TRIBUTES are flowing from across the political divide for former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, remembered as a political colossus, social visionary and friend of regional NSW.
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Mr Whitlam, who was elected to the top job in 1972 before being sensationally dismissed from office three years later, passed away yesterday, age 98.
He has been credited with making Australia a more inclusive and compassionate society, delivering free university education and universal healthcare, ending conscription and the death penalty and making Advance Australia Fair our national anthem.
A deeply polarising figure, particularly in conservative strongholds like the New England/North West, Mr Whitlam visited the region in 1995 as Tamworth’s Australia Day ambassador, also opening the new visitors’ information
centre.
Tamworth City Council’s deputy mayor at the time, James Treloar, said Mr Whitlam’s visit divided the community.
“We got hate mail when people found out he’d be opening the visitors’ centre,” Cr Treloar said.
“But he was just wonderful: enormously intelligent, a great speaker and a fantastic sense of humour. “He gave greater social justice to Australia than any other person.
“He was a true statesmen who thought about the next generation, not just the next election.”
It was Mr Whitlam’s charisma and towering presence that most struck local ALP life member Bill Forrest.
“I met him that day and everyone wanted to shake his hand,” Mr Forrest, a former ALP candidate, said.
“He had an incredible presence about him and made an enormous contribution to Australian political history.”
Tamworth woman Charna Graham had a more personal recollection of Mr Whitlam, having become friends with him while operating a business next to his electorate office in Liverpool in the early ’70s.
“We knew him quite well socially and he was very charming and always a gentleman,” Mrs Graham said.
“When he walked into a room, you knew he was there, and not because he spoke the loudest.”
New England MP Barnaby Joyce praised Mr Whitlam in Parliament yesterday as a man of “bravado and presence”.
“This bravado and colour gave Whitlam presence,” Mr Joyce said.
“This bravado and colour was emblematic of courage, and courage and presence gave nurture to vision-courage, presence, vision and wit.
“Whitlam was a breath of fresh air.
“Whitlam also had a vision of decentralisation. Gough Whitlam showed this vision in pushing the Labor Party to adopt policies that pushed their focus past the outer suburbs of major cities and into regional towns and growth centres of inland Australia.”
