Gough Whitlam

Six of his ten planets sit in water signs, and five of them are in Cancer: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Pluto, across nineteen degrees of it. A single planet sits in fire and a single one in air, with five of the ten cardinal. The record says Whitlam ended conscription, recognised China and introduced universal healthcare in three years, and was then dismissed by the Governor-General in a constitutional crisis Australia still argues about.

The Sun sits at an awkward angle to Uranus at under half a degree, and the reading is that the urge to break out arrives at the wrong moment: restlessness, abrupt reversals of direction, and a pattern of leaving things just before they mature. That last clause looks like a description of three years and a dismissal, and the direction is wrong. The reading describes somebody who leaves. The record describes somebody who was removed. Those are opposite agencies, a chart cannot tell them apart, and that is the limit of this page in a single sentence.

Five planets in Cancer is the other half. Cancer looks after what it belongs to and does not argue the point, and a prime minister the record credits with introducing universal healthcare has identity, speech, taste, limit and force all sitting in the sign that does the looking after. That is a resonance and a good one, and it is also the kind a reader should be told is cheap: five planets in Cancer would read the same way in somebody who never left their own street.

Jupiter sits square Neptune at under four tenths of a degree, the closest contact here, faith without evidence: wishful thinking, and promises that felt entirely real when they were made. For a programme of three large reforms inside three years that is the unflattering reading on offer, and the record settles it only in the sense that two of the three are still standing. Saturn stands at an awkward angle to Uranus at just over a degree, order against revolt, which in a constitutional crisis is a coincidence of vocabulary and a slow pair besides. Venus and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He died at Sydney on 21 October 2014, at ninety eight. Jupiter stood in direct opposition to his natal Uranus at under a fifth of a degree that day and Saturn sixty degrees from his natal Mars at just over a quarter. The Moon was balsamic and eight per cent lit.