The 2023 Rod Wallace Lecture and THE SEARCH FOR THE PALACE LETTERS (Darryl Dellora, Australia, 2023)

Ray Edmondson, Chair of the Friends of National Film & Sound Archive writes: Professor Jenny Hocking (pictured above) delivered the 2nd Annual Rod Wallace Lecture on 28 November at the NFSA. The Lecture was titled: ‘Burnt files, lost files, and denials of public access: censoring Archives and the falsification of history’ and 

Both the text and the video recording are now available on the Friends website:

http://www.archivefriends.org.au/index.php/events-news/wallace-lectures

 

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Daryl Dellora’s film The Search for the Palace Letters will air on the ABC in the new year.  This film follows historian Professor Jenny Hocking as she fights a David and Goliath battle against the Australian Government and the British Royal Family in a landmark legal action. At stake is whether letters between former Governor General Sir John Kerr and HM Queen Elizabeth, written at the time of the constitutional crisis of 1975, are deemed private correspondence and therefore remain closed, or official documents that should be accessible to the Australian people. Running for more than four years, the Palace Letters Case was ultimately successful and opened the secret archives on the Palace's role in the unprecedented dismissal of the Whitlam Government. This documentary follows the personal struggle and immense legal battle faced by Hocking as she goes all the way to the High Court of Australia, the highest court in the land, in her bid to uncover the last piece of the extraordinary jigsaw that is the 1975 dismissal. She is motivated throughout by her determination that the Australian people have the right to know their own history..