‘Doc’ Evatt
By any measure Herbert Vere Evatt was an outstanding product of Maitland. Born on 30 April 1894, in East Maitland (at the Melbourne St Bank Hotel which his parents managed), he was to have a stellar career in the law and politics, in scholarly writing and in the fledgling United Nations organisation.
Bank Hotel, Melbourne St, East Maitland, 1924.
(Noel Butlin Archives, Australian National University via Picture Maitland)
Early life and education
The young Evatt attended East Maitland Superior Public School and was a choirboy at his local Anglican Church, but when he was only seven his father died. His time as a resident of Maitland ended with his primary schooling because, when he was ten years old, his mother took him and his siblings to Sydney to live.
Evatt was an outstanding student and very good at sport. On his high school matriculation at Fort Street Model School in Sydney in 1911 he was dux and the captain of both the cricket and rugby teams.
He then attended the University of Sydney, where he completed a BA degree in 1915 with excellent results in mathematics, logic, philosophy and English and triple first-class honours (an extremely rare feat). He finished an MA two years later and followed up with an LLB and an LLD. In his various studies he won what the Australian Dictionary of Biography called “a swag of medals and awards”. He also found time to be the President of the Students’ Union, to edit the student literary magazine, to tutor other students and to play hockey, baseball, cricket and rugby league. To say the least, he was an all-rounder.
Legal career, state politics and writings
Herbert Vere Evatt, about 1925.
Evatt quickly came to prominence in his legal career, being admitted to the Bar in 1918 at only 24 years of age and practising mainly in industrial law. In that same year he joined the Australian Labor Party. A second career began in 1925 when he entered the New South Wales Legislative Assembly as the Labor member for Balmain. There he fell out with Jack Lang, the legendary Labor premier, as a result of becoming a strong critic of Lang and his leadership.
Refused party endorsement in 1927, he stood for Balmain as an Independent Labor candidate and won. But his future in New South Wales politics was limited while Lang remained the party’s most powerful figure.
In 1929 Evatt was appointed King’s Counsel and, no doubt disillusioned by the stumbling block Lang represented to his career advancement, he quit state politics the following year to devote his attention to the law. His practice became one of the largest in the state, earning £8000-10000 per year. Before the end of 1930 he was appointed a justice of the High Court of Australia. At 36 he was the youngest to achieve such a post. His appointment was controversial because it was made by the Scullin Labor government, and Evatt’s style of operation courted more controversy because some regarded him as secretive and scheming. He made many dissenting judgements and was regarded as a brilliant judge, but one fellow judge thought him capable of “most unjudicial” decision making. This individual was probably implying that Evatt was capable of bias.
Evatt was a prolific writer on history and the law. His book The King and His Dominion Governors (London, 1936), a study in constitutional law prompted by Jack Lang’s dismissal as Premier of NSW in 1932, was later cited by both sides in the long-running debate about Gough Whitlam’s dismissal by Sir John Kerr in 1975. Injustice Within the Law, a book about the Tolpuddle martyrs, followed in 1937, and then came The Rum Rebellion (1938) on Governor William Bligh. Some believe his finest work to have been Australian Labour Leader (1940), on W A Holman, a hero of Evatt’s youth. The University of Sydney awarded Evatt a DLitt in 1944.
Evatt contributed to Australian cultural life too. He was a patron of modern art, supported the Contemporary Art Society and was a long-term President of Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales.
Federal politics and the United Nations
Few Maitland-born people could have had such a succession of high-profile careers by middle age as did Bert Evatt. Had he achieved nothing of note after 1940 he would surely have been one of the highest achievers to have emerged from Maitland, but he was to accomplish even more in his later years and to play important roles on the national and international stages.
Politics continued to attract him, and he entered federal parliament in 1940 as MP for the Sydney seat of Barton. The following year he became Attorney General and Minister for External Affairs in the government of John Curtin.
Evatt (left) with Ben Chifley and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, 1946.
After the war his position as Minister for External Affairs gave him contact with the newly formed United Nations Organisation, and he sat on the Security Council and became the first President of the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1948 he was elected President of the UN General Assembly, and he helped draft the famous and influential Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He was also involved in the creation of the state of Israel.
Internationally, between 1948 and 1951, Evatt was probably the best-known Australian citizen as far as the rest of the world was concerned.
Deputy leader and leader of the federal Labor Party
Evatt was the Deputy Leader of the federal ALP from 1946 to 1951 under Ben Chifley and became Leader in 1951. His leadership was fraught, however, and he was to lose three successive general elections (in 1954, 1955 and 1958) to the Liberal-Country Party coalition under Robert Menzies. Evatt became mired in the Petrov Affair, and his sympathy for the Soviet Union saw him painted by his conservative adversaries and in much of the media as being dangerously close to the communist cause.
Max Dupain, Portrait of H.V. Evatt sitting at a desk, 1951
In fact he was an Australian patriot, arguing during the war that the Australian media (including the Australian Broadcasting Commission) was not sufficiently pro-Australia: this, he worried, affected troop morale. But his view that Russia was more enlightened than Britain on matters of human welfare (a not uncommon position on the left of Australian politics at the time), and his support for the Communist Party cause when Menzies sought to outlaw it, cost him and the ALP greatly in political terms.
Evatt was a defender of civil liberties and freedom of expression, but also a supporter of the White Australia policy. His failure to condemn communism, was part of the lead-up to the ALP split in the mid-1950s: Labor’s right wing hated the communists. The split had long-lasting consequences and was part of the reason the ALP was out of power until the early 1970s.
Evatt was probably to a degree unlucky in that the 1950s was a period of rising prosperity and optimism: with living standards high and a better future in sight, the ALP struggled to gain electoral traction. Evatt also had great difficulties within his own party. His obsessive, suspicious and sometime antagonistic nature caused concern to many of his colleagues and he lacked a real sense of teamwork.
Evatt left Parliament in 1960. The last seat he represented was the electorate of Hunter. He had one more career, as Chief Justice of NSW, but ill-health forced him to retire from that position in 1962. He died in 1965.
Legacy
In the end, Evatt was something of a tragic figure in Australian politics, having never achieved the prime ministership despite being Leader of the Opposition for nearly a decade. Nevertheless his life and career can be admired for many things. He was extraordinarily energetic and a great all-rounder, excelling at sport as a young man and later in the law, writing and international diplomacy. But he was not so adept at politics, and in many respects Menzies was a more attractive politician with a better grasp of how to appeal to the electorate.
Maitland should be proud of Evatt: he was a Maitland-born high achiever. In 2016 he was inducted into the City’s Hall of Fame in the first tranche of people so honoured, but there had been community uproar when in 1987 an East Maitland high school was named supposedly after the Evatt family at the behest of ALP Minister for Education Rodney Cavalier. The truth, probably, was that the school was named after Evatt himself, and this was the view that most Maitlanders took. The name was soon withdrawn.
The Canberra suburb of Evatt was named after him, and that name stuck.
References
Atkinson, David, ‘Our past: Early years productive for high-flying ‘Doc’ Evatt’, Maitland Mercury, 20 December 2020.
Atkinson, David, ‘“Doc” Evatt: a great man but never Prime Minister’, Maitland Mercury, 27 December 2020.
Bolton, G C, ‘Evatt, Herbert Vere (Doc) (1894-1965)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 14, 1996.
