Professor Jenny Hocking honoured as a Member of the Order of Australia

She also wanted it to be seen as a recognition of her legal team and supporters in her successful campaign for the release of previously-secret correspondence between Buckingham Palace and the governor-general when the Whitlam government was dismissed in 1975.

"It's a great honour and I'm humbled," she said.

Just over two years ago, Professor Hocking won her long-running legal battle for the opening up of communications between Sir John Kerr in Australia and the Queen and her private secretary Sir Martin Charteris in Britain.

The 212 letters were written between August 15, 1974 and December 6, 1977 and included attachments such as newspaper clippings, press releases, articles, speeches and booklets. They had been deemed as confidential for nearly half a century until Professor Hocking's legal victory.

She campaigned tirelessly, taking the matter up through the court system, until she eventually secured a ruling from the High Court that the National Archives could make them available.

Professor Hocking thinks the honour she has now received underlines the need for the official holders of archives to be able to release much more of the royal correspondence, particularly, for example, that during the referendum on the monarchy in 1999.

She complains when correspondence between the Queen and her representative in Australia has been released, it has been heavily redacted. "That's excising an important part of our history," she said.

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More broadly than the royal correspondence, she sees her AM honour as timely because of a lack of funding for the National Library and because of the current furor over the revelations in Prince Harry's book.

"It's an interesting time for a better understanding of how important our archives are, and that's what I hope to bring to the fore," she said.

"We need to have access to our archives, especially our royal archives.

"It highlights the strong and growing need for better resources and better funded archives - our collective institutions, in particular our national archives."

Her plea comes as the National Library of Australia awaits a decision by the federal government about funding for its widely-accessed online archive, Trove. "Without any additional funds, the Library will need to cease offering the Trove service entirely," the National Library said.

Professor Hocking of Monash University has won a string of awards, including for her two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam, Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History and Gough Whitlam: His Time. Her latest book is The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam.

She thinks the current row over Prince Harry and his very public falling-out with the rest of the royal family only shows how important it is to know and understand the inner-workings of the monarchy.

"This now openly feuding family provides our head of state, imposed on us and 14 other Commonwealth nations by dynastic succession and inherited title alone, in which we have no say and no relevance. It inevitably reignites questions about why Australia is still a Constitutional monarchy," she wrote.

"This unedifying display of royal family discord will only hasten Australia's move towards a republic with our own choice as head of state, no longer determined by the dynastic succession of the British monarch. Surely one of us can only be better than one of them."

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