Behind ropes, in the open spaces across the road in front of the Old Parliament House protesters shrieked and chanted. They waited hours for the chance. When newly elected prime minister Malcolm Fraser raced past in a luxury Mercedes limo, with C 1 number plates, the angry sound was deafening.

When the co-conspirator of the so-called coup d'etat, Sir John Kerr, arrived in a Rolls Royce with a police motorcycle escort the crowd baritoned a deathly response.

Inside, before question time the new prime minister and his predecessor coldly exchanged brief pleasantries. Labor MPs snarled across the chamber, at those who robbed them of government in the Remembrance Day coup.

It was February 1976. An hour or so later, a small group of us with our long hair, board shorts, leather wrist bands and daggy tee-shirts, came across Sir John Kerr leaving the Old Parliament House, as it is now called, by the Senate entrance. He cracked a joke to companions while crossing the road, but looked like a man who knew he had become a pariah.

Years later, working in the press gallery I used to sit on the Parliament House front steps of an evening, waiting for my lift, about where Gough Whitlam uttered his famous threat to his executioner the governor-general: "Well may God save the Queen, because nothing will save the governor-general."

Old battlefields inevitably become peaceful places. Now it's a museum.

Here's my take. I never blamed Sir John Kerr for giving me the right to have a say. You can accuse the conservatives of all sorts of conspiracies; of concocting a crisis and never giving the government a chance.

But, in 1970 Mr Whitlam threatened to block supply as the conservatives did in 1975. All Sir John did was give the people a say.

He needn't have installed Mr Fraser as PM, but in a way he had to sack the government to find one that would call an election. Mr Whitlam had refused.

He offered a half-Senate election but this was no guarantee of supply - the money to pay the wages of public servants and which the opposition had deferred in the Senate.

Sir John's action in dismissing the government was so universally unpopular, and voters were so incensed with this coup d'etat that they elected Malcolm Fraser in a landslide a month later, and then reaffirmed their decision in another Fraser landslide in 1977.

Sir John used the convention of vice-regal reserves powers to dismiss the government. Interestingly in the 39 years since November 11, 1975, which incidentally have involved 19 years of Labor governments, these reserve powers have survived and still exist. The official Government House website says so.

A referendum in 1999 on a republic was roundly defeated. The Queen remains the Queen of Australia and the Governor-General remains her vice-regal in Australia, along with six state governors.

So what was the big deal in 1975? Nobody died.

Popular elections were held and then held again with similar result. Malcolm Fraser lost to a highly disciplined and popular Bob Hawke in 1983, after seven bland years.

Mr Fraser and Mr Whitlam eventually became firm friends. Democracy endured and Australians still love the monarchy.

Detractors say Sir John was a drunk, but they would say that.

The public service got paid in 1975, and I got to vote.

Must be one of the rare times in history when a coup produced free elections so immediately.