Remembering the day Gough Whitlam lost his job

Tuesday is the fiftieth anniversary of the Dismissal of the Whitlam government. For those who were alive at the time it’s one of those “where were you?” moments. In this podcast, the Conversation’s politics and society editor Amanda Dunn and I discuss that historic day and its impact on Australia’s federal politics.

On the scene when Gough Whitlam gave his famous speech on the steps of Parliament House (now Old Parliament House):

I was on the steps […] with many, many other people, journalists, staffers, the start of a gathering crowd. Everybody was shocked, amazed. We’d heard only a while before of this act by the governor-general.

Despite Whitlam’s emphatic election loss months later, the mood of his supporters in the campaign was intense:

I travelled a lot with Gough Whitlam [in those weeks] and you really got a quite distorted picture of what was likely to happen [at the election], because there were these immense crowds and people were so enthusiastic about Whitlam that it was easy to get the impression he had more support than of course he did.