Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, with me, Ben

Henderson.

It's the 11th of November 1975, and we're at Parliament House in Canberra, the seat of

the Australian government.

Goff Whitlam, the country's democratically elected Prime Minister, has just been sacked

by the Governor-General, an official appointed by Queen Elizabeth II.

Now, this sounds like an old-fashioned wild west constitutional shootout, and in a sense,

that's exactly what it was.

This is Paul Kelly. He was a political correspondent at the time for a national newspaper called

the Australian. The sacking is seen as the most controversial moment in Australian political

history, eventually becoming known as simply the dismissal. This Australian shared his thoughts

with the BBC at the time.

There was a government elected by the people, that we go back to colonialism, and the governments

remove without the people having the right to say it.

So how did things get to this point? To understand what happened, we'll have to go back a few years.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time. The next little leader of the Australian Labour Party is the Goff Whitlam.

Goff Whitlam led the Australian Labour Party to victory in December 1972.

It was the first Labour electoral success for 23 years, a success in part due to Goff Whitlam's personal style.

Goff Whitlam was a self-styled man of destiny.

Whitlam stood tall at six foot five inches, saw himself as a visionary who was attempting to

transform Australia and running into a wall of conservative resistance.

Fast forward to 1975, and things weren't looking great, Whitlam's early success was marred by

...