Our Jewel

The Whitlam Institute's development has not gone at all the way I had originally planned!

Coming from the Brisbane Institute's highly successful city seminar program, I thought that the first and best thing that we should do at the Whitlam Institute was public seminars across the length and breadth of Western Sydney. My ambition was to rival Alan Jones and John Laws by airing the burning issues of the day, but of course at a new level of sophistication and rigour!

We did do some of that.

Professor Jamie Galbraith gave an oration on the rise of international inequality in the first Whitlam Institute lecture at Parramatta's Riverside Theatre last year on the 25 July. Professor Galbraith's talk was reported across the country and his widely reported predictions about the dismal state of the US economy have proved to be correct. On the 19th September we also featured the authors and Directors of the great US series A Force More Powerful that was aired on the Compass Program on the ABC in September

But great though these two events were, this was not the fortnightly event series I had imagined. Why, you may well ask, have we been so slow to get going?

Part of the reason is that I have discovered Gough again. Over the past six months its been my privilege to work with Mr. Whitlam's papers in the formation of the on-line exhibition of speeches and photographs that will be part of the activities involved in the naming of the Parramatta Library on the 14th March 2002. Until this point, I had thought that I knew Mr. Whitlam pretty well. However no-one could have prepared me for the extraordinary corpus that Mr. Whitlam's non-parliamentary papers represent.

Mr. Whitlam has never stopped attending ALP branch meetings! He has never stopped contributing, commenting, participating and offering thoughts about Australian public life and a wide variety of international issues and academic interests. When many others retired, or tired and gave up, Mr. Whitlam just kept going. When I first started to think about researching Mr. Whitlam's life in Western Sydney I did not expect literally hundreds of records of Mr and Mrs. Whitlam attending primary school and community events over their time at Cabramatta from 1957-1972.

However, even more extraordinary is the pace that Mr. Whitlam has kept up even at the age of 85. To give you an idea, from 1990-2 Mr. Whitlam gave over forty speeches on subjects such as Australia and UNESCO, Toulouse Lautrec, the centenary of Labour Day, the centenary of Arbor Day, the power of speech, living with the United Sates, Aboriginal Rights, Fred Daley, Australia and the World Heritage Commission, The Darwin Rebellion, Hunter Rail, Chifley, Hawke and Keating, the Goss Government, Amnesty International and many more. In 2001 Mr. Whitlam kept up the same pace and he has already spoken on, amongst other things, English and French Explorers in the Indian and Southern Oceans 1767-1840, the past, present and future of the Australian Constitution, the ALP Caucus Centenary, Chifley and Curtin, Leadership, Australasian Law, Joan Sutherland, the importance of going directly to the documents for the real sources of historical truth and knowledge, the 25th anniversary of the Family Court and the launch of the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Food Guide!

The above is just the tip of the iceberg, there are still many more speeches from 2001, and Mr. Whitlam's pace would leave many contemporary politicians bobbing in his wake.

As time has gone on I have found the work that Mr. Whitlam has done to be inspirational and an elixir for our times. There is simply no peer in terms of the richness, depth or magnitude of materials that Mr. Whitlam's non-parliamentary papers represent. It doesn't matter which side of politics you come from, whether you are far right or far left, there is simply nothing, that I am aware of as a contemporary historian, to compare with the Whitlam non-parliamentary collection as a prism from which to view contemporary Australia, Australia's role in international affairs and Australian politics in general. This is not even to mention Mr. Whitlam's role as Australia's antiquary of cultural and artistic treasures.

I hope that you will discover Gough again as I have done. Soon you will be able to see for yourself the extraordinary Whitlam collection unfolding on the web. The staff of the Whitlam Institute, with the help of Social Change Online, and Steven, Christina and Michael from Mr. Whitlam's office, have spent months burning the midnight oil scanning, processing and formatting Mr. Whitlam's photographs and speeches. From March 14th you will be able to see the volumes of work appearing here at the Whitlam Institute's web site. As time goes on this glimpse of the Whitlam collection will grow into a wide vista.

The University of Western Sydney owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Whitlam. Despite Mr. Whitlam's long association with Western Sydney, he did not have to leave his papers to the University of Western Sydney. I know this because my father in law attended St Pauls College at University of Sydney with Mr. Whitlam in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and I know of the great affection Mr. Whitlam has for those days, his old college where he was editor of the St. Paulian, and his old alma mater. With its huge resources and endowments it would have been easier for Mr. Whitlam to bestow on the University of Sydney his extraordinary papers.

But thankfully for UWS, and thanks to the efforts of the Vice Chancellor Professor Reid, that has not happened, and in typical Whitlam fashion it has been Mr. Whitlam who has led the fundraising for a Whitlam Reading Room to house his books and papers. This has meant giving up a great deal of his own time, and working with the Board of the Whitlam Institute, led by his son Mr. Nicholas Whitlam, to raise the funds to house the collection. Mr. Whitlam and the Board of the Institute have already raised over $60,000 to create a room to the books and physical objects that Mr. Whitlam has left to the university.

However, it is Mr. Whitlam's foremost wish that the Whitlam Institute does not become, in his words, "a mausoleum" and that is why this year we will return to my original expectations of the Whitlam Institute by holding events in every major part of Western Sydney on subjects such as "creating jobs in the dormitory suburbs of Western Sydney", "cosmopolitan, multicultural, multi-talented Western Sydney", "Parramattas Heritage", "Western Sydney;s Information Technology Hub" and many more.

Despite Mr. Whitlam's desire not to overly glorify his own papers, I wanted to tell you that I think they are unique and they create an extraordinary opportunity and a great responsibility for UWS. I look forward to telling you more about the Whitlam Collection of Books and Papers and the work that is being done in the lead up to the naming of the Whitlam Library on March 14. In the meantime please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to know anything about the Whitlam Institute. I have had my head down and been trying to use the resources that have been devoted to the Whitlam Institute as sparingly as possible over the past six months, but you will begin to hear more about our work, and I hope now to hear more from you, in the months ahead and into the 2000s.

Peter Botsman
Foundation Director
Whitlam Institute
2/2/02