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Australian troops in camp Mena in Egypt, circa 1914-1915.Phillip Schuler; courtesy of Australian War Memorial<\/p>\nWar, as we might ponder on this latest Anzac Day, is a pitiless beast.<\/p>\n
It produces heroes, villains and countless innocent victims, and there is often no end to a war for those touched by it.<\/p>\n
Physical, mental and moral injuries have no ceasefire date. Healing \u2013 if there is to be healing at all \u2013 often takes an age without a name.<\/p>\n
Arthur Gordon Whitlam, a young officer in the Australian 1st Divisional Ammunition Column, never got to a battlefield during World War I.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, he was a victim of that war, and it took almost three decades before his wounds could begin to heal.<\/p>\n
Australian troops in camp Mena in Egypt, circa 1914-1915.Phillip Schuler; courtesy of Australian War Memorial<\/p>\n
His world began to fall apart in 1915 and 1916 when he was based in Egypt, the stepping-off place to Gallipoli.<\/p>\n
A year later, his reputation was wrecked in northern France as World War I raged nearby on the Western Front.<\/p>\n
What was later revealed to be false evidence and incompetent and rushed judgment combined to all but ruin Whitlam\u2019s young life, almost as surely as if he had been wounded in the front line.<\/p>\n
His downfall came in a hurried court-martial run by British officers in the French village of Sailly-Sur-la-Lys near Armentieres in northern France in 1916.<\/p>\n
There, Whitlam, having been held under close arrest for four months and transported from Egypt to France with no opportunity to prepare a proper defence or to call witnesses, was found guilty \u2013 despite his protestations that the charges were absurd \u2013 of stealing items such as revolvers and field glasses from fellow officers in Egypt and sending them home to Australia.<\/p>\n
Whitlam, aged 25, was sentenced to be \u201ccashiered\u201d from the Army.<\/p>\n
He was stripped of his rank and sent home in disgrace.<\/p>\n
He spent the next 28 years fighting the Australian and British military and political machines to restore his name.<\/p>\n
At the end of it all, he was found to be innocent.<\/p>\n
On July 19, 1944, as the Battle of Normandy raged in Europe and Australian troops fought the Japanese in another world war, the governor-general of Australia, Lord Gowrie, officially exonerated Whitlam by quashing his 1916 court-martial conviction.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/abd4f2084d64d7f8effbbdb2117cc383a6611a64.jpeg\")
The governor-general, Lord Gowrie, inspects a regiment in 1939. He would go on to quash Whitlam\u2019s conviction.Fairfax Photography<\/p>\n
The decision came after Australia\u2019s most senior military and legal authorities \u2013including the commander-in-chief, General Thomas Blamey, the adjutant-general, Lieutenant General V. A. H. Lloyd, and attorney-general Dr H.V. Evatt \u2013 unanimously agreed that Whitlam had been innocent all along.<\/p>\n
A panel of eminent barristers damned the original court-martial as a travesty of justice.<\/p>\n
Blamey\u2019s file on the matter condemned the evidence of the primary witness against Whitlam in furious terms: \u201cNo witness has ever given evidence so vulnerable. Cross-examination would have decisively exposed its great weaknesses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Attorney-general Evatt compared Whitlam\u2019s experience with the most infamous cashiering in military history, that of French officer Alfred Dreyfus in 1894.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis case is on all fours in many ways with the Dreyfus case and should be quashed,\u201d Evatt wrote in 1944. (\u201cOn all fours\u201d is legal idiom meaning that the facts and circumstances of one case are substantially the same as another.)<\/p>\n
Dreyfus, a French Army officer who was found guilty on a cooked-up charge of treason in 1894, was subjected to the cashiering ritual of \u201cdegradation\u201d \u2013 his sword was broken in two, his rank was physically stripped from his uniform in public and he was sentenced to rot on Devil\u2019s Island off French Guiana.<\/p>\n
![\"Alfred](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/e93b7e80b1ea41dd1ec8771a05f500e223640482.jpeg\")
Alfred Dreyfus depicted during the period of his retrial.<\/p>\n
The French writer Emile Zola brought the injustice to a head when he famously wrote a scorching article headed \u201cJ\u2019Accuse\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dreyfus was brought home to France and eventually exonerated in 1906.<\/p>\n
Whitlam was spared the full degradation ritual, but he had no literary champion, and he lived under the cloud of being a dishonourable thief more than twice as long as Dreyfus\u2019 misery.<\/p>\n
Yet he prevailed.<\/p>\n
In his ruling, the governor-general directed that the original proceedings of the general court-martial be quashed and that Whitlam be \u201crelieved of all the consequences of his conviction\u201d.<\/p>\n
Whitlam was retrospectively appointed to his former rank of lieutenant, backdated to June 17, 1916 \u2013 the date he was dismissed from the Army \u2013 and his medals were returned.<\/p>\n
He waived any right to compensation. He just wanted his honour and his good name restored, he said.<\/p>\n
If the name Whitlam rings a bell, you are not mistaken.<\/p>\n
Arthur Gordon Whitlam \u2013 always known as Gordon \u2013 was the uncle of Gough Whitlam, who would become Australia\u2019s prime minister in 1972.<\/p>\n
![\"General](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/e515767b2bc927875a02d8c59cd7ec6f5af27557.jpeg\")
General Thomas Blamey\u2019s leather-bound file on Arthur Gordon Whitlam, held in the National Archives of Australia.Tony Wright<\/p>\n
Yet the story of Gordon Whitlam\u2019s disgrace and eventual absolution is all but unknown in Australian history. His exoneration was gazetted and reported in newspapers in 1944, but news of the war swamped it.<\/p>\n
The whole sorry story resides in hundreds of pages of old documents held in the vast morgue of the National Archives of Australia in North Melbourne.<\/p>\n
Central to the numerous files is a large blue leather-bound book bearing the title, in gilt, \u201cEx-Lieut. A.G. Whitlam General Court Martial 1916. Submission to quash by Commander-in-Chief A.M.F. 1944\u201d.<\/p>\n
Within that volume, prepared on behalf of the man who led Australia\u2019s military forces in World War II, Blamey, is a devastating timeline of official stonewalling and duckshoving, despite authorities right up to a prime minister knowing or suspecting since the early 1920s that Whitlam should never have been convicted.<\/p>\n
![\"General](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/e640110a46b3621c6f5b210038c0e7c933e95b3c.jpeg\")
General Sir Thomas Blamey in 1944.<\/p>\n
It took almost to the end of the next conflagration \u2013 World War II \u2013 to have it proved beyond doubt that he was the victim of a travesty of justice.<\/p>\n
The court in Sailly-Sur-la-Lys accepted the word of Ernest Edward Fowle, Whitlam\u2019s batman (a military servant), that Whitlam had packed a large box in his tent in Egypt that was sent to Whitlam\u2019s father in Australia and found by Customs at Port Melbourne to contain the stolen items.<\/p>\n
Whitlam protested at his court-martial that he did not pack the box and had no idea what was in it.<\/p>\n
He had simply instructed his batman to pack personal belongings to be sent back to Australia that he would not need in Gallipoli, where he expected to go within days, he declared. (In fact, Whitlam became ill and did not go to Gallipoli.)<\/p>\n
He argued it would be absurd for an officer to openly ship a large trunk of stolen property to his father in Australia, knowing it would be inspected closely by Customs.<\/p>\n
At the end of two days of hearings, his argument was dismissed.<\/p>\n
It was as if, after the Army\u2019s trouble of bringing a large tin trunk loaded with items ranging from saddles, clothing and pistols back from Australia to France, the court needed a conviction. Besides, Whitlam had been under close arrest for four months, as if his guilt was already decided.<\/p>\n
He was found guilty on only four of 10 charges \u2013 two of stealing (a pistol, an overcoat and items of government equipment valued at \u00a318) and two of receiving stolen binoculars.<\/p>\n
Court-martial documents show that the batman changed his evidence several times regarding the number of boxes and their storage during the hearing.<\/p>\n
To cap it off, the prosecuting officer mounted the extraordinary and erroneous legal argument that \u201cdenial of possession [of stolen goods] is evidence of guilt\u201d.<\/p>\n
Few fates could be worse for a young military officer than to be cashiered.<\/p>\n
Whitlam\u2019s civilian career as an accountant and auditor was destroyed when he got home to Melbourne.<\/p>\n
Before he joined the Army, he was employed as chief clerk, cashier, accountant and assistant secretary by the Commercial Travellers\u2019 Association of Melbourne. He was so valued that when he enlisted, his employer wrote to the minister for defence asking that he be held back as \u201che could not be spared\u201d.<\/p>\n
But when he was dismissed from the Army, the Incorporated Institute of Accountants, informed by the defence department that Whitlam had been cashiered after being found guilty of stealing and receiving, refused his professional licence.<\/p>\n
Whitlam appealed to the British Army Council and to the Australian military in 1917 to quash his convictions.<\/p>\n
The Army Council denied an appeal on the grounds that the court-martial was properly convened, and the Australian military said the Court of Review had no jurisdiction.<\/p>\n
Another appeal to the defence minister in 1923 was denied, despite Whitlam producing a letter he had written to his father from Egypt on September 19, 1915, in which he expressed puzzlement that his revolver, field glasses, compass and other gear was missing. The letter \u2013 which had not been available during the court-martial \u2013 speculated that the items may have been packed mistakenly into his trunk by Fowle, and he asked his father to send them back to him, as he would need them in Gallipoli.<\/p>\n
Years later, legal reviewers declared the letter showed \u201cclearly and beyond all reasonable doubt that Whitlam was ignorant\u201d of the stolen goods being in his trunk, and it alone justified quashing his conviction.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/4db28131f5e16941e21a3627638c08a81a7f5758.jpeg\")
A 1919 photo of prime minister Billy Hughes with Australian soldiers.AAP\/Shrine of Remembrance<\/p>\n
Soon after Whitlam\u2019s appeals in 1917 and 1921 were dismissed, prime minister Billy Hughes, Australia\u2019s solicitor-general Sir Robert Garran and other senior military and legal figures made clear in written notes held by the archives that they knew or suspected Whitlam had been wrongly convicted.<\/p>\n
Precisely how Whitlam\u2019s predicament came to the ears of such illustrious figures is not clear.<\/p>\n
Historian Greg Pemberton has speculated that Gordon Whitlam\u2019s brother Fred \u2013 Gough\u2019s father \u2013 may have had influence. Fred Whitlam was a senior figure in Garran\u2019s office, and by 1943 was Crown solicitor and a legal adviser to the attorney-general, H.V. Evatt. The files in the national archives, however, make no mention of Fred Whitlam.<\/p>\n
What is clear is that Gordon Whitlam\u2019s campaign to be exonerated was driven for many years by the Melbourne law firm established by the lawyer who had appeared for him in France, Major Frank P. Derham.<\/p>\n
Derham, who never wavered in his belief that Whitlam was innocent, was hampered from presenting a strong defence during the court-martial because he was actively commanding an artillery battery in combat at the time.<\/p>\n
He could only be spared for \u201crushed visits\u201d to the court-martial, which was held about 12 kilometres behind the battle front.<\/p>\n
Whitlam stated he saw Derham for only 10 minutes before the court-martial began, meaning the lawyer was \u201ccompletely unprepared\u201d to present the case.<\/p>\n
As early as 1921, the head of Australia\u2019s department of prime minister, Percy Deane, wrote to prime minister Hughes saying he had been advised that \u201cevidence of the most conclusive character could be produced to show that Ernest Edward Fowle [the batman whose evidence had sunk Whitlam at the court-martial] was a thief, a liar, and a rogue generally\u201d and \u201ceverything pointed to him being the person who committed the offences for which Whitlam was punished\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hughes wrote that \u201cprima facie\u201d evidence suggested an inquiry was warranted.<\/p>\n
The minister for defence, Senator George Pearce, wanted the Whitlam case buried, arguing that if it was reconsidered, it would open the floodgates to other cases in which Australian soldiers had been convicted by courts-martial.<\/p>\n
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Senator George Pearce (centre), wartime minister for defence.<\/p>\n
By 1923, however, Garran had studied the file and wrote that in his opinion, the conviction should be quashed.<\/p>\n
In 1926 Whitlam, employing a law firm in Durban and a private investigator, found Fowle in South Africa, where he was living under a false name.<\/p>\n
Fowle had deserted the Army on his way back to Australia, jumping ship in South Africa with a young woman he had misrepresented to military authorities as his daughter (and who later gave birth).<\/p>\n
His wife was left abandoned in Australia. She presented an affidavit portraying him as an abusive drunk.<\/p>\n
Fowle, in the presence of South African lawyers and Whitlam, signed a statutory declaration reversing his evidence to the court-martial.<\/p>\n
He swore that: \u201cI am convinced that Mr Whitlam did not receive or take the articles in question nor do I believe that he had any knowledge thereof.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Whitlam provided this to Australian military authorities and the solicitor-general, he was offered a pardon. He refused on the grounds that a pardon implied he was guilty.<\/p>\n
Whitlam was left without resolution for another 18 years until 1944, when Blamey, alerted to Whitlam\u2019s predicament by the adjutant-general, ordered a review of the case.<\/p>\n
He appointed three eminent lawyers to look into the voluminous documents generated over 28 years. One of them, H.G. Alderman, KC \u2013 one of the most prominent barristers in Australia \u2013 wrote in a covering note to his lengthy opinion that \u201cI started off being bored and a doubting Thomas\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018It is my training as a barrister which has aroused the anger at this travesty of justice.\u2019<\/p>\n
H.G. Alderman, KC<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I went on I became more and more angry,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat anger does not influence my opinion as counsel \u2013 on the contrary, it is my training as a barrister which has aroused the anger at this travesty of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two other KCs, Sir Edmund Herring (later chief justice of Victoria) and Brigadier Eugene Gorman, chief inspector Army, agreed with Alderman that Whitlam was innocent and should be exonerated.<\/p>\n
But why had Fowle lied to the court-martial, effectively condemning Whitlam?<\/p>\n
Fowle, Whitlam believed, had stolen pistols, binoculars and other items from officers\u2019 tents around the military camp in Egypt, knowing he could get a good price from newly arrived officers who needed to purchase such things before leaving for Gallipoli.<\/p>\n
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Australian troops in Egypt, c. 1914-1915.Australian War Memorial<\/p>\n
He had hidden them in Whitlam\u2019s large tin trunk before taking the trunk for storage, where it could be expected to sit for several days before being collected by Thomas Cook and Co for shipment, Whitlam believed. He had given Fowle the key to the trunk, asking that it be mailed to his father, though it never arrived.<\/p>\n
Fowle had believed Whitlam was leaving for Gallipoli the next day. He would then be free to retrieve the box, remove the stolen items and sell them.<\/p>\n
But Whitlam, having fallen ill, did not go to Gallipoli. Fowle was sent there instead, robbing him of his chance to complete his plan.<\/p>\n
The box, inscribed with Whitlam\u2019s father\u2019s address and still holding the stolen items, was duly collected and shipped to Australia.<\/p>\n
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