This is a revised version of Gough Whitlam’s address to the Murdoch University Student Law Society.
Introduction by Professor Michael Blakeney – Dean of the Law School
It’s my very great honour to welcome Gough Whitlam to the Murdoch Law School. One of the reasons that Gough is here is that I was interviewed by the law students’ newspaper and asked who I would most like to spend the night with. I mentioned Gough!
Gough has had a profound influence on my life and on the lives of my generation. To understand that proposition, you have to appreciate the flavour of the political and intellectual climate of Australia in the mid to late sixties when I was a law student. To appreciate some of that I commend to you the autobiographical works and diaries of that great Western Australia, Paul Hasluck. He communicates something of the stench for what my generation considered to be the intellectual mediocrity and stultification of the post-Menzies years. Australian involvement in the Vietnam War was a tangible manifestation of the moral bankruptcy of our leadership at that time. In 1972 the younger generation, which at the time included me, looked to Gough Whitlam as a shining beacon in the darkness.