Gideon Haigh on Doc Evatt: Destined for brilliance

Gideon Haigh wants Australians to rediscover HV “Doc” Evatt. Not the rather hapless, divisive, slightly mad opposition leader but the visionary external affairs minister during World War II.

External Affairs Minister Dr HV “Doc” Evatt, left, meets with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the courtyard of Number 10 Downing Street in London in 1943.

Gideon Haigh wants Australians to rediscover HV “Doc” Evatt. Not the rather hapless, divisive and slightly mad opposition leader of the 1950s but the man of deep compassion, patron of the arts, historian, crusading lawyer and eminent judge, and visionary external affairs minister during World War II.

In a new book, deeply researched and filled with penetrating insights, Haigh reveals the Evatt lost in contemporary remembrance. In The Brilliant Boy, the prolific journalist and author gives us a new portrait of Evatt which focuses mostly on his life before becoming Labor leader in 1951.

“I had an abiding interest in Evatt, but there was something missing in everything I read, which is what had made Evatt such an attractive personality in the first place,” Haigh told Review. “There must, I had this nagging feeling, be more to him than Bob Menzies’s punching bag, which is the way we see him now, if we see him at all.”

The title of the book is misleading. The brilliant boy is not Evatt but rather Max Chester who, at age seven, fell into a ditch and drowned in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs in 1937. The traumatic impact of Chester’s death, both mental and physical, and legal recognition of this suffering, wends its way through the book.

It is a riveting and at times harrowing book to read. It is deeply affecting to learn of the impact of Chester’s death and the family’s grief which never eased, and had further tragic consequences. Haigh takes readers through court rooms, caucus meetings and parliamentary debates and eventually the case comes to Evatt while he is a judge on the High Court.

Politician HV (Herbert) "Doc" Evatt in 1928.

The Chester family’s case was lost but Evatt wrote a sparkling dissenting judgment, both literary and legal in its rendering, and it is now celebrated for establishing a new liability standard for negligence that extended to nervous or mental shock suffered by families. It was ahead of its time. It confirmed Haigh’s inkling there must be more to Evatt.

“It’s a fascinating piece of writing and reasoning,” he says. “It’s moving and erudite, bold and original, compassionate towards the inconsolable mother, scathing about his legal contemporaries. It contains a real flavour of the man, or, at least, the man Evatt aspired to be, striving to nurture a bigger, fairer culture, out of a mixture of high ideals and immense personal ambition.”

Evatt had experienced the shafts of fate by his early 20s with four of his brothers dying – two during World War I and two during infancy. He understood the family expectations of being a brilliant boy himself. Haigh writes about Evatt being a man of “unpredictable sensitivities” with a kindness towards children, animals and those who suffered.

“We do see in Evatt, I think, the interplay of a strong sense of destiny, and a highly developed dread of the external forces that might thwart its fulfilment,” he explains. “Often deeply suspicious of adults, Evatt was also entirely disarmed by the young, solicitous of their welfare, sentimental about their innocence.”

With sparkling prose, meticulous research and a command of both the law and politics, the story of Chester and the most promising years of Evatt’s life lift off the page. It is scholarly, erudite and beautifully written. It offers a perceptive portrait of Evatt as good as any full-life biographer.

“He had broad shoulders, ruffled hair, large feet, and small hands with slender fingers, which he was in the habit of pressing tightly together,” Haigh writes of Evatt. “His complexion was sallow, his mien alert, his voice level if harsh. His grey eyes peered through thick spectacles and he leaned slightly forward as he walked, deep chest out, radiating drive and curiosity.”

Evatt was a dazzling lawyer who served in the NSW parliament and sat on the High Court before he had turned 40. He was elected to the federal parliament in 1940 and a year later was a cabinet minister. He served a term as president of the UN General Assembly and played a lead role in the establishment of Israel.

Writer Gideon Haigh at home in Melbourne. Picture: Paul Jeffers

Haigh offers a sympathetic portrait of Evatt but not one blind to his faults. “He could be soft and sentimental, then prickly and despotic,” he writes. Evatt had a complex character: a devoted father and husband, more politically opportunistic than tribal Labor, with a liberal minded bourgeois intellectualism, vain and self-confident but also reserved, and perennially suspicious of others. Evatt undermined John Curtin and deviously sought to be prime minister leading an all-party

government.

The book deals in less detail with Evatt’s tumultuous later life, as Labor leader in the 1950s and as Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court, as his paranoia rose and mental faculties declined. He describes Evatt’s defeat of the Menzies government’s plan to ban the Communist Party – a victory for civil liberties. But the rest of Evatt’s life, post the Curtin-Chifley government, was largely unhappy as Labor was split and remained in the political wilderness.

“Where I suspect Menzies was always a politician in the making, Evatt never really ceased to be a man of the law,” Haigh judges. “He was an individualist; he had unshakeable and probably naive faith in legal processes and tribunals; he tackled issues like an advocate, sometimes impervious to their wider consequences.”

Haigh has a kaleidoscope of interests and an inexhaustible assembly-line of articles and books. Asked about a writing process or technique, he demurs. “It’s just journalism,” he says. “I just try to follow every lead until I can go no further.” He claims to be useless at everything else. “At life,” he says, “I’m a rank amateur.”

Gideon Haigh’s The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Dissent (Scribner) is out now.
Troy Bramston is writing a biography of Bob Hawke to be published next year.