Remembrance Day climax: Media revels in high profile sacking

JAMES MANNING

November 11, 2025 10:23

"We want Gough". The sacked Prime Minister meets the press and demonstrators at the front of Parliament House Canberra hours after his sacking.

November 11 is the culmination of what feels like a long period of nostalgia in the media as publishers and broadcasters remember the tumultuous events leading up to November 11, 1975.

The media loves an anniversary, more so if it is linked to a high profile sacking. Those don’t come much bigger than handing a dismissal notice to an elected prime minister.

But any communication to an audience is carefully targeted. In the case of the 50th anniversary of the sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam the audience is an older generation and/or political nerds. I qualify for both camps.

As one ABC TV documentary – the Greg Jennett-hosted Whitlam Dismissal: 50 Years – noted the date is iconic for a number of reasons. Most importantly it was the day that fighting ceased in World War II in 1945. It was also the date that bushranger Ned Kelly was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1880.

However the day has been remembered more by many as the day in 1975 that the then Governor General John Kerr sacked the sitting Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

Highlights today include a Sky News documentary from the channel’s political contributor Chris Uhlmann – The Dismissal: 50 Years On.

Mainstream TV won’t be referring much to the anniversary apart from discussion on news bulletins and current affairs programming across the day which began with reporters stationed at Old Parliament House on breakfast TV.

However tonight in FTA primetime it will be Big Brother, the game show The 1% Club and the doco about animal life inside Taronga Zoo.

The ABC has more on offer, although its video coverage is largely on-demand today apart from the ABC News channel, but there is also much on offer via ABC Radio.

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It’s no surprise to learn that YouTube is a treasure trove for history buffs. No really! Try Constitutional Clarion for over 200 hours of detailed analysis from Anne Twomey, Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney.

Some publishers have had a field day with The Dismissal though, chief among them The Australian. The News Corp Australia-owned national daily prides itself on its national politics coverage and was all over the events as they unfolded 50 years ago.

Central to its coverage then was Paul Kelly. The 78-year-old veteran has written extensively about the events of that day in the intervening years and now is the newspaper’s editor-at-large. Kelly wrote a compelling cover story for The Weekend Australian Magazine last Saturday detailing how events unfolded on November 11, 1975.

Paul Kelly revisits Old Parliament House in The Weekend Australian Magazine.

When it comes to quantity and quality regarding coverage of The Dismissal, it is hard to look past the work of journalist and author Troy Bramston. He has been dropping what seems like daily news exclusives revealing unknown facts about the events leading up to November 11, 1975 for readers of The Australian for weeks.

In what might be one of his final pieces, for now, about the anniversary, Bramston today writes: “The Dismissal has been a lifelong obsession for me – born just weeks after – and it still has lessons to teach us. It is unlikely to be repeated not only because the three principal figures – Whitlam, Fraser and Kerr – were so unique, but because there is now institutional and political acceptance that it was not the way to run a country.”

Bramston has also covered the events in his new book Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New (HarperCollins), which was, of course, excerpted in The Australian. Bramston and his readers are probably looking forward now to a break from this forensic investigation into the Whitlam sacking.

How the Melbourne Herald reported the news from Canberra on November 11, 1975.

Although the media has been commemorating the 50th anniversary for many weeks, today is peak Remembrance Day. From Wednesday November 12 you can be sure most of the media will move on quickly.

While there will be many media consumers for whom the anniversary means little, people of a certain age or with an interest in significant historical events are still drawn to the dismissal like moths to a flame.

In 1975 I was a young factory worker in Melbourne having left school at 16. The deal with my parents was that I would finish my secondary schooling at night school which I was doing at University High School in Parkville.

On the day of the prime minister’s sacking I followed the events closely on a transistor radio at work, jumping between ABC 3LO and 3AW. Finishing work I joined a group of demonstrators voicing their anger at the sacking in Melbourne’s City Square. A group of us then moved to the gates of Victoria’s Government House to chant about what we saw as an abuse of vice regal power.

Night school was abandoned that evening though, as both students and their teachers found solace at a pub in inner-city Melbourne.