Just as importantly, Gough trod on the ground as much as in the clouds. Some spoke of the achievements of his prime ministership in terms of national and international political landmarks and reforms; Whitlam himself sometimes thought his enduring achievement was in providing most Australians with sewerage services in the 1970s. "I found half the nation unsewered; I left it fully flushed," he joked. It was, at first at least, politically of as much importance in changing the lives of working class Australians as reforms to health, including Medicare, to education, including the establishment of the Schools Commission and the abolition of university fees, reforms to markets and the law, and a new and more confident and nationalistic approach to arts, culture and international affairs.

When Whitlam came to power in late 1972, the Labor Party he led had been out of power since 1949, and had wasted many bitter years in infighting, schism, and payback, seemingly at best slightly more daring, socialist and welfarist in its policies than a settled government, established by Robert Menzies, itself a believer in an active role of government in the economy and national affairs.

Whitlam's achievement was, first, to reform his party, and its branches, to be an engine room of progressive ideas and policies, to make it outward rather than inward looking and more concerned with the practicalities of achieving and using power than so completely pure in spirit, and with such a jihadist approach to deviance, as to be almost unelectable. In this process, he also engaged with an emerging middle class – of which he himself was a symbol – to recreate a fresh enthusiasm for ideals, sacrifice and social improvement that became one of the reasons his legend is still so powerful.

Beyond that, he took a divided and just heavily defeated party to power within two terms with a program involving all aspects of national government, including many projects new to Commonwealth involvement. His was not a government that won power by promising to increase aged pensions by a small amount, or some new scheme for scholarships. Rather he worked his front bench – the first in Australian history to be allocated "shadow" portfolios – to work hard on developing coherent policies, and himself drew together many of the strings so that the all aspects of the program were seen to have common themes and to complement each other.

This was a process not achieved by focus groups, advertising agencies and young political careerists – though there were some about even then. It was done by mobilising party branches, by engaging with public policy and program experts, and by getting the electorate excited. There were ample practical goodies on offer, but also promises to redress ancient wrongs, change the nation's role in various areas, and to signal a new and modern administration replacing one that had become tired, cynical, materialist and out of ideas.

The biggest cheers at the policy launch in 1972 were for a promise of social justice, including land rights, for Aborigines – it seemed, at least for a time, a self-ennobling idea like the moment of 1961 when the newly-inaugurated President John Kennedy had said "ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country."

The Whitlam government, narrowly elected, was impatient for power, and believed it had a lot of catching up to do, if only because it had been away so long. Unwilling to wait until each House of Representatives seat was declared, Whitlam decided to form a duumvirate ministry with his deputy, Lance Barnard, and, each holding about 14 portfolios, governed by decree for some weeks. An amazing array of decisions were announced each day: some of lasting importance, others satisfying some sectional promises: announcement of the recognition of China and the release from prison of draft dodgers would be accompanied by news that the luxury tax on the contraceptive pill was being abolished, and that an ACT law banning advertisements for condoms would be repealed. Some decisions were trivial; many that were not seemed long overdue. Though Labor had only scraped in, it seemed, after a short time, that everyone was caught up in its excitement.

Yet all the preparation, and all of Labor's work in attracting bright young people, translated poorly into the execution of power, and for this Whitlam must bear his share of responsibility. Labor had no inner ministry or Cabinet, and a ministry of 27 was far too big and unwieldy, and often, so consumed by petty debates, for the proper exercise of Cabinet government. Whitlam could preside, and did, often miles above the melee, but he found it difficult to chair or to manage.

No ministers had practical ministerial experience, and most found engagement with the professional public administration, respect for process, and public discretion, very difficult. A good many were in any event very suspicious of a public service that had spent 23 years in the service of one side of politics, and tended to see any public service call for caution, or process, as an exercise in conservatism, obstructionism or sabotage. Whitlam may have been right in wanting the public service to recognise that everything had changed; he himself, as a senior public servant's son, was essentially conservative and proper about the proprieties, but he failed to instigate ministerial checks and balances that might have some some of the fantastic indiscipline, leaking, political self-indulgence and waste that came to seem almost an incident of the Whitlam government in action. For reporters at Parliament – I was a young one at the time – it was heaven for stories, and laughs, not least at Whitlam's own self-mocking humour. But there were others who were increasingly horrified, convinced that the usurpers were taking Australia to hell in a handcart.

Yet there was steady progress on many of the objectives of the program. Bill Hayden, in Social Security, was laying the foundations for what became Medibank, and not merely as a means of recovering fees at the doctor but in a program of providing funds to public hospitals around the nation. He, and bureaucrats, was also developing the Australian Assistance Plan, an early notion of a regionalised one-stop-shop of access to Commonwealth services, and the Social Welfare Commission under Marie Coleman, the first woman to run a substantial Commonwealth agency. The Commonwealth Schools Commission virtually doubled the resources going into Australian schools, and was essentially needs based. Fresh public money poured into universities and further education, and student fees were abolished. If this was to prove largely unsuccessful in greatly increasing the proportions of working class children into universities, it certainly led to a massive expansion of the sector.

Tom Uren, in Urban and Regional Development, and his department were not only focused on improving urban life, but in setting up decentralised growth centres such as Bathurst and Albury-Wodonga. Charlie Jones in Transport was developing national integrated plans for road, rail and air infrastructure, primarily through states grants. And there were vast national projects such as with the Pipeline Authority program.

The Attorney-General, Lionel Murphy, had major projects in law reform, including plans for a Freedom of Information Act, judicial review and administrative appeals legislation, establishment of an Ombudsman, the creation of a federal court, and family law reform, some of which were to wait for a successor government for accomplishment. Just as importantly, Murphy created the Trade Practices Act, which, along with a Whitlam devaluation, did more than anything, before Hawke, to make Australia the modern national economy of today. Business – today's apostles of competition and free markets – were bitterly opposed.

The sense of too-much too soon was aggravated by a declining economy, brought on rather more by international conditions, including the first oil shock of 1973, which effectively quadrupled the international price of oil overnight, than by fiscal indiscipline by the Whitlam government. Internationally, a long period of steady growth, effectively since 1945, was coming to an end, and Keynesian economics, and some of its foundations, including the Bretton Woods agreement, were falling apart. Although government spending, particularly on social programs, was increasing, so too were revenues, and only in 1975 for 1975-76 did the government project, or achieve a deficit. The legend of profligacy and a complete want of spending controls – ever since a political burden on Labor – is largely a myth; while the Whitlam government increased the size of the public sector, it has since increased, as much by the actions of coalition governments as because of Labor, by a further 50 per cent.

The Whitlam Government was dismissed in late 1975, about half way through its second term, after a budget, from Bill Hayden, the third Whitlam Treasurer, seeking to impose restraints, and, particularly, to address inflation and rising unemployment. The dismissal was for scandal and political (and perhaps constitutional) impasse, not for economic mismanagement. However much the legal and constitutional niceties and rights and wrong are still debated, the dismissal was certainly at the wrong time of the political cycle and Whitlam and his team were judged very harshly by voters in the election that followed. The perceived unfairness created, in a section of the political class, a sense of a noble lost cause, of idealism frustrated, and promising life cut short – in somewhat the manner of the legend of John Kennedy in the US. Whether Whitlam and his team would have steadied, and ultimately won the respect of voters, is not clear. Yet the sense that he was, by comparison with some of his contemporaries, predecessors and successors, a giant of the first rank, persists, undaunted by 40 years of life after death. Even to those enemies to whom he seemed the devil incarnate, there is a sense of his grandeur.

Whitlam himself was frankly bored by economics – he was the last prime minister to admit this – and was much more preoccupied with what could be done for the community, sensibly, within the resources of government than in mere economic achievements involving deficits, debt or notions of creating some ideal market. Whitlam tried to tame some of the Labor structures, not least the impossible size of his Cabinet; it was for successors, such as Bob Hawke to implement what many regarded as reforms made necessary by a sense that Whitlamism had been a disappointment and a failure.

Beyond the politician was a man of incredible intellectual breadth (and, sometimes arrogance), a penchant for grand gesture and memorable statement, a speechwriter in Graham Freudenberg as great a wordsmith as Gough himself, a fond father and husband and lover of an electorate which, in his time, encapsulated the battler belts of the Sydney western suburbs. He was the last prime minister to have seen active service in wartime. We have not seen his like again.

Jack Waterford is Canberra Times Editor-at-Large.