Newly released letters written by the former governor general show he regarded his forced resignation under the Fraser government as the ultimate betrayal

In the cryptic taxonomy of archives, the relationship between Sir John Kerr and the Queen stretches beyond the palace letters and into obscure files scattered throughout the National Archives of Australia and elsewhere. The most surprising of these is a new set of letters between Kerr and Sir Martin Charteris in the National Archives of Australia.

From all these archives – in personal letters, Kerr’s rambling handwritten notes, and his unguarded personal reflections – a common theme emerges: the involvement of the palace in every step Kerr took, and every decision he made, regarding the dismissal of Gough Whitlam and its gathering aftermath, including even his own resignation. It is impossible to separate Kerr’s decisions from his intractable view of his “duty” to the monarch and the monarchy, presented to him so clearly in the months before the dismissal by Queen’s private secretary, the unctuous Charteris.