The day the Dismissal saved a bored Canberra teenager’s afternoon

3 months ago 11

Opinion

November 15, 2025 — 5.30am

Listening to the radio this week, I discovered that almost every Australian of a certain age claims to have been on the steps of Parliament House in Canberra on the day of the Dismissal.

It’s a bit like Woodstock, the opening of the Sydney Opera House and the last Midnight Oil concert. If everyone who claims to have been there had been there, there’d be no one left.

But here’s the thing: I really was.

Former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam speaks on the Parliament House steps in Canberra after his government's dismissal on November 11, 1975.

Growing up as a teenager in Canberra in the 1970s had its problems. There was nowhere to buy a coffee after 6pm. The only place with good music was a “bistrotheque” – half disco, half bistro – at which you had to buy an overpriced chicken schnitzel as the price of entry. And every winter you’d beg for the sweet release of death because of the cold.

Being close to parliament on that particular day – November 11, 1975 – was one of the rare upsides to my adolescence. I was a few suburbs away, listening to the cricket on the radio with a group of friends from school. I don’t know why I agreed to listen to the cricket, a sport in which I had no interest. Actually, I had no interest in any sport. Pretending an interest in sport was a measure, I suppose, of that desperate teenage desire to fit in.

Anyway, the cricket commentary was interrupted with the breaking news of Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam government. We immediately jogged the few kilometres to Parliament House. I don’t claim we made it for the famous speech – “Well may God save the Queen because nothing will save the governor-general” – but we were there soon after, and stayed late into the night.

I still remember the excited feeling that we were witnessing history. What would happen next? A nationwide strike? Street battles with police? A civil war?

Canberra, famously, had been described as “a good sheep paddock – ruined”. To us it seemed an apt description. These days it’s a great city. I’d love to be a kid growing up there now. In the ’70s, though, the main excitement had been when Gus Petersilka placed some chairs on the pavement outside his cafe. Naturally, the police were called. Soon after, Gus’ chairs disappeared on the back of a government truck.

My father, who had a newsagency around the corner, was on Gus’ side. According to my pro-small-business father, Gus had survived a Nazi labour camp during the war, so understood exactly what he was dealing with when it came to the federal government’s Department of the Interior.

Richard Glover and Gough Whitlam in 2005.

Later, following extensive debate in the local paper, the chairs were returned, on the provision that Gus indemnify the government should anyone bump into his furniture. Now, of course, that part of Canberra is a sea of outdoor tables and chairs, people sipping cappuccinos with hardly a murmur from the local constabulary.

Back in 1975 we were hungry for action. I’d like to claim that on November 11 we were worried about our democracy, or outraged about the use of royal powers, but really we were sticking around in the hope that – for once – something might happen in our town.

In the event, of course, it was a fizzer. The national strike never happened. The civil war failed to start. Whitlam lost the election that followed.

Thirty years later, on the 2005 anniversary of the Dismissal, I had the chance, on my ABC radio show, of a face-to-face interview with Gough Whitlam. As a fond father himself, he’d been a fan of my Herald columns about Batboy and The Space Cadet, which, he said, was why he’d agreed. He turned up with a copy of his book, signed for Batboy.

Whitlam described Kerr and his social-climbing wife, calling her “Fancy Nancy”. He explained how Kerr had manufactured a trip to the UK so Fancy Nancy could meet the Queen. He was 89 but funny, sharp and still deliciously bitter about the Kerrs.

Sir John Kerr and wife Lady Anne Kerr at Sydney Airport in 1978.

He moved on to November 11 and I prodded him to repeat those famous words – the ones I’d missed first time around.

“So you said … ?” I prompted.

Whitlam laughed, knowing what I was after. Finally he complied. “You’ll remember there was a squeaky voice” – this a reference to the GG’s secretary – “followed by my voice, which, at that time, was very good.” He then recalled the famous phrase in full, before repeating the last bit: “Nothing will save the governor-general – and it didn’t! Because, you’ll remember, he went into exile with Fancy Nancy” – another delicious pause – “and what could be worse?”

Such sweet revenge, served so perfectly cold.

Back on the steps of parliament, 50 years before, we schoolfriends waited and waited. Like the listless aristocrats of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, we just wanted something to happen. Finally, late into night, the great Labor wit Fred Daly wandered out, entertained us with a passionate, funny, off-the-cuff speech, and then told us all to go home.

Obedient Canberra school students as we were, we did what we were told. The affable Fred Daly had told us we were dismissed, and that was good enough for us.