Prime Minister. Gough Whitlam was an Australian Labor Party politician who became the 21st Prime Minister of Australia from 1972 to 1975 and the Leader of the Labor Party from 1967 to 1977. He led Labor to power for the first time in 23 years at the 1972 election and went on to win the 1974 election before being controversially dismissed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr during the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. He stepped down after losing the 1977 election and retired from Parliament in 1978. With the election of Bob Hawke's Labor Government in 1983, he was appointed as the Australian Ambassador to UNESCO, and remained active into his nineties. His wife Margaret died in 2012, a month short of their 70th wedding anniversary. He is survived by his four children, five grand-children and nine great-grandchildren. Abbreviated eulogy given by Noel Pearson, an Aboriginal Australian lawyer, land rights activist and founder of the Cape York Institute, published in The Sydney Morning Herald of Nov. 5, 2014: For one born estranged from the nation's citizenship, into a humble family of a marginal people striving in the teeth of poverty and discrimination, today it is assuredly no longer the case. This because of the equalities of opportunities afforded by the Whitlam program. Raised next to the wood heap of the nation's democracy, bequeathed no allegiance to any political party, I speak to this old man's legacy with no partisan brief. Rather, my signal honour today on behalf of more people than I could ever know, is to express our immense gratitude for the public service of this old man. In June 1975, the Whitlam government enacted the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Queensland Discriminatory Laws Act. The law put to purpose the power conferred upon the Commonwealth Parliament by the 1967 referendum, finally outlawing the discrimination my father and his father lived under since my grandfather was removed to the mission as a boy and to which I was subject [for] the first 10 years of my life. Without this old man the land and human rights of our people would never have seen the light of day. We salute this old man for his great love and dedication to his country and to the Australian people. When he breathed he truly was Australia's greatest white elder and friend without peer of the original Australians.