Abstract
‘He had intellectual brilliance and reached extraordinary heights, yet he was so clearly flawed and often quite foolish.’ All who have written on Evatt have wrestled with his perplexing contradictions, but John Murphy’s biography is the most sustained attempt to understand them. It goes beyond the legendary idiosyncrasies, the bullying insensitivity and the kindness, to what Murphy describes as ‘the strange fractures through his character’ and ‘apparent inability to read the social world around him’.
In doing so Murphy resists resort to the psychological labels so commonly used to explain this Australian Labor politician’s behaviour. Murphy’s reading of his subject’s personality is certainly attentive to formative influences – the early loss of a father, the driving expectations of his mother – and suggests traits that help explain his behaviour. He had vaulting ambition and overweening self-regard, driving himself to win every prize. He was acutely sensitive to slights, quick to detect ulterior motives of those with whom he disagreed. But Murphy does not treat these and other characteristics as fatal flaws: they operate and take on their significance in the activities that Evatt pursued. The law shaped his mode of thought, more particularly a legal rationalism that left him unable to comprehend problems not amenable to such reasoning. He chose politics and ‘he lived in a world frighteningly devoid of trust’. His liberalism was fundamentally a legal liberalism that emphasised the rights of citizens, so he was more concerned to fight for justice against tyranny and privilege than with the economic and social goals of the labour movement. Finally, Murphy suggests that an absence of self-awareness meant that Evatt was ‘singularly unsuited’ to the Labor Caucus, where loyalty has to be earned and leadership requires trust.
The book opens with Evatt’s parliamentary speech as Leader of the Opposition in October 1955, following the Petrov royal commission, when he set out to disprove the allegations that members of his staff were embroiled in Soviet espionage. Vladimir Petrov, the MVD officer in the Soviet embassy in Canberra, had defected and provided Australian security with documents that implicated them. Evatt told the House he had asked the Soviet foreign minister if these documents were genuine, and reported Molotov’s assurance they were fabrications. The prime minister, Robert Menzies, tore him to shreds; his supporters were appalled, his opponents in the Labor Party scornful, yet Evatt could not comprehend his folly. ‘In opening a case one must ask counsel for the accused for his version of events’, he explained.
Murphy is not the first to see the life of Evatt as a tragedy. A career that brought early success in law and then the decision to leave the High Court for federal politics allowed him to represent Australia abroad during the Second World War and serve as president of the United Nations General Assembly. But after putting his career at risk by opposing and defeating the referendum to ban the Communist Party in 1951, he was an abject failure as leader of the Labor Party, humiliated by the circumstances of his appointment to the Supreme Court of New South Wales before succumbing to dementia. Previous biographers have also wrestled with Evatt’s contradictions, though not with such insight. Murphy’s biography stands out both for its exploration of ‘the puzzle’ of Evatt and a fuller realisation of the tragedy.
A biography as sharply pointed as this one cannot be comprehensive. It deals selectively with Evatt’s decade on the High Court, emphasising tensions with colleagues at the expense of a more substantial consideration of his judicial performance. Murphy is right to note that, as a Labor appointment, Evatt was disparaged in a way that non-Labor appointments were not; even so, he remains to this day the only member of the court to use his chambers to pursue a seat in parliament.
There are rewarding chapters on Evatt’s involvement in modernist art and his writing of Australian history at this time. Rum Rebellion, arguing the case for Bligh against the clique who dominated early New South Wales, is aptly characterised as ‘comically biased’ in its confusion of advocacy with historical evaluation. But more might have been made of his friendship with Brian Fitzpatrick, who at this time was writing his own account of this episode in a similar vein, and with whom he would work closely in the defence of civil liberties.
Murphy makes no attempt to extenuate Evatt’s impatience for office once elected to parliament in 1940. He had already made overtures to members of the Menzies ministry and now directed his fire at John Curtin for failure to press Labor’s claims. Here Murphy misses the concessions that Curtin extracted from Menzies following the close 1940 election result, which included the creation of a department of labour and national service with planning for post-war national reconstruction with Evatt as the research director. Evatt directed no research but offered his service to Menzies again in 1941 and was still encouraging an all-party arrangement during the 1943 election. Curtin supported his election to the ministry when Labor took office at the end of 1941, for the party was conspicuously short of expertise, and allocated him the portfolios of external affairs and attorney-general.
Murphy suggests that Evatt was not a notable law reformer, but he certainly aspired to be one with his design of the bill to give the Commonwealth post-war reconstruction powers, which would have enshrined Roosevelt’s ‘four freedoms’ (freedom of expression and religion, freedom from want and fear) in the constitution. He overplayed his hand badly in framing the terms of the referendum finally held in 1944 to secure those powers by insisting that all of them must stand or fall together.
Conversely, I think Murphy’s wide-ranging and informative account of Evatt’s performance as foreign minister might overstate his influence. His thrusting assertiveness seemed well suited to win recognition of Australia’s place in wartime strategy, but did he? The Pacific War Council that Roosevelt created for consultation was a dead letter. The three squadrons of Spitfire aircraft he secured from Churchill did not arrive until the US Air Force provided air cover for the South-West Pacific Theatre. He claimed to have discovered the existence of the Beat Hitler First agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, but that had been agreed a year earlier than Murphy suggests, and its existence was all too apparent before Evatt claimed to have discovered it. He clashed with Stanley Bruce, the High Commissioner in London, but Bruce was not the Anglophile Evatt thought – indeed he was far less susceptible to Churchill’s flattery than Evatt himself. The problem here is a reliance on press reports, rather than the original sources and the extensive secondary literature on wartime foreign policy. It suited Curtin as well as Evatt to play up the Australian foreign minister’s ‘success in having his voice heard’. As both would complain, Australia was neither present nor consulted at the principal meetings that determined the Allied arrangements.
Evatt’s finest hour, at the conference in San Francisco to establish the United Nations, is handled well, though Arthur Tange would have provided a valuable corrective to Paul Hasluck’s account and the full employment objective was entrusted to an Economic and Social Council, not UNESCO. As Murphy reveals, Evatt was constantly busy on the world stage during the remainder of the decade, with the conspicuous exception of South-East Asia. Again, his endeavours were strongly promoted at home: he was given equal billing with Chifley in Labor’s 1946 election campaign.
I would have liked to see more on his relations with John Burton, not least because Burton’s strong aversion to Cold War security measures had implications for Evatt’s own stand on the Communist Party Dissolution Bill and the Petrov inquiry. I think also that the Petrov affair needs closer attention. Robert Manne’s account has been widely accepted as vindicating the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation and refuting claims that Menzies took political advantage of its discoveries. It needs to be remembered that Ron Richards, the Deputy Director in charge of the ASIO operation, had planted evidence when the Communist Party was declared illegal during the war (in June 1940, not May) and that Spry frequently communicated with the prime minister. Just when Menzies learned of the imminent defection of Petrov remains to be determined.
Against that, I think Murphy provides a superb account of the internecine conflict in the Labor Party that Evatt led in the 1950s and his inept attempts to settle it. This is a subject and a period that he knows well, allowing him to see the forces at work and reflect on his subject’s inability to control them. He makes good use of testimony gathered by earlier biographers, especially Kylie Tennant, and tells some of the stories of Evatt’s foibles – but not too many. To the end he keeps the puzzle of Evatt at the forefront, and the tragedy is poignant.