No, me neither until today. Firstly, he’s not related to our own Robert Kerr, or at least not that I’m aware of. Anyway, for those of you who may be interested John Kerr AK, GCMG, GCVO, QC was the 18th Governor General of Australia, serving in that post between 1974 and 1977. Pretty boring so far. In 1975 he was right in the middle of what is now known as the 1975 Constitutional Crisis or more commonly as The Dismissal, which in Australia is considered to be the greatest constitutional crisis ever in the modern history of Australia. His involvement was to sack the incumbent PM at the time, Gough Whitlam of the Labor Party and replace him with Malcolm Fraser of the main opposition party. This, in effect, meant that he sacked the whole government. Now, 45 years later, the Supreme Court in Australia have allowed letters between John Kerr and Elizabeth Windsor relating to the sacking to be made public from the national archives. So why am I posting this on this forum? No reason, only that it would never have happened if John Kerrs nanna and grandad hadn’t decided in 1886 that Australia would be a better place to live than Sunderland where they came from.
Interesting post, I know many ships left Sunderland for Australia in the early days, including our very own City of Adelaide, or it should have been if our council had had any vision.
So twenty years after transportation stopped, someone decided that an island full of convicts was better than Sunderland
In fairness, in WA where I live we have only had 586 confirmed cases and nine deaths. Compared to elsewhere I’m not complaining with those figures. Our state premier took notice of the science and the advice he was given by the scientists, closed WA off to the rest of Australia and the world, strictly controlled regional borders within WA and regularly updated the state population with what was happening, what he was going to do and why. Most of us took it on board, hence the very low numbers.
I read about the Supreme Court Ruling that these letters can be released, with redactions. That in itself is interesting as it goes against the norm. So all in all I'm curios about their content. For the benefit of those interested in politics, the reason given for this most unusual action was that Mr Whitlam and his government were unable to get a budget Bill through Parliament. Had they tried it was believed that they would have lost the vote and as this would have been considered as a Vote of NO Confidence, would have had to go anyhow. So The Governor General in effect sacked the Government, appointed the Opposition as an Acting Government, dissolved both houses and called an election. His action was 'justified' (???) when the election returned the 'Acting Government' to power with large majorities in both houses. Mr Whitlam's famous leaving quote was 'God Save the Queen, because nobody's going to save The Governor General'. Interesting days. Australian politics seems, even today, to be sometimes a bit on the rough side.