Whitlam’s legacy is one of possibility and hope. He showed us what a brave, grown up Australia could look like.

In 1938, a 21-year-old Gough Whitlam enrolled in a Greek class as part of his classicist education at the University of Sydney.

His professor was only a few years older. At 25, Enoch Powell had been appointed the youngest professor in the British Empire.

Whitlam would later tell friends and colleagues that he recognised he had been in the presence of a “brilliant mind” but the “best” decision he made was to leave it at just the one year.

Powell would leave Australia shortly after, fuelled with the need to ‘kill or be killed’ in World War II and his later mission to divide Britain on race, his racist and inflammatory speech ‘Rivers of Blood’ still considered a rallying call for white supremacists.

Whitlam would apply his own brilliance to reforming Australia, its peoples and its place in the world, for the betterment of the nation and those who dwelled within, as a whole.

The three years he spent as steward of the government still reverberates 50 years later, but among the biggest impacts is the spotlight on just how cowed, how timid, how small our politics has been since.

Much is made of Whitlam’s decree that you either “crash through or crash” and his doggedness, dismissal of the usual order of things, cunning and intellect and he is usually cast as Odysseus or a canny Icarus whose policies flew too close to the sun.

But that has never been the whole story. Whitlam’s brilliance wasn’t just in his socialist reformist principles, but in knowing how to borrow from the best ideas. Whitlam could recognise the brilliance of Powell and often wove his classist education through his public life, but he also knew what no longer served him.

Whitlam was certain in himself, and what was right, in a way we have not seen in subsequent politicians. His legacy is often pointed to by the Australian Labor Party as the foundations of what the modern party stands for, but Whitlam would not recognise much of himself and his ideas in this party. When the capitalists, corporatists and conservatives took down Whitlam, they also struck a long-lasting blow against political courage in mainstream progressives.

Whitlam’s government was the victim of a concerted campaign, not just against him, but his ideas. Against the hope and inspiration the policies inspired among the general population.  But it was also a victim of a party structure which refused to defend its leader, or itself, instead starting the path to conciliatory, centrist politics that has reached the inevitable endpoint of a Labor government refusing to instigate much needed reforms because of the lack of bipartisan support.

When you read of those three years and the agenda Whitlam spearheaded, from introducing Medibank to recognising the need for a petroleum and minerals authority (a battle he sadly lost) to establish Australian ownership of natural resources, to divorcing Australia from it’s British and American overseers (one of the reasons his removal became so urgent), fighting the Country Party’s gerrymandering with one vote, one value, establishing free tertiary education (which Bob Hawke would later lay down the groundwork to help destroy), defying colonist history and attitudes by giving the Gurindji people their land back and drafting the NT Land Rights Act which Malcolm Fraser subsequently passed into law, his arts policy and deep belief Australia was a bigger nation than its leaders following Curtin and Chifley had allowed for, ending conscription and pulling Australia out of Vietnam while facing down the unelected swill of military brass – you can see why so many forces came together to stop him.

Whitlam wasn’t perfect. But he was big. He was brave. But mostly, he was rational. He bulldozed his way through the incrementalist policy that kept Australians small, and scared and ill-educated and insular because he knew the evidence was on his side. There is debate over whether Whitlam, the self-described “Maximus” of Fabians, could be considered a Fabian, given he had no time for gradual or gentle reform. But that too is a sign of Whitlam’s ability to do what so many modern political leaders cannot – to adapt to the times. Rapid reform was needed in the Australia of the 1970s. Conservative governments, riding on the coat-tails of post-war reformists, set about creating a middle class of acolytes, always warning someone else was coming for what they had earned, and that if they had not ‘earned’ it, then it was not deserved. Never mind that it was socialist and Keynesian policies that had built the Australia they were now desperate to preserve. Never mind that without big government and big government thinking, the life they had convinced themselves was earned on nothing, but grit and merit was nothing but a populist fever dream.

Whitlam knew the role of government and how to wield it. But he also knew the role of leadership. Of not allowing mealy mouthed vested interests to narrow the debate window to a reflective strip.

Whitlam would not have stood for the climate change ‘debate’ that held Australia’s political and media classes hostage for two decades. He would not have refused to reform the tax system because of fears the ‘battlers’ would turn against him. He would not have ignored rising inequity and a housing system that relied on wealth and luck to provide shelter and stability. He would not have allowed the Israeli lobby to dictate Australia’s foreign policy on genocide. He would not have signed Australia up to further military servitude to the Americans. We know that, because he didn’t.

Whitlam wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t have all the answers, but it wasn’t just his bravery which set him apart from today’s brand of politicians and politics. It was his flexibility. That he allowed himself to keep learning, to keep looking at what was possible, while using the language of class against those who naturally seek to oppress.

Whitlam was not Odysseus or Icarus – he was Cassandra, doomed to speak the truth and be ignored.

Whitlam’s legacy is one of possibility and hope. And of showing what is possible when the Left adopts the hallmarks of the right and pushes through no matter the pushback.

Whitlam was a rarity in modern Labor leaders in that he was not afraid of power. Not of it and crucially, not of using it. Since then, Australia’s progressive leaders have slowly shrunk themselves into shadows of possibilities, where middle of the road consensus and civility politics takes precedent over the much-needed structural reform and forward-thinking leadership the nation craves. The 50 years since Whitlam’s dismissal shows us just how much we have lost.

In this age of ‘sensible’ (read cowardly) mainstream progressivism, where leaders appear desperate to appeal to the right and prove to their critics they are not radicals, where the mainstream foil to conservative insanity is to not use power when handed it to improve lives because of the fear of upsetting those who will never care about more than maintaining their own power and the status quo, all they have done is give way to the right.

Whitlam, for his faults, refused to yield on progressive ideals and instead of celebrating what he achieved, we treat it as a cautionary tale.

His power was at looking at the alternatives to what existed, seeing the opportunities, and saying yes – and more importantly, fuck no, when needed.

Whitlam showed us what a brave, grown up Australia could look like. And 50 years later, you have to wonder – is it even possible to make Australia brave again?

Amy Remeikis is chief political analyst at the Australia Institute and a contributing editor at The New Daily.

Originally published as A Nation Craving Braveness in the Spring 2025 edition of Meanjin.