In his just-released memoir, historian and former diplomat Lachlan Strahan recalls being picked up from his Melbourne primary school by a neighbour on November 11, 1975, the day Gough Whitlam was sacked as prime minister. His politically active mother "was so upset she didn't trust herself behind the wheel".

Journalist Margo Kingston was a teenager and not political at the time. She remembers going to bed that night, pulling the covers over her head and listening on the radio. The next day, she organised a march around her Brisbane school.

The Dismissal is one of those "memory moments" for many Australians who were adults or even children when it happened. They can tell you what they were doing when they heard the news. It was an event that embedded itself in the mind, like news of US pr

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