We The Jury, Part 8

Summary: In the first seven chapters of this series we reviewed Gough Whitlam’s arrest, trial, and conviction for treason; the subsequent political and social consequences of the Whitlam trial; and the later exoneration of Whitlam along with his colleagues Jim Cairns and Bill Hayden. In this installment we’ll look at some of the events marking the 25-year anniversary of the Parliament House crisis.

With the coming of the year 2000 the Parliament House standoff and the Gough Whitlam trial, never far from the surface of the Australian public’s collective consciousness, rose again to the forefront as a new debate about the legacy of those events raged among Australians of all stripes. Certainly prime minister John Howard spent a great deal of time thinking about those days; one of his first major speeches in 2000 was a thirty-minute address to cadets at Duntroon Military College in which he recalled fearing both for the country’s survival and for his own. ”I was sure I’d get shot before it was all over.” he admitted to the cadets. He might not have been the only Australian citizen to voice such fears, but he was certainly the most famous.

Indeed, with the 25th anniversary of the Parliament House crisis and Gough Whitlam trial approaching, public interest in first-hand accounts of those tense days was spiking in a big way. Nine Network commissioned no less than four separate documentaries about the standoff; its rival Seven green-lighted three while the Special Broadcasting Service would produce a highly regarded six-part miniseries about the Parliament House standoff and its aftermath. When a memoir by a former Australian Capital Territories police officer who’d been on duty near Parliament House when Gough Whitlam was arrested went on sale at Amazon.com’s Australian site, the book jumped into the site’s top 5 bestseller list within less than a week after it first went into print. Malcolm Frasier generated enormous interest-- and equally enormous controversy --with his three-part guest editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald about his experiences during the Parliament House crisis.

Four of the top ten highest-grossing films to play in Australian theaters during the year 2000 were either directly or indirectly tied in to the legacy of the Parliament House crisis. Two of them, the indie flick The Clerk and the big-budget epic Parliament House, garnered an impressive number of positive reviews not only from Australian critics but from reviewers and audiences throughout the entire world; Clerk in particular would go on to win a number of awards at Cannes and Sundance and score an Oscar nomination or two to boot. Jim Cairns had a short but memorable onscreen cameo role in Clerk as an ACT policeman; Bill Hayden did extensive voice-over work on Parliament House narrating that movie’s opening and closing sequences.

There were even a handful of children’s and young adult books about the Parliament House standoff; the best-received of these titles was Mr. Whitlam, a picture book recounting Gough Whitlam’s life up to the day he was arrested trying to flee Parliament House. It would go on to score a number of children’s book award nominations and become the basis for two history educational videos about the standoff that are still in wide use in Australian schools today.

About the same time Mr. Whitlam hit bookstore shelves a three-part graphic novel series about the ill-fated former prime minister hit the YA market and sparked a fair amount of controversy for its-- to say the least --raw language and graphic portrayal of the storming of Parliament House. Originally titled Revolt and published in the U.S. as 2-12, it’s been compared by some readers to Frank Miller’s 300. And to be sure, the trilogy’s depiction of the climax to the Parliament House standoff is as intense as anything in the 300 saga-- small wonder, then, that when the trilogy was first printed in the United States there was a massive push by certain conservative groups to have sales of the series restricted to readers 21 and over.

Excessive as that reaction may sound, however, it was actually mild compared to what happened when the trilogy came out in Great Britain; in that country, right-wing critics actively campaigned to have Revolt/2-12 banned from the shelves altogether and staged protests outside bookstores selling it. In one particularly dramatic episode members of the far right British National Party actually tried to force the closure of a Liverpool bookshop where the trilogy was enjoying brisk sales; the only thing which the BNP stalwarts actually accomplished by this act was to get themselves arrested for disturbing the peace and attempting to incite a riot.

In Indonesia there actually were riots over the Revolt trilogy after a rumor started circulating that the series was being used by its authors to incite anti-Indonesian bigotry in the West. The basis of this(at best) dubious assertion was a throwaway line of dialogue in the second part of the series in which a middle-aged Sydney man coming home from a vacation trip to Bali grouses about the rudeness of the customs agents working at Jakarta’s main airport. Since grumbling about rude customs agents happens to be a common pastime among travelers from all countries, it’s tough to imagine how this line could be meant specifically meant as a knock on the Indonesian people specifically; some Indonesians, however, chose to take it that way anyhow, perhaps out of lingering bitterness over the way that protest movements opposing Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor had grown in Australia and other Western countries during the 1990s.

In the summer of 2000 a producer for one of Australia’s most popular morning TV news programs approached the show’s hosts with an idea for a “where are they now?” series of interviews with some of the lesser-known surviving figures from the Parliament House crisis. As he envisioned it, the interviews were meant to act as a teaser for his network’s upcoming two-hour 25th anniversary special about the storming of Parliament House; however, they would end up being more than that... much more. The interviews would reveal stories about the crisis which had never been told before, or might have been told before but then were forgotten, and pave the way for a whole new understanding of the events that led to the collapse of the Whitlam government. By the time that the 25th anniversary documentary went to broadcast at least three additional specials had been green-lighted and an anthology of transcripts from the interviews was on its way to bookstore shelves throughout Australia.

The interviews also provided inspiration for a politically oriented Sydney theater group to create a two-act play aimed at satirizing Malcolm Frasier in general and Frasier’s handling of the Parliament House crisis in particular. That in itself would have stirred a fair amount of debate in the first place, but the group’s director added fuel to the fire when he decided to give the play a title that can’t be repeated here. It was a name that made scathing(and some thought uncalled for) allusion to Malcolm Frasier’s alleged sexual proclivities and generated endless debate within Australian society before it was changed to the more family-friendly title Mr. Frasier’s Mates. And even with the title change the play still sparked a firestorm of controversy when it debuted in Sydney in September of 2000. Frasier’s defenders-- and he still had his share of those-- considered the play nothing more(or less) than a gratuitous personal attack on the former prime minister while his critics felt Mates might have gone a bit too soft on him.

Still, the play got enough favorable publicity to record more than 2500 performances in Sydney and another 1850 in Melbourne on its maiden theatrical run. It also enjoyed considerable success in London and Toronto and even had a short run on Broadway; by the spring of 2001 talk had begun to circulate of a possible movie adaptation of Mates. (The film version of Mates finally reached the screen in 2006 after a number of cast and script changes.) One critic who gave the play a decidedly negative review was the play’s subject-- in a scathing letter to the Sydney Morning Herald Malcolm Frasier blasted Mates as “obscenity bordering on the pornographic” and all but threatened to sue the play’s creator. Fortunately for both Frasier and the playwright satirizing him, Frasier’s legal counsel managed to dissuade him from making good on the implied threat.

Perhaps the most poignant event to take place in connection with the 25-year anniversary of the Parliament House crisis happened early on the morning of December 2nd, 2000, when family, friends, and colleagues of the late Gough Whitlam gathered outside Parliament House for a rally in tribute to the former prime minister’s memory. It spoke volumes about how Australia had changed since the days of Bob Hawke that such an event was taking place to begin with, and the massive turnout for it was still further testament to that change. Representatives from nearly every major Australian political party, including Malcolm Frasier's own Liberal Party, took part in the service; Frasier himself was conspicuously absent, either out of fear of being harangued by his political critics or maybe from a desire not to rub salt in old wounds. One of the keynote speakers at the memorial service was a thirty-nine-year old House of Representatives MP from the Lalor district; her name was Julia Gillard, and her speech that morning would mark the beginning of her ascent into Australia's political stratosphere....