Joining authors Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt was Sir David Smith, the secretary of ex-Governor-General John Kerr, who infamously read out Gough Whitlam’s dismissal on the steps of Parliament House.

And just to add an even more august air, the event was also attended by Fiona Patten and Robbie Swan from the Australian Sex Party.

Reid was responsible for publishing the iconic 1963 “faceless men” photo in this newspaper, depicting Arthur Calwell and his then deputy Whitlam outside the Hotel Kingston under a lamp post at 1am waiting to be told what Labor policy was to be.

The image and the phrase became emblematic of the backroom powerbrokers that secretly run the party to this very day, right up to tearing down Rudd last week.

Fitzgerald and Holt have discovered that it was Alan Reid’s fishing mate Val Paral who took the photos and spirited them to the reporter, and even produced in person 84-year-old Ralph Westen, who witnessed the photos being developed in the darkroom of the John Curtin School of Medical Research.

The Daily Telegraph, July 3, 2010

Great talk with Phillip Adams about Alan Reid & Wilfred Burchett last night(11/6/10) . Another blast from the past of people & events of the days in the 50′s when Menzies, Doc Evatt would talk from the tray of a truck at election time.

In the early sixties some friends & I used to go to a Burchett family member’s house in West Rosebud & get updates of Wilfred’s adventures & what was happening in Vietnam from a husband & wife who were lawyers & involved in the extreme Socialist Left wing of the ALP, so listening to you talk started off the memory lane trip of a few things that I’ve done in life.

I, like as you say of Reid have a sense of fun as I tell people I meet that, ” I’ve lived longer than I have left , so it’s too late to be serious”

Cheers. Bill