Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt, Great Australian Experiment

How can an author frame the life of a paradoxical historical charact­er, partic­ularly one who has almost slipped out of Australian public conscious­ness? Author Gideon Haigh noted the issue in the first chapter of his book The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Experiment.

Min of  External Affairs and Attorney General Dr Evatt, with P.M Winston Churchill 

10 Downing St May 1942. 

Nat Library Australia

In this clever narrative, Haigh resurrected his hero by focusing first on a private tragedy in a Jewish migrant family in Sydney 1937. In 2019 Haigh was reading the transcript of a 1938 hear­ing in the NSW Sup­reme Court, the accident­al death of a child which precip­itated one of the most div­­isive, hist­or­ically significant cases in Austral­ia’s High Court.

Herbert Vere Evatt (1894–1965) was a brilliant barr­ist­er and Just­ice of the High Court of Australia who breathed life into the Int­er­war mig­rant experience, Jewish extend­ed family life and Council res­p­ons­ib­ilities. Note the terrible psychol­ogical trauma on the dead child’s mother Gol­da Chester, from a market town Lowicz in the Polish Pale of Settlement. A 7-year-old Max Chester (his mother’s bri­l­liant boy, see book title) drown­ed in a waterfilled trench near the house, which had been left unfen­c­ed by council workers. The family sued the Waverley Council and when the mat­ter wound its way to the High Court, Evatt was one of the jud­ges who ruled on the comp­lex case. Ev­att’s lengthy judgment be­came a water­shed in Austral­ian legal history, alth­ough it was a diss­enting judg­ment. Mother Golda Chester suicided.

Herbert was also born in a family who knew trauma and grief. His dad died of rheumatic fever in 1901, and 4 of HV’s 7 brothers died of typhoid or in WWI trenches. Herbert tried to en­list in WW1 but was re­j­ected because of poor vision. His brot­hers filled the men-of-action role, while Herbert was his mother’s pre­coc­ious boy, driv­en by his own ambition AND his mother’s. Note he got his Doctor of Laws in 1924.

It was quickly clear that Haigh’s book was no saintly biog­raphy. In 1930s-Australia, Evatt was an intellectual power­house; the youngest judge on the High Court bench, broadly cultured, a writer and patron of the arts. But he had also a endless hunger for praise and laurels. Flawed, of course, but was that so unusual?

Later in the book Haigh ad­justed his lens to capture the ex­t­ra­ordinary life, political exp­er­ience and legal legacy of Dr Evatt. Evatt’s tum­ul­­tuous political career was outside the scope of this book, although it offered much about the political and intellectual infl­uen­ces that informed Evatt’s jurisprudence, and his social attitudes.

Haigh’s task was to allow a judge/politician, in all his prodigious ability and frailty, to emerge from the political propaganda and pub­lic am­nes­ia, and to critique Australian complacency and deficiency of hum­an empathy, again!

Read the brutal Australian response to Jewish refugees in 1938 at the Evian Conference. The Conservatives were in power then, but you will see the relevance to Labour’s Evatt shortly. The legal basis for Australia’s wartime internment policy was the National Sec­urity Act 1939, which allowed the government to issue regulations em­powering authorities to control nationals of countries at war with Aus­tralia. The internment of enemy aliens went ahead, under the new PM Robert Menzies. The prisoners included Jewish refugees directly from Eastern Europe or those escaping Naz­ism via internment camps in UK on the Dunera etc.

L] Dr Evatt and R] Anthony Eden the UK Foreign Secretary,

examining documents in San Francisco, 1945.
United Nations photograph.

From my perspective, Doc Evatt’s later decades were even more influen­t­ial. When Labour came to power under P.M John Curtin in 1941, Evatt bec­ame Attorney-General and later Foreign Minister. He was Labour’s Dep­uty Lead­er/Deputy PM after the 1946 election, under the leadership of Ben Chif­ley. And from 1951–1960 he was Leader of the Labour Opposition during the long ascend­ancy of his great rival Robert Menzies, Austral­ia’s most famous prime minist­er. Yet Evatt was already a public intel­l­ect­ual, confident advocate and outspoken opinion-maker. It helped to exp­l­ain Evatt's valiant defence of liberty and democracy in fighting off the 1950 vote to ban Commun­ism in Australia. Where in Australia are commitments to democracy now?

Dr Evatt’s humanitarian and internationalist values helped in the crea­tion of the United Nations from 1945 on. Then he served brilliantly on the Preparatory Commission of the U.N, Security Council, Atomic Energy Commission and Commission for Conventional Armaments. From Nov 1946, Australia's Deputy Prime Minister repres­ented his country in the Pacific Council, Brit­ish War Cabinet, Council of Foreign Ministers in the Paris Peace Conference, British Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Con­fer­ence, Far-Eastern Commission and he was President of the South Pacific Regional Conference.

L] HV Evatt, C] Ben Chifley and R] Clement Attlee
Dominion and British Leaders Conference, London, 1946
Wiki

Evatt was fam­ous­ly the only Australian President of the UN General Assembly, presiding over the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundation of human rights across the modern world. Thankfully for the Jews who survived the Holocaust, Evatt was instrumental in the foundation of Israel in 1947-8. Despite Austral­ia’s anti-Semitism at the 1938 Evian Conference and the internment camps for Jewish refugees in Australia in 1940, Australian Jews are still beholden to Dr Evatt’s memory today.

HV’s family were also famous. Brother Clive Evatt (1900-84) was a very successful barrister and Labour politician. In 1976 niece Elizabeth Evatt became the first Chief Judge of the Family Court of Australia & then President of the Australian Law Reform Com­m­ission. Niece architect Penelope Evatt Seidler was a member of National Gall­ery of Aust­ralia Council & wife of Australia’s best known architect, Austrian born and trained Harry Seidler.

Gideon Haigh's book (2021)

The review of the book came from Morag Fraser while the review of the man came from my late grandfather.