The Brilliant Boy

Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Dissent

Gideon Haigh

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781760856113
• eBook ISBN: 9781760856120
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Law Biographies
• Index: History

Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards.
Longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award.

Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian Book Review.

In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy drowned in a ditch that had filled with rain after being left unfenced by council workers. How the law should deal with the trauma of the family’s loss was one of the most complex and controversial cases to reach Australia’s High Court, where it seized the imagination of its youngest and cleverest member.

These days, ‘Doc’ Evatt is remembered mainly as the hapless and divisive opposition leader during the long ascendancy of his great rival Sir Robert Menzies. Yet long before we spoke of ‘public intellectuals’, Evatt was one: a dashing advocate, an inspired jurist, an outspoken opinion maker, one of our first popular historians and the nation’s foremost champion of modern art. Through Evatt’s innovative and empathic decision in Chester v the Council of Waverley Municipality, which argued for the law to acknowledge inner suffering as it did physical injury, Gideon Haigh rediscovers the most brilliant Australian of his day, a patriot with a vision of his country charting its own path and being its own example – the same attitude he brought to being the only Australian president of the UN General Assembly, and instrumental in the foundation of Israel.

A feat of remarkable historical perception, deep research and masterful storytelling, The Brilliant Boy confirms Gideon Haigh as one of our finest writers of non-fiction. It shows Australia in a rare light, as a genuinely clever country prepared to contest big ideas and face the future confidently.

'Gideon Haigh has always been an exquisite wordsmith, and he proves here that he is also an intuitive historian and acute biographer with a masterful control of the broad sweep and telling detail’ AFR Books of the Year

'Here is a master craftsman delivering one of his most finely honed works. Meticulous in its research, humane in its storytelling, The Brilliant Boy is Gideon Haigh at his lush, luminous best. Haigh shines a light on person, place and era with the sheer force of his intellect and the generosity of his words. The Brilliant Boy is simply a brilliant book.' Clare Wright, Stella-Prize winning author of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka
 
‘Gideon Haigh has a nose for Australian stories that light up the past from new angles, and he tells this one with verve, grace and lightly worn erudition. I couldn’t put it down.’ Judith Brett, The Saturday Paper
 
‘An absolutely remarkable, moving and elegant re-reading of the early life of an extraordinary Australian. Gideon Haigh is one of Australia's finest writers and thinkers … mesmerizing … one of the best Australian biographies I have read for a long time.' Michael McKernan, Canberra Times

1 ‘How I yearn for them and can’t forget!’

A recent documentary about Doc Evatt introduced him as a ‘little-known Australian’. It may even be true. His world seems remote. He does not fit easily into a national pantheon that exalts bravery in war, popularity in culture, electoral success in politics. He was an indifferent orator, an abrasive colleague, even a careless dresser. His papers are fragmentary. He bequeathed no memoirs, and his other works are now but little read. A suburb bears his name in Canberra and a reserve in Sydney, but he is honoured by no monument. His remaining admirers, who usually accent his achievements at the United Nations, are ardent rather than widespread; the same is true of his detractors, who execrate him as vainglorious, paranoid and malign for his part in the Petrov Affair and Labor’s subsequent fissuring. He is routinely called ‘brilliant’ and also ‘mad’ with little elaboration, conscripting the well-worn cliché about the close relation of genius and insanity. The standard neutral descriptor is ‘flawed’, even if it is far from clear how this distinguishes him from anybody else.

In 1930s Australia, however, Herbert Vere Evatt was a one-man intellectual powerhouse. He was a student prodigy who had become a successful advocate who had become the youngest addition to the Bench of Australia’s High Court. He also dabbled in politics as a local member, in literature as a popular historian and in art as an effusive patron. A protean figure, then, with a legal reputation beyond his country’s shores, despite a culture that struggled to rise above the derived and parochial. A Bradman of law and letters? Evatt would have revelled in such an epithet, for his love of cricket was profound, his knowledge encyclopedic. He had also – something understood by those who knew him well – a bottomless hunger for praise and laurels.

Sometimes the roots of such traits are obscure. Not in Evatt’s case. They were planted by his Irish-Australian mother, Jeanie nee Gray, who married John Ashmore Evatt in 1882. John became licensee of a modest hotel in rural Maitland. Jeanie helped, but eschewed the bar. She read books. She loved music. She sang in a church choir. She was genteel but aspirational. Herbert Vere, born 30 April 1894, was the fifth of eight sons. The family was further shaped by the loss of two middle boys in local outbreaks of typhoid and John Ashmore’s death of rheumatic fever in October 1901, leaving Jeanie a widow with effectively two camps of children, George (eighteen) and John (thirteen) forming one, and Bert (seven), Ray (five), Frank (three) and Clive (one) the other. On Bert would Jeanie have the greatest influence. When he exhibited signs of precocity, she put literature in his path, indulged his propensity for ceaseless questions, took fierce pride in his academic progress – a teacher at East Maitland Superior Public School would say that Bert was the brightest pupil she ever taught. When Jeanie gave in to George’s urgings in July 1904 and moved the family to Sydney’s Milsons Point, near her own parents in Kirribilli, it was mainly with Bert’s opportunities in mind.

The majority of workers in North Sydney were then in maritime or manufacturing industries – utilities, tanneries, glue factories. For Bert, Jeanie had vastly higher hopes. She was a martinet, rejoicing in his pageant of success at Fort Street Model School at Observatory Hill, with the proviso that better was always possible. Bert would tell the story of returning home to Bella Vista in Grantham Street with a report card containing nine first-class honours. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jeanie retorted. ‘You sat for ten subjects.’ Yet he did not find this oppressive, nor the religiosity that had her playing the organ at St John’s Anglican Church on Broughton Street and cleaving to its minister, Reverend William Newby-Fraser. On the contrary, Evatt seems to have corroborated Freud’s belief that ‘the man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success’. Brother Bert, Clive would say, ‘was taught that he could do better than anyone else’.

Evatt certainly upheld the Fort Street motto about every man being the maker of his own fortune. He served as head prefect in 1911, was awarded the Bridges Prize for ‘the boy who brought the greatest honour to Fort Street School’, and won a bursary to Sydney University as well as a scholarship to the Presbyterian St Andrew’s College. Evatt then lived up to the university’s motto about the stars changing but mind remaining the same. He carried on as before, graduating with first-class honours in English, philosophy and mathematics; winning more than a score of university awards, medals, scholarships and essay prizes in English; editing the university’s already venerable Hermes; becoming the first undergraduate elected president of the Sydney University Union; even reviving university rugby league in the face of opposition from a disapproving Sports Union: ‘A parallel feat,’ Smith’s Weekly observed, ‘would be to introduce jazz into the ritual of St Andrew’s or St Mary’s Cathedral.’

Politically, Evatt was still finding his way, partly for personal reasons. His questing mind was attracted to Labor’s radical tendencies, despite his family’s circumstances and his mother’s conservatism. His thinking was fluid and susceptible to influence, particularly from two thinkers at Sydney University: Vere Gordon Childe, a gnomic Marxist theoretician, and Francis Anderson, a philosopher steeped in English liberalism. Childe, whom Evatt called his ‘political father’, was the more trenchant thinker, sceptical that a working-class party could reconcile with the institution of parliament. In ‘Liberalism in Australia’, which won the prestigious Beauchamp Prize for ‘the best essay on a literary or historic subject’ in 1915, Evatt positioned himself more clearly alongside Anderson, justifying state intervention ‘on the principles of equality of opportunity and social freedom’ but decrying socialism as stressing ‘material and economic interests at the expense of intellectual, moral and religious principles’. Childe and Anderson appealed to competing sides of Evatt’s personality, theoretical and practical, with the latter tending to prevail over time because it contained personal possibilities: Anderson argued strongly that professional men should become involved in politics, because democracy required the balancing of the state by ‘a great and free community outside government control’.

Evatt respected Australia’s Labor prime minister, Billy Hughes, but above all revered New South Wales’ Labor premier, William Holman. The urbane champion of ‘modern socialism’, Holman was from a theatrical family, drawn to politics by theory, to the Bar by intellect. He was cultured, charismatic, handsome, bold. He had run the gauntlet of martial patriotism by hoping that England would suffer defeat in the Boer War, the ‘most iniquitous, most immoral war ever waged with any race’; he had incurred the wrath of capital by founding state enterprises, such as mines, brickworks, timberyards, dockyards, quarries and factories, to compete with private monopolies; he rose above sectarianism and kept trades unions at arms length; he was even possibly the first Australian politician to fly, using a Vickers Vimy on the campaign trail.

‘An endless capacity for hard work’: William Holman.

Evatt idolised Holman. They seem to have met at Sydney University, the premier employing him for a term as a ‘research officer’. Writing about him a quarter of a century later, Evatt was still in thrall to his hero’s qualities: ‘great courage, a first-class brain, an endless capacity for hard work, a fine physical appearance, a magnificent speaking voice.’ Yet with the coming of war, Holman was doomed to bear out Childe’s misgivings about progressive politicians in reactionary institutions. Seduced from the socialist path by the trappings of power, he would drift from the party’s rank and file into the embrace of imperialism, specifically around the question of conscription. And that, for Evatt, would have an acute personal significance.

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On completing undergraduate studies, Evatt veered into law – then, at Sydney University, a tiny elite of about eighty students. The school’s Phillip Street premises were right in the city’s legal district, and at a nexus of power with neighbouring Macquarie Street: the professor of law, Sir John Peden, was a member of the Legislative Council; alumni included Australia’s first prime minister, Sir Edmund Barton, his High Court colleagues Sir Samuel Griffith and Sir George Rich, and the state’s chief justice, Sir William Cullen, who doubled as university chancellor. Evatt excelled here too, causing Cullen to take him on as associate in February 1916.

Yet Evatt’s life would be marked every bit as deeply by what he could not do. Rejected thrice because of his astigmatism, he could not enlist in World War I; nor could his older brother Jack, a bookkeeper at the Sydney Morning Herald, who was deaf. Jack and George would both marry sisters, respectively Grace and Stella Ward; their place, it was generally agreed, was at home. But the family also had strong ethos of service – indeed, Evatt was an early recruit to the Universal Service League, championed by Holman. Evatt often referred to his martial inheritances. His father’s forebears had served for four generations in the Indian Army, while his British uncle Sir George was a military surgeon-general.

For their inclinations, the Evatts would pay a high price. Sir George’s son Raleigh, a captain in the Middlesex Regiment, became the clan’s first wartime casualty: he succumbed to a sniper in France in November 1914. Evatt’s brother Ray, a chemist at CSR, joined up in March 1915, days after his nineteenth birthday; cousin Vic Gray enlisted three months later despite being only sixteen. Brother Frank, a Sydney University medical student, enlisted in September 1916; Paddy Nolan, a Sydney University law student friend of Evatt’s, enlisted in January 1917. None would return.

‘Uncle George’: Sir George Evatt.

It made sense that Ray was first of the brothers to join. Athletic and rugged, he was the family’s man of action. The symmetry of the Evatt family’s last photograph together at Bella Vista in May 1915 evokes their orderly intimacy and precedence: Jack (twenty-seven) and George (thirty-two) are seated like bookends; Bert (twenty-one) and Frank (seventeen) stand, suited, in from the ends; flanked by Clive (fifteen) in his cadet uniform and Ray (nineteen) in his gunner’s khaki, Jeanie is at the centre, unsmiling, severe. She was a perfervid nationalist who urgently wished Ray to distinguish himself. ‘I do hope you will be able to wipe out the Germans and their kind,’ she urged him in a letter. Ray duly embraced military life, and was desperately disappointed at Gallipoli to be sent to convalesce from dysentery after three weeks. ‘Three of our Majors were killed with the one shell,’ he reported home. ‘Another officer who won the DSO had a leg shattered and yet another poor goat was in my sector of the trench for a day or two had his nut blown off’. But this thick of it was where he longed to be: ‘I’m keen to hear the old bullets cracking again as long as they continue to miss me.’

Wounded by a sniper at Flers, Ray waved concerns away: ‘For heaven’s sake don’t write calling me darling or being worried, it’s all rot.’ He wrote his brothers constantly, too, never losing an ebullient tone. He was excited by Bert’s continued academic successes: ‘I envy a slice of the grey matter in your nut which is lacking from mine.’ He was excited by Frank’s enlistment after passing his medical exams: ‘When you get away, keep smiling and look on the humorous side of everything. There’s a ton of fun in this game if only you see it.’

Frank was cut from different cloth – diffident, sensitive, a lover of literature and music. He idolised Ray temperamentally but was intellectually closer to Bert, whose gift of a watch he wore when his unit embarked for Europe in December 1916. He whiled away time aboard the Orontes reading Booth Tarkington, O. Henry and David Graham Phillips, struck up an improbable friendship with an artilleryman who heard him whistling tunes from La Bohème, and enjoyed London for Aida, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and the music hall minstrel George Robey. Reuniting with Ray, who had just been awarded the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry’ in leading a successful trench assault at Warlencourt, reinforced his sense of mission. When the pair palled around on leave with their uncle Sir George and aunt Sophie, Ray joked that he’d return from his next ‘stunt’ with a German machine gun under each arm.

In August 1917, Frank in 5th Division and Ray in 2nd marched separately for the new push at Ypres that became the carnage of Passchendaele. During the Battle of Menin Road, Ray was cut down by a machine gun at Westhoek Ridge, and buried in a shellhole grave that quickly disappeared beneath the tramp of armies. During the Battle of Polygon Wood six days later, Frank was in a crater with two fellow university students when a shell detonated on top of them, killing one, badly wounding another and leaving Frank with what he called ‘a scratch’ from which he nonetheless took months to recover in Prince Christian Hospital, Weymouth. Infinitely worse was the loss of his brother. At first Frank was incredulous: ‘He [Ray] was a real soldier and the bravest of the brave.’ Later, to his mother, he tried to find solace:

Overwhelming though the news is, one can feel pride in the fact that he died the bravest and best of deaths that ever man could – and that he himself would have been content with such a fate. Seek comfort in that fact, dear old Mater, and please try not to worry, think of poor Aunt Sophie and Uncle George whose only son [Raleigh] – their idol – made the same glorious sacrifice. It seems hard that two such splendid men should be cut off in their prime – but God has willed it so. Dearest Mother, try to keep well and strong and cheerful.

Given the news by her spiritual guide, Newby-Fraser, Jeanie did try to ‘take it bravely’. But some of her ardour cooled: she heeded Frank’s urging against Clive enlisting ‘no matter how keen he is, not even if he is 18’, delaying her youngest boy’s service by steering him to the Royal Military College in Duntroon for training as an officer. Bert, meanwhile, took more vigorous action, gaining the university senate’s approval to seek Frank’s return to studies. Frank was interested: ‘I am very keen to get back to my course, especially now that Ray has gone. Of course there will probably be weeks of weary red tape business before we know anything definite.’ But Frank was also oppressed by Ray’s example and Jeanie’s expectations. To Bert he decried himself as a ‘dud’ compared to the ‘glorious life’ of his warrior brother. When it became clear that Bert’s intervention had failed, he promised his mother he would ‘try to lead a life like Ray’s if it were possible, and to strive to gain the glorious success which was his’.

After a few quiet months, the front was shattered by the German counteroffensive. Frank grew inured to shelling, was gassed twice, learned to live on scant sleep. Now, perhaps, he felt his academic comparison more directly with Bert. Learning from Jeanie that Bert’s ‘Liberalism in Australia’ was to be published as a book, he sighed: ‘He has certainly had some academic career and will go high in the world of law I trust… He certainly deserves all that comes his way in the nature of a successful career and no one is more pleased than me that such will be his.’ He also indulged a tiny fantasy of returning to study himself: ‘It would be a great thing to visit Oxford and Cambridge, were it merely to get some idea of the “atmosphere” of college life at one of those places. However, one must just wait and hope for the best.’ It was his last letter home: hit by a gas shell during an attack on 29 September 1918, he died of wounds at a clearing station, Tincourt, near which he was buried. Newby-Fraser received another telegram concluding: ‘Please inform mother’. This time, according to Evatt’s first biographer, Kylie Tennant, Jeanie fainted at the news.

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Ray and Frank: the names endured. George and Stella’s fourth daughter, Olive Ray, was usually known as Ray; Jack and Grace called their first son Frank. At their mutual alma mater, Fort Street, where he had become head of the old boys’ association, Bert endowed the Raymond and Frank Evatt Memorial Prize, to be awarded for an essay on ‘an approved Australian topic’ which he judged personally. But it was tacitly acknowledged among the Evatts that their mother never recovered from the losses of the boys whose enlistment permissions she had signed because they were not twenty-one, effectively warranting their deaths. In Bert’s later generally admiring biography of Holman, he would fault his hero’s bullishness about conscription: it evinced a failure to grasp ‘the tremendous strain and anxiety in every family from which a member was absent at the front’, a strain ‘almost too heavy to be born...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: ‘How I yearn for them and can’t forget!’
• Chapter 2: ‘Let truth and falsehood grapple’
• Chapter 3: ‘The legal Phar Lap’
• Chapter 4: ‘The extreme gradualness of inevitability’
• Chapter 5: A good kick in the arse for the old guard’
• Chapter 6: ‘Only one’s sense of duty prevents public scandal’
• Chapter 7: ‘‘He can do what he wants’
• Chapter 8: ‘Who is my neighbour?’
• Chapter 9: ‘The apparently trivial case of telling significance’
• Chapter 10: ‘The agony of hope and fear’
• Chapter 11: ‘Hell-bent on re-entering politics’
• Epilogue: ‘Justice is the thing’
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Bibliography
• Photo credits
• Copyright