Gough and Margaret Whitlam

Edward Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister of Australia from December 1972 until 11 November 1975, the day his government was dismissed by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr — an event that remains the most consequential constitutional moment in Australian post-war political history. Margaret Whitlam, born Margaret Dovey, had married him in 1942, and was through every public phase of his career an unusually independent and visible Prime Ministerial spouse: a championship swimmer in her youth, a social worker and writer in her later life, and after the Whitlams left Canberra a public figure in her own right.

The Marathon Road apartment, 1975–2012

The Whitlams chose Darling Point as their post-Canberra home almost immediately after the Dismissal. They took a three-bedroom apartment on Marathon Road, in a small block of approximately ten flats with a swimming pool — a building of the kind that had become common on the peninsula in the 1960s and 70s, generously sized but architecturally unassuming. Gough is known to have listed himself on the building's lobby directory under the alias "Miltiades" — the name of the Athenian general who commanded the Greek forces at the Battle of Marathon — a characteristic Whitlam pun on his street.

They lived there together for thirty-seven years. The choice of a comparatively modest apartment, in a small block, on a quiet eastern suburbs street, was — like most of the Whitlams' post-political life — a deliberate one. There was no Whitlam estate, no Whitlam mansion. They had been the most prominent Australian household of the early 1970s, and they spent the four decades that followed living without conspicuous display in a Sydney suburb that suited them precisely.

The years after Margaret

Margaret Whitlam died at the Marathon Road apartment on 17 March 2012, aged ninety-two. Gough remained at the address for some time afterwards before relocating to Lulworth, a heritage-listed aged-care residence at Elizabeth Bay run by the St Luke's Hospital trust. He died there on 21 October 2014, at the age of ninety-eight.

Their thirty-seven years on Marathon Road are not commemorated by a plaque. The apartment block is not architecturally distinguished. But the choice — to live for nearly four decades in a quiet flat on a quiet street, on a peninsula that does not advertise its tenants — is characteristic of how the Whitlams chose to be Australian after the government had finished. The peninsula understood the choice and respected it. It still does.