John Kerr (governor-general)
Sir John Robert Kerr AK, GCMG, GCVO, QC (24 September 1914 – 24 March 1991) was the 18th Governor-General of Australia. He dismissed the Labor government of Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975, marking the climax of the most significant constitutional crisis in Australian history. He had previously been the 13th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
Kerr was born in Balmain, a working-class suburb of Sydney, where his father was a boilermaker. He entered the Fort Street Boys' High School, and later won scholarships to the University of Sydney, where he graduated in law with first class honours and the University Medal, before being called to the New South Wales bar in 1938. At Fort Street he met H. V. Evatt, who later became Leader of the Australian Labor Party and then a judge of the High Court of Australia, and became a protege of Evatt for many years. In 1938 Kerr married Alison "Peggy" Worstead, with whom he had three children. He spent World War II working for an Australian intelligence organisation, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, a fact that later gave rise to speculation about an intelligence role in the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. In 1946 he became principal of the Australian School of Pacific Administration and the first Secretary-General of the South Pacific Commission.
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