In 1975 the Whitlam Labor government invited Professor Jean Martin, then Australia’s leading sociologist of migration, to conduct a five-year study of the settlement experience of the first refugees from Vietnam. She had barely begun the study when the incoming Fraser government terminated its funding. Drawing on internal government documents, this article tells the inside story of that decision. The fate of the project became intertwined with the dismissal of the Whitlam government, but the links were indirect. Archival sources show state actors raising concerns about academic autonomy, the utility of academic research for public policy, and independence of academic publication. The social science of the period saw research as a public good, generating knowledge at once for its own sake and for application in public life. The withdrawal of Martin’s funding marks the end of an era when Australian social scientists could see research collaboration with government as unproblematic.