1919 - 2012

From childhood, Bondi-born Margaret Elaine Whitlam (née Dovey) lived in the public eye. As a junior swimming champion, she won the Australian Championship for the 220-yards breaststroke and in 1938 competed at the Empire Games in Sydney. In 1972 she became Australia’s ‘first lady’.

Margaret was born in 1919, when her family lived at Miller St, Bondi. She was the daughter of NSW Supreme Court judge Wilfred Dovey, who was a Waverley Council alderman (1935-36) and, like his statuesque daughter, a Bondi Amateur Swimming Club member.

She completed a degree at the University of Sydney, then practised as a social worker. In 1942, she married RAAF navigator (Edward) Gough Whitlam. He entered Federal Parliament in 1952 as the Labor member for Werriwa. Margaret took on public duties in the electorate while raising four children in Gough’s absence.

It annoyed Margaret that people assumed her political views were those of her husband. ‘I say what I think … I am not a mouthpiece for my husband or for the ALP.' Soon after Gough became prime minister in 1972, she spoke frankly in favour of equal pay for women, legalising abortion and her belief that marriage was not necessary unless children were involved.

While in the Lodge, she relished a chance to write a magazine column each week. It was her opportunity to share the extraordinary experience. ‘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.’ 

In 1974, Margaret was part of the Bondi Pavilion Theatre’s official opening.

Her response to the dismissal in 1975 was typically forthright. She thought that, instead of accepting the governor-general Sir John Kerr’s note withdrawing Gough’s commission, he 'should have torn it up, slapped Kerr and told him to pull himself together.'

After Gough's parliamentary career ended, Margaret had time for her love of the arts and travel. The Queen made her a member of the Order of Australia in 1983.

Margaret’s death in 2012 - a month short of her 70th wedding anniversary - ended one of the most extraordinary personal and political partnerships in Australian history. She is remembered locally in the Margaret Whitlam Recreation Centre in Waverley Park.

Courtesy of the Waverley library Local Studies Collection and the National Archives.