Britain’s Prince Charles sent a hand-written letter of support to Australia’s governor-general in 1976, backing his controversial sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, local media reported on Saturday.

The letter, published on Saturday by The Australian newspaper, is dated four months after Queen Elizabeth’s representative in Australia, John Kerr, took the unprecedented step to dismiss Whitlam without first warning the palace or the Prime Minister.

“Please don’t lose heart,” the heir to the British throne wrote in the hand-written letter to Kerr on March 27.

“What you did last year was right and the courageous thing to do and most Australians seemed to endorse your decision when it came to the point.”

Whitlam’s firing remains one of the country’s most polarising political events because it represented an unmatched level of intervention by the Commonwealth.