Palace letters: historian claims national archives misled her over copies

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/28/palace-letters-historian-claims-national-archives-misled-her-over-copies

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A leading historian has accused Australia’s national archives of misleading her when it barred her access to duplicates of highly sensitive letters between the Queen and the governor general in the lead-up to Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975.

Prof Jenny Hocking, a historian with Monash University, has spent years fighting to have the “palace letters” made public. It is thought they could reveal the extent of the palace’s involvement in John Kerr’s controversial dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, one of Australia’s greatest political and constitutional crises.

This month Hocking lost a federal court case aimed at forcing the national archives to release the original palace letters. The court ruled the letters were personal correspondence and not commonwealth records, and were exempt from a 30-year disclosure rule.

Now Hocking has made serious allegations about her attempts to access a second, lesser-known file held by the archives, which contains duplicates of the letters.

Three years after Whitlam’s dismissal, Kerr’s secretary, David Smith, made copies of the palace letters during what Hocking describes as a session of “secret late-night photocopying”. They were kept by Kerr’s family, and ended up with Stephanie Bashford, his stepdaughter.

Bashford gave the duplicates to the national archives in 2004 and stipulated that they should be released 30 years after their creation, 2008.

But when Hocking applied for the duplicates in 2011, the archives told her the file was “completely closed” because the records were personal and private.

Hocking only learned of Bashford’s original instructions during the federal court proceedings. She now alleges the national archives misled her.

“I was tremendously disappointed for two reasons,” she said. “The first was I had requested those documents, that is the copied file, and had been told that they were not available. But from the instrument of deposit … they should have been available after 30 years.

“When we asked to actually see that, it clearly said they should have been released after 30 years, so that’s the disappointment from our end. And surprise. Great surprise.”

But the archive’s director general, David Fricker, has denied the allegation, and says there is “no grand conspiracy” to keep the letters secret.

“We believe that these are very historic and significant documents that one day should be in the public domain so that all Australians can appreciate this momentous time in Australia’s history,” he told Guardian Australia.

“It’s not because I’m obsessed about keeping secrets; it’s what I have to do to preserve the integrity of the institution and maintain the trust of our depositors, who have deposited these very, very important documents.”

Fricker said it would be a total nonsense to release copies of the palace letters when it would breach the conditions restricting the release of the originals. It would be a betrayal of trust of the original depositor, which would greatly undermine the archive’s ability to properly function.

“The provenance is identical,” he said. “It’s the same provenance ... It’s an exact facsimile of that correspondence. It therefore falls into the instructions that I received about how to treat that correspondence.”

There was another twist in March 2017 when Hocking said something “entirely unexpected and disturbing” occurred. The conditions for accessing the duplicate file were changed.

Hocking says neither she nor her legal team were made aware of the change, despite the federal court proceedings being under way.

The new conditions mirror the secrecy restrictions placed on the original palace letters, effectively placing them under the embargo of the Queen. The earliest they could be released is likely to be 2027.

Fricker said Bashford was simply clarifying the position on release of the duplicates. There was no trickery involved, he said.

“It’s a nonsense to say ‘Well, I’ll only do it if I photocopy it, or if I transcribe it in some manner, that somehow that will make it publicly available,’ ” he said. “You must understand. It’s a moral, ethical argument, as well as legal argument, as to what is the proper way to treat this correspondence.”