as absurd, and Fraser himself openly laughed at it.

Still, the bombshell dropped in the News Weekly article would play a crucial part in ratcheting up popular support for a reopening of the Whitlam case. Within less than a month after it first hit newsstands a hundred newspaper editorials had been published in support of a judicial review of the verdict in Whitlam’s trial and dozens of prominent Senate and House members of all political stripes had signed a petition stating their backing for a reopening of the case. In the first week of August a group of Melbourne college students held a two-day sitdown strike to show support for a reversal of the verdict against Whitlam; that same week one of Australia’s most respected religious magazines published a commentary calling the decision to prosecute Whitlam “one of the most horrific moral catastrophes of our century” and urging the Hawke government to overturn the federal court’s treason conviction in Whitlam’s trial.

But what ultimately tipped the scales in favor of a reopening of the former prime minister’s case was an investigative story done by the news division of Australia’s Channel Ten TV network in late September of 1985 that exposed not only deliberate deception by some members of the Whitlam trial prosecution team but also sheer blundering and incompetence within some of the highest circles of Malcolm Fraser’s cabinet in the midst of the Parliament House crisis. Within 48 hours after the Channel Ten report was broadcast, Bob Hawke ordered the federal attorney general’s office to reopen Whitlam’s case.

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The federal inquiry into the prosecution’s conduct during the Whitlam trial would focus fresh attention on the Parliament House crisis and its aftermath. For older Australians, the inquiry revived chilling memories of a time when their country had stood on the verge of civil war; for younger ones it opened a new window into an era of recent history they were still trying to come to terms with. For Malcolm Fraser the inquiry brought on a new barrage of questions of whether or not his decision to use soldiers to end the Parliament House standoff had been less about alleged treasonous activities than about Fraser’s personal feud with Gough Whitlam. For Jim Cairns and Bill Hayden it represented the perfect chance to redeem their late friend and boss’ reputation from the damage it had endured during his 1976 trial. And for Whitlam’s widow and children, it meant hope they might finally start to escape the shadow which had been looming over their lives since Whitlam’s conviction for treason.

The inquiry formally began on September 28th and would last nearly ten months. Hundreds of witnesses were questioned and thousands of pages of government documents were analyzed as the federal attorney general’s office sought to clarify once and for all whether there had in fact been prosecutorial misconduct in the Whitlam trial; for a while it seemed as if all of Australia was holding its breath waiting for the results of the inquiry. Malcolm Frasier himself testified twice before the federal courts in response to questions about whether or not he’d suborned prosecutors in the original Whitlam case to falsify evidence or testimony. On the 10-year anniversary of the Kerr letter which sparked the Parliament House standoff supporters of Cairns and Hayden held massive demonstrations in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra demanding Fraser be indicted as a co-conspirator in the wrongful prosecution of Cairns, Hayden, and Whitlam.

In April and May of 1986 the US air strikes against Libyan dictator Muammar Khadafy and the Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl would for a time replace the Whitlam trial judicial review as the top stories on the front pages of Australia’s major newspapers; come June 1st, however, they would be relegated to memory and the judicial review once more take center stage. On that day Bob Ellicott, Fraser’s attorney general at the time of the original Whitlam trial, testified before the review panel that an aide to his second-highest ranking deputy had written Ellicott a letter warning him said deputy was doctoring evidence to ensure Whitlam’s conviction but that the letter had subsequently been stolen from his office shortly after it was received and it had taken police nearly a decade to recover it from the thieves.

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Once the letter to Ellicott resurfaced events in the judicial review of the Whitlam trial moved at a dizzyingly swift pace. The author of the letter testified before the review panel just three days after Ellicott’s appearance, and a week after that Ellicott’s former second-highest ranking deputy confessed to the panel he had in fact tampered with critical pieces of evidence in the Whitlam trial. The deputy’s confession helped reinforce a growing revisionist mindset in Australia that regarded Whitlam’s actions in the Parliament House crisis not as treason but as acts of protest gone tragically wrong. Even many people who had previously supported Fraser’s decision to deploy troops to resolve the Parliament House crisis were now suggesting Frasier had overreacted.

On July 17th, 1986 the Whitlam trial judicial review panel issued its final ruling on the original jury’s verdict in Whitlam’s case. The panel’s findings were that 1)the jury in the original trial had been in error when they convicted Whitlam of treason; 2)there had indeed been considerable prosecutorial misconduct in the Whitlam trial; and 3)while there was no concrete proof Malcolm Fraser had played any role in such misconduct he had certainly been grossly negligent in not doing more to prevent it from happening in the first place or punishing such misconduct once it came to light. This opened Fraser up to a massive civil suit from Whitlam’s family and deepened the already serious rift that had been forming between Fraser and his fellow Liberals since his defeat in the 1983 elections.

Bob Hawke rode popular support for his government’s reopening of the Whitlam case to a decisive victory in Australia’s 1987 elections for prime minister. He enjoyed solid backing not only from the majority of his own Labor Party but also from millions of his countrymen of all political and social stripes; by contrast Malcolm Frasier was becoming an outcast in the very political organization of which he’d once been the most prominent and respected figure....

To be continued