Jenny Hocking

Jenny Hocking is emeritus professor at Monash University, Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University and award-winning biographer of Gough Whitlam. Her latest book is The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know about November 1975 – The Palace Connection. Her appeal against the decision of the full Federal Court in the ‘Palace letters’ case was heard by the High Court of Australia on 4 February 2020. You can support the campaign to Release the Palace letters by donating here.

Jenny Hocking reviews 'A Certain Granduer' by Graham Freudenberg

September 2009, no. 314 • 01 September 2009

Gough Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, delivered before a crowd of thousands at the Blacktown Civic Centre in a scene that bore a closer resemblance to a pop concert than to a political campaign, is seen as the ultimate articulation of the Whitlam Labor government’s radical program for change. If its chief political architect was Whitlam, its amanuensis was Graham Freudenberg. With Whitlam’s el ... (read more)

'At Her Majesty’s pleasure: Sir John Kerr and the royal dismissal secrets' by Jenny Hocking

April 2020, no. 420 • 19 March 2020

Listen to this essay read by the author. The dismissal of the Whitlam government by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, on 11 November 1975 was one of the most tumultuous and controversial episodes in Australian political history. The government had been elected on 2 December 1972 and returned at the May 1974 double dissolution, with Whitlam becoming the first Labor leader to achieve successiv ... (read more)