I was 23 when my hero cancelled me, I taunted a prime minister, and played dumb with a spook

It was largely because of this masthead that the sacking of the Whitlam Labor government 50 years ago was coined The Dismissal. And also partly that the miniseries of that name ever came about.

I was 23 years of age and working as a special writer on The Age under the inimitable Peter Smark and editor Creighton Burns when the phone rang from Sydney.

It was an acquaintance, the late Byron Kennedy, who I knew through 3AW’s producer of the Derryn Hinch show, Terry Hayes, and who himself was the producer of the hit film, Mad Max. He was calling to see if I was interested in working on an idea that he and his partner, George Miller, had for a miniseries on the sacking of the Whitlam government.

Byron and George had recently completed Mad Max 2 and had the funds to invest in some passion projects, and as a Melbourne boy, Byron was an Age reader.

“We noticed an article you did in The Age,” Byron said. “It was about a prostitute and you wrote it in screenplay form with dialogue.”

Indeed, I had recently finished an article for the-then features editor, Eric Beecher, spending a week with a prostitute in one of Melbourne’s notorious unlicensed “massage parlours”. I’d phoned a service advertised in the local rag and asked the owner for permission to shadow one of its sex workers for a week. In a dingy one-bedder in Dandenong Road, St Kilda East, I followed one of his “girls” and, to disguise my identity from the Johns, played the receptionist, greeting clients and taking calls when the girls were busy in the bedroom.

Given the obvious drama in such a story, I wrote it as a three-act play.

Byron continued: “We’re thinking of making a miniseries on the sacking of the Whitlam government. Would you like to write a three-page outline for a pitch to television?”

Would I ever! I’d been a uni student doing honours in political science when Kerr did the unthinkable. Six years later, my rage had not abated and I leapt at the offer: I was keen to help Australians understand the full play of the politics that led to what I now believe was a coup d’etat rather than just a day-to-day tabloid story of loans affairs and sex scandals.

The Channel 10 board apparently prevaricated over the appetite of Australian audiences for a political drama before giving it the green light and I was offered a five-week contract in Sydney to research the six-hour show, though I knew it wouldn’t be enough.

When I’d first joined The Age in 1980, I had sought opportunities to express my rage, as Gough had advised. On one occasion I was assigned to cover a book fair where then prime minister Malcolm Fraser was officiating and discussed with the chief of staff my idea of asking Fraser what was the last book he’d read. This was an insulting trope of the times suggesting the person was ill-read but disguised as an innocent question.

When I came up behind the PM and put my question, he turned around and, more than twice my age and at least a foot taller, dressed me down. And the lightning-fast Age photographer captured it.

Now, it was November 1981, and the Kennedy-Miller miniseries had to be in the can by the following June to meet the government’s new tax concessions for film and TV investment. I worked every day and night for eight months as I forensically examined books, news clippings, TV footage, Hansard, and interview material, weighing up the most likely scenario for the 300-odd scenes necessary and then co-writing the script with Terry Hayes leading.

I was an extra in the critical last scene of the show when Whitlam marches through the doors of Old Parliament House to deliver his formidable Kerr’s cur speech, which I can still quote word for word. In finally watching the whole show for the first time last weekend, I saw my young self with a pixie haircut right behind Max Phipps, after which the show cuts to the original footage.

While the show was in post-production, I returned to journalism and, according to Terry, it was he who came up with a range of titles for the show, including the one that was accepted: “The Dismissal”.

Disappointingly for me, the screening was delayed as Channel 10 did not want to be seen to be influencing the next federal election due to be fought by Fraser. In the end Bob Hawke won and the show was put to air on the three nights that followed, and was a smash hit in the ratings.

I wonder now, had Fraser won that election, if the show would have ever been aired.

Nevertheless, the most shocking event in Australian political history, henceforth, became known by the name of our miniseries, which is regularly cited among the best Australian TV shows of all time.

Many of the actors were reputedly happy to work for free because they recognised the series’ significance. One of the directors said, wisely at the time, that none of us would ever work on anything like that again. He was proved right – though I did go on to have my own interesting government career, and a political campaign as an independent candidate.

The most fascinating aspect of the project for me was at the start of my research. When word got out, I was phoned by someone introducing themselves as “from the prime minister’s office”. Another tall, intimidating bloke, twice my size in both directions – who struck me more as an intelligence officer – arranged a cafe meeting with me near the studios in Kings Cross and tried to grill me ever so slowly on the tenor of the show. I kept my cool and played dumb while assuring him we were aiming for a balanced portrayal of events.

He scheduled a second meeting closer to the completion of the shoot, where I reiterated my reassurance.

In the end, the feedback from all sides was positive.

Through the show, I was fortunate to get to know the cream of Australia’s directorial and acting talent from Bill Hunter (Rex Connor) and John Stanton (Fraser) to John Meillon (Kerr) Max Phipps (Whitlam), Robyn Nevin (Lady Kerr) and Ruth Cracknell (Margaret Whitlam) as well as directors Phil Noyce and George Ogilvie, among many others. The research took me into the minds of the key personalities; it was a rabbit hole that threatened to devour me given its import and social magnitude.

Early in my research, I tried to secure an interview with each of the key players. I had come upon Whitlam’s home number and braced myself to call him from a landline under the stairs of my Glebe share house. “How dare you call me on my private number!” he boomed down the handset. But, but, but ... you’re my idol! Yes, my all-time hero had cancelled me, for which my body still keeps the score.

The next day, from his work phone, he denied me an interview to protect his legal rights to sue for libel should he be seen to be collaborating with the show. Yet in releasing his dysregulated emotions upon me, Gough told me all I needed to know about the impact of his personality on the proud John Kerr.

However, my view was, and firmly remains, that Kerr was 100 per cent in the wrong. By taking such a monstrous affront to Whitlam’s treatment of him, Kerr himself lost everything, and we all lost the integrity of our polity.

My rage only expands as the years go by.

Sally Gibson is a journalist and was researcher and co-writer of The Dismissal. She appears this week on a special edition of the Truth Lies and Media podcast.

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