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Gough Whitlam: A Personal Retrospective (Read 560 times)
RonPrice
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Australian Politics

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George Town Tasmania
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Gough Whitlam: A Personal Retrospective
Oct 25th, 2014 at 8:39pm
 
Part 1:

When one writes about politics, the people and the events, the ideas and the issues, one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other and engages millions in hair-splitting discussions on topics about which they usually or, at least, often know very little. Often the opinions are endless, opinions which get dropped-about now in cyberspace's social media and elsewhere, and in real space.

I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement more than half a century later.  I am now 70.  My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s.  It was in those early, those embryonic, years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. That in-house political discussion was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes in what were my pre-puberal years, and the scene has changed little in the last several decades, some 60 years of my life-narrative.

But such experience of political wrangling in my childhood and adolescent years has not prevented me from being interested in the political world.  Nor does it prevent me now as I go through these years of my retirement from a 50 year student and paid employment life, 1949 to 1999. 

I just finished watching a two-part doco on Gough Whitlam.1  He was Australia’s 21st Prime Minister from 1972 to 1974 just after I arrived in Australia from Canada when I was in my late 20s as an international pioneer from the Canadian Baha'i community.  I wrote the first draft of this statement after watching this political-doco in the evening of my life, early or late it is hard to say.  I updated this statement today on hearing of the passing of Gough Whitlam on 21/10/14, and on seeing that doco yet again in the first 24 hours after his passing.

Part 2:

More books have been written about Whitlam, including his own writings, than about any other Australian Prime Minister.  According to Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, for a period of at least a decade, the Whitlam era was viewed almost entirely in negative terms, but that has changed. Paul Kelly(1947- ), an Australian political journalist and author who has written seven books on political events in Australia, wrote the following 3 paragraphs on hearing of Whitlam's passing at the age of 98 yesterday:

"Gough Whitlam’s passing is a sad moment for the nation, but it is the time to recognise one of the most extraordinary and inspiring figures produced by the Australian nation and our democracy. Gough’s glories and follies were writ large. Nothing he did was small, mediocre or apologetic. He was a giant in stature, learning, presence and achievement. Nobody who ever met Whitlam will forget him and those who dealt with him regularly in political life will retell Whitlam stories to the end of their days."

"He was a prime minister yet he became a figure transmitted into our national mythology, joining that bizarre cast of uniquely Australian figures that include Ned Kelly, Don Bradman, Phar Lap, Charles Kingsford Smith and Nellie Melba, among others. The great paradox of Gough was his abiding love of tradition yet his visionary sense of Australia’s future. His mind was an organised expanse of rigid, disciplined rationality yet his temperament was explosive, thrilling, funny and egocentric."

"This implanted the fantastic contradiction at the heart of his career and government, the implementation of the most planned agenda in the nation’s history. It was rocked by excess, upheaval and boundless impatience. Gough called it “crash through or crash”. He meant it and he lived it and, as a consequence, the Whitlam government became the best of times and the worst of times."

Part 3:

Kelly's book, The Dismissal was used as the basis of the television miniseries The Dismissal in 1983. I used this film, this miniseries-doco, when I was a lecturer in politics to matriculation students in Western Australia a decade later.  Whitlam didn’t easily rise to the top to become Prime Minister; he had to fight to get there.1  He did that fighting all the way back to the same year my mother joined the Baha’i Faith: 1953.  I was only 9, then, and living in Ontario Canada.

Whitlam’s only free ride into the political arena came on the winds of social change that woke up conservative Australia and helped deliver the Australia Labor Party (ALP) victory in 1972.  By then I was 28, living in the dry dog-biscuit land of northern South Australia, and teaching high school at the beginning of what became, at least for me as I look back over 70 years of living, a rich and rewarding career in the world of teaching and tutoring, lecturing and adult education.

I had arrived in Australia on 12 July 1971.  In the week before my arrival Gough Whitlam, then the leader of the opposition Labor party, visited China as did Henry Kissinger. Little did I know, of course, as I was travelling from Toronto Canada to Hawaii and on to Melbourne and Adelaide.  For most people, the comings-and-goings of the world's celebrities on the political stage act as a background to the intimacies of their private and family lives, their employment and various interest and activity interests.

Part 4:

I'll mention only a few details in relation to Whitlam's rise in the Labor Party after entering Parliament in 1953. I leave it to readers to follow the rest of his story.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania
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married for 45 years, a teacher for 35, a writer and editor for 13, and a Baha'i for 53(n 2012).  I have 10 books on the internet and they are all available free of charge.
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