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Governor-General Sir John Kerr's dismissal of the elected Whitlam Government in 1975, more or less at the behest of the Liberal-Country Party Coalition led by Malcolm Fraser, was among the most momentous events in Australian political history. Born into a privileged life Whitlam joined the Australian Labor Party, rose to be its Parliamentary leader and took it into power after twenty-three years in the wilderness. But the pace of change scared too many people, and sudden changes in the world economic environment threw down challenges he just could not overcome. Nor could he overcome the local political challenges thrown down by the conservative forces,and he and his colleagues seemed determined to keep providing him with the ammunition they needed to shoot him down. On 11 November 1975, they did.

The election of the Whitlam government in 1972 marked a turning point in 20th century Australia. Shaking off the vestiges of two decades of conservative rule, Gough Whitlam brought new ideas, new policies and new people to the task of governing

"We were a motley mob, we sans-culottes of Canberra …"In this vastly entertaining book, Mungo MacCallum captures the spirit of a nation-changing time. He portrays the Whitlam government's key figures - from Gough and Margaret to Lionel Murphy, Bill Hayden and Jim Cairns - as well as "the other mob" in opposition - Billy McMahon, John Gorton, Malcolm Fraser and many more.The Whitlam Mob addresses some crucial questions: What was the night of the long prawns? Who was the playboy of the parliament? And who was "the toe-cutter"?This is Mungo at his best: vivid

Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- 1 'We're In' -- 2 'Euphoria, Absolute Euphoria' -- 3 Colonial Relics -- 4 Action Painting -- 5 Night of the Long Prawns -- 6 A Toothpick in the Raging Sea -- 7 A Magnificent Obsession -- 8 Fire-eaters -- 9 'The Falsification of Democracy' -- 10 The Third Man -- 11 'An Ending Fitting for the Start' -- 12 By the Stroke of a Pen -- 13 A Divided Soul -- 14 'It's His Name' -- 15 The Brave Idea of UNESCO -- 16 'My Best Appointment' -- Epilogue: 'I never said I was immortal, merely eternal' -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgements -- Index

Australia's constitutional crisis of 1975 was not simply about the precise powers of the Senate or the Governor-General. It was about competing accounts of how to legitimate informal constitutional change. For Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, and the parliamentary tradition that he invoked, national elections sufficiently legitimated even the most constitutionally transformative of his goals. For his opponents, and a more complex tradition of popular sovereignty, more decisive evidence was required of the consent of the people themselves. This book traces the emergence of this fundamental constitutional debate and chronicles its subsequent iterations in sometimes surprising institutional configurations: the politics of judicial appointment in the Murphy Affair; the evolution of judicial review in the Mason Court; and the difficulties Australian republicanism faced in the Howard Referendum. Though the patterns of institutional engagement have varied, the persistent question of how to legitimate informal constitutional change continues to shape Australia's constitution after Whitlam