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March 16th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Margaret Whitlam did more than any woman before her to bring life and personality to Australia’s most ill-defined job, being a prime minister’s wife.
Tall, smart and rarely afraid to give an opinion, she became an almost equal partner in the Gough and Margaret show which thrilled and affronted Australians during his prime ministership and continued to fascinate during a long and active life post-politics.
Yet Margaret remained, first and foremost, a loyal wife and mother; the personification of all those intelligent women who came into their prime in the 1960s and who wrestled to reconcile new, radical and liberating ideas with their traditional backgrounds.
She also occasionally hinted that, for all the richness of her life, she was not entirely satisfied with it, that she suffered frustrations and could have done more.
Margaret Elaine Dovey, who has died aged 92, was born on November 19 1919 in Bondi.
She had a privileged upbringing. Her father Wilfred became a NSW Supreme Court judge and her mother Mary was “full of good works”.
Margaret went to SCEGGS, Darlinghurst, an elite Anglican school, where she excelled at sport. She swam breastroke for Australia at the 1938 Empire Games. Her other love was the theatre.
To her disappointment, she wasn’t a prefect — perhaps because she’d been caught running a Melbourne Cup sweep.
Her greater regret, until she met the even taller Gough, was her 188cm frame.
They met at Sydney University just after World War II started.
“I do believe it was instant. I thought he was dreamy,” she recalled.
They married in April 1942, six weeks before he was called up by the RAAF. When their first son Antony was born, Gough was navigating bomber missions against the Japanese.
She gave up her social work before the birth and didn’t return to it until Cathy, the youngest of their four children, was 11. She later wondered if she shouldn’t have gone back to work earlier.
After the war the Whitlams moved to Cronulla and Gough threw himself into law and politics. In 1952 he won a by-election for the seat of Werriwa.
Margaret felt housebound and initially resented the way politics consumed her husband’s time.
After he became opposition leader in 1967, the media started taking an interest in her. It generally liked what it saw. However at this stage she still presented a comfortable, domestic image.
“Women’s Lib doesn’t really appeal to me,” she said then.
But she steadily became more forthright, asserting the right of politicians’ wives to have opinions of their own. The media liked that too.
Believing that she was a political asset, Labor strategists gave her a substantial role in the 1972 “It’s Time” election campaign.
Through a magazine column, radio and TV chat shows and interviews, she came across as an honest, thoughtful person with a mind of her own.
Asked what she thought of Sir William McMahon’s glamorous young wife Sonia, she replied: “I’m a different age, a different shape and a different person. My main decoration is, I suppose, my conversation.”
Influenced by Germaine Greer, she started embracing women’s issues, particularly abortion law reform.
Greer interviewed her just after the election and thought she was the best political wife in the world.
Margaret also understood the dilemma of all PM’s wives: “If you say nothing you’re just dumb. If you talk, you’re too talkative.”
There was ambivalence after Gough came to power.
The first entry in her diary as the PM’s wife started: “This is our first week at the Lodge and I’m loving it.”
Yet less than a month later she wrote: “This is my life and I must make the most of it…I’m envying the life I’ve left.”
Nevertheless, her diary for the first year, much of which was published in Woman’s Day, was largely a catalogue of travels with Gough — from dining with the Queen to opening country shows — plus golf and tennis, the theatre and meeting interesting people.
Her media honeymoon continued.
After a long news conference for women journalists — when she supported abortion reform, contraceptive advice, wages for housewives and legalising marijuana — one wrote:
“Dame Pattie (Menzies) said little. Zara (Holt) said a lot but achieved little. Bettina (Gorton) was intellectually bright but evasive and Sonia (McMahon) was uninvolved.
“Margaret Whitlam is the first female resident of the Lodge who’ll go in with guns blazing.”
When the Whitlams went to London, she delighted the bitchy British press, opening her news conference by saying: “Ask me an outrageous question and I’ll give you an outrageous answer.”
She did affront the guardians of protocol with her Woman’s Day account of dinner with the Queen at Windsor Castle — burbling away about the pink eiderdown, the paintings in the bathroom, the salmon, turkey and pineapple bombe menu and the Queen’s bouffant hair.
Her response to the criticism showed her growing confidence: “I came to represent all the ungainly people, the too-tall ones, the too-fat ones and the housebound as I’d been, who’d never go to China or Buckingham Palace and went through me.”
Inevitably, the media turned on her.
In August 1974 she was reported, a little out of context, saying inflation was “a lot of hooha”. She responded to the outrage that caused by savaging reporters as vultures, freeloaders and intruders.
Next month a newspaper started a new controversy by reporting her total pay packet — from a television chat show, her magazine column and as a director of Commonwealth Hostels — was more than $36,000 a year.
Gough was then getting, when allowances were included, $56,500.
ACTU president Bob Hawke — whom Margaret, in one of her worst predictions, said would never be PM — thought she was unwise.
As Labor’s fortunes declined, Margaret made more waves on women’s issues, but sensibly refused to comment on the loans affair, the main reason for its ultimate fall.
She was in Sydney on the momentous day of the dismissal.
“I just stood there. I was flummoxed,” she recalled.
Gough told her not to return to Canberra, so she moved straight out of Kirribilli House and into a flat they’d just bought. She even had to go out and buy a television so she could watch events unfold.
Labor was thrashed in the ensuing election and Margaret never forgave Governor-General Sir John Kerr.
“I can hate pretty well now,” she said.
She also hated the radio talk-back hosts, calling them died-in-the-wool Liberals who used their pernicious influence to hold suburban housewives in mental thraldom. The jocks, of course, bit back.
Margaret campaigned heavily in the 1977 election, saying a return to the Lodge would be a nice vindication and that this time she’d be much more her own person and would never again make herself totally available.
But Labor was again heavily defeated and Gough resigned.
The energetic Margaret gathered a wide range of responsibilities, from teaching English to migrants to being a director of the Sydney Dance Company. She wrote for magazines and newspapers and modelled clothes for a label called Think Big.
In 1983, with Labor back in power, Hawke appointed Gough Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO. Margaret, a little reluctantly, went to Paris with him.
She enjoyed the French capital but missed all her educational and cultural activities and her growing brood of grandchildren. Her luxurious life there was “self-indulgent” and caused her “huge waves of guilt”.
In 1985, 100,000 people at Sydney’s Domain waited to hear Joan Sutherland sing.
When the Whitlams, home on leave, walked in hundreds surged forward to shake their hands and pat their backs. They got a bigger reception than the Hawkes.
Margaret said: “It was a rather stunning experience.
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