The High Court’s decision could shed light on key questions including why Sir John Kerr acted in secret against a democratically elected prime minister, and if there was any explicit prior support from the Queen.

After three weeks of rising tension and wild rumours, November 11 began as a beautiful Canberra day, but by lunchtime the government was gone.
Kerr dismissed Whitlam without warning and made Liberal party leader Malcolm Fraser prime minister on condition that he advise calling an election.
On December 13 Whitlam’s Labor was thrashed at the polls, and received another electoral drubbing two years later, ending Whitlams political career.
Kerrs action spawned more than 20 books, numerous articles, even more conspiracy theories and a TV mini-series, and sowed the seeds for a nascent republican movement. The latter reached its zenith in the mid-90s, although the demand for an Australian head of state was decisively rejected in a November 1999 referendum.
Hocking, who has penned biographies of Whitlam and his one-time attorney-general and later High Court judge Lionel Murphy, is the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow with the Whitlam Institute, an emeritus professor at Monash University, a former director of its National Centre for Australian Studies, and has been remorseless in pursuing material on the dismissal.
She earlier revealed that High Court Justice Anthony Mason agreed with the advice of the then Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, who was also a former Liberal government attorney-general, that Kerr was constitutionally entitled to sack Whitlam.
However, Mason also advised Kerr that he should give Whitlam due warning of his thinking and intentions an action Kerr never took.
Fridays decision follows a four-year legal battle mounted by Hocking to secure access to the correspondence, including two rebuffs at the hands of the Federal Court. According to legal commentator Richard Ackland, how can you make letters setting out why you want to dismiss a democratically elected Prime Minister private?”.