March this year marked the 60th anniversary of a famous “gotcha” moment in 1963, when Labor leader Arthur Calwell and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, were photographed outside the Hotel Kingston in Canberra.
They were waiting for their party’s federal conference to settle a key election policy.
Inside, delegates – six from each state – deliberated. The photographs and their hostile treatment in The Daily Telegraph the next day by journalist Alan Reid were damaging. Reid decried Calwell’s “night watch” as “a sad commentary on the decline in status of Labor’s parliamentary leadership”.
