For Murphy, that incident illustrates the paradoxical nature of Evatt: ‘intellectually complex but ... sometimes childish ... [with] strange fractures through his character and an apparent inability to read the social world around him’. The puzzle of Evatt’s character, augmented as it is by a lack of personal material – no diaries, few personal letters (Evatt was a notoriously poor correspondent) – plus the passions of the Cold War that raged around him, have, to Murphy’s mind, defeated previous biographers. The trajectory of Evatt’s life is clear; but it is the identity at the heart of this journey that is the challenge.

Murphy posits six key character traits to guide us through the Evatt labyrinth: first, ambition (‘No matter how high he rose, his ambition was still unappeased’); second, ‘overweening self-regard’; third, suspicion of the motives of others (‘he lived in a world frighteningly devoid of trust’); fourth, a belief in legal rationalism as the source of truth, though as Russel Ward told Evatt, commenting on the Molotov incident, ‘correct legal protocol was suicidal political insanity’; fifth, liberalism – Evatt was more interested in protecting civil liberties than in transforming social conditions; and finally,a ‘distinct lack of self-awareness’. In Murphy’s judgement, ‘[h]e was an enigma to others, but perhaps also to himself’. It should be noted that these traits have been culled from the views, not of Evatt’s enemies, but of friends, colleagues, and dispassionate observers.

With these traits as ever-present guides, Murphy embarks on an otherwise conventional biography with a chronological narrative from Evatt’s birth in the Hunter Valley town of Maitland in 1894 to his death in 1965. He accepts, as do Evatt’s other biographers, that his mother, Jeanie, was the key parental influence; his father, a notable local cricketer, died when Evatt was only seven. Evatt seems to have remembered little of his father or at least, as the cautious Murphy points out, ‘more precisely he recounted few memories of him’. But if Murphy concludes that his mother’s determination to see her children do well (she had six sons) and her ‘ferocious commitment to education’ does much to explain the ambition of her brightest son, he rejects the psychological layering around this theme that characterises Peter Crockett’s biography of Evatt (1993). Nor does he have any time for Kylie Tennant’s romantic myth that because both Evatt’s parents were of Irish descent he imbibed rebellious Irish folklore at the family fireside. As Murphy points out, Evatt’s father was of Anglo-Irish stock, from a family which had long supplied military officers to the Empire.

The widowed Jeanie Evatt and her six sons, Sydney, 1904. Herbert Evatt, aged ten, is pictured on the far left (Flinders University Library no. 2046)

The critical factors for Murphy are class and academic achievement. The Evatts were the owners of a ‘respectable’ hotel and, though the evidence is fragmentary, Murphy conveys the impression of ‘a family holding on to the lower rungs of the middle class’. Evatt’s mother’s ambition and his own intellectual brilliance – a stellar path through Fort Street High School and Sydney University – guaranteed him full middle-class status. As Murphy succinctly observes, that was ‘not an obviously Labor pedigree’. Unlike the social democratic parties of Europe, the early labourist ALP mistrusted intellectuals and middle-class professionals. Evatt was an anomaly: a generation before Gough Whitlam, he was the first major ALP figure to come to the party from the middle class.

Murphy’s chronological approach suits Evatt, whose various career changes tended to fit into discrete chronological compartments: barrister 1918–25; NSW State Labor MP 1925–30; High Court judge 1930–40; Federal Labor minister 1941–9; Federal Labor leader 1951–60; Chief Justice, NSW Supreme Court 1960–62. Each of these periods has a distinct tempo and tone. First, the brilliant young lawyer and his meteoric rise at the Sydney bar. By the time he was thirty, Evatt had appeared before the High Court seventeen times and had established a reputation as ‘a champion of the labour movement in the courts’. Then the young MP for Balmain in the NSW State Parliament, where his upward trajectory stalled. He failed to win an anticipated cabinet post, not recognising perhaps that his caucus colleagues might have thought a little parliamentary experience a prerequisite. He fell out with his leader, Jack Lang – he was not alone in this – and became one of Lang’s fiercest critics, likening his leader’s dictatorial tendencies to those of Lenin and Mussolini. Disendorsed, he ran against the official candidate, was expelled from the party but still managed re-election. With the party divided and in opposition, Evatt appears to have become disenchanted with political life and seems scarcely to have been present in the 1929–30 sessions of the State Parliament.

Herbert Vere Evatt ca. 1925 (The Swiss Photographic Studios Sydney, Wikimedia Commons)Through the beneficence of the Scullin federal government, Evatt was raised to the High Court at the age of thirty-six, becoming the youngest High Court judge ever. The appointment of this inexperienced ‘leftie’ outraged a conservative profession. Despite this controversial start, the 1930s seems to have been the happiest period in his life. Always preferring legal rationalism to political persuasion, he enjoyed High Court work, despite the irascibility of some of his colleagues. Murphy notes that the correspondence between the judges ‘bristles with ego, rivalry and umbrage’. Sheltered from the turbulence of the political world, Evatt found the leisure to write; he published four major historical works during the 1930s. Again, it was during the High Court period that he and his wife, Mary Alice, developed a growing interest in modern art. They were not only becoming major collectors, but by the end of the 1930s Evatt was the champion of the moderns against that defender of the art establishment, Robert Menzies. Murphy paints a delightful picture of the socially conservative Evatts being hosted by the bohemian Reeds at Heide, with the painter Sam Atyeo as the Evatt court jester.

War drew Evatt back to politics as the celebrity candidate for Barton in the federal election of September 1940. When the UAP government fell in October 1941, Evatt, despite his brief federal apprenticeship, became both attorney-general and minister for external affairs in the Curtin government. These ministerial years were his most successful in politics, perhaps because as attorney-general his legal experience gave him unrivalled authority, and as minister for external affairs he was relatively free from party constraints. An effective attorney-general rather than a law reformer, he implemented policies aimed at sustaining the war effort and preparing for the peace. He placed much more emphasis on his role at External Affairs, where he sought to articulate an independent foreign policy for Australia as well as pursuing an ambitious liberal internationalism. He compelled both Britain and the United States to recognise Australia as an autonomous nation, not one which either could take for granted. In the struggles to establish the constitution of the United Nations, he became the champion of the small powers, seeking with limited success to qualify the veto of the great powers, and to promote the role of both the International Court of Justice and UNESCO. It is probably true to say that he was the most significant Australian player on the world stage in the first half of the twentieth century.

This prominence ensured that after the triumph of Menzies and the Liberals in the election of 1949, followed by the death of Chifley eighteen months later, Evatt became leader of the Opposition without a contest, but not without many doubters. This opened the most disastrous phase of his career. As Murphy writes ‘the combination of Menzies’ resurgence, domestic anticommunism and the international Cold War would destroy him’. Under Evatt, the Labor party split in 1955, crippling his leadership and denying the ALP federal government for nearly a generation. Murphy has a splendid metaphor on the magnitude of the break, comparing the early Labor splits of 1916 and 1931, when a few leaders peeled off to the conservatives, ‘as chips off a block’, whereas 1955 ‘fractured the rock entirely’.

Dr Evatt with Soviet Minister for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov, and Alexei Pavlov of the Soviet Embassy, during Molotov’s 1942 visit to Britain (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade via Wikimedia Commons)

How far was Evatt to blame? To what extent was he the wrecker? Or did the real explanation lie in the ‘powder keg’ – the underground war in the broader labour movement between right-wing Industrial Groupers, backed in Victoria by B.A. Santamaria and the secretive Catholic Social Studies Movement, and the communists and their left-wing allies? It is an issue which Murphy examines meticulously. He argues that Evatt, in a series of politically unwise interventions – easily pictured as pro-communist – and by his erratic and intemperate behaviour over the Petrov Affair, inflamed tensions within the party and facilitated Menzies’ wedging of the Labor party on the issues of communism and the Cold War. Murphy also admits that Evatt lit the powder keg with a speech in October 1954 denouncing the malign influence of Santamaria and the Victorian Groupers, thereby initiating a series of convulsions that led directly to the Split six months later. But he acquits Evatt of the charge that he deliberately provoked this split to sustain his leadership. His grounds for so doing are not particularly creditable to Evatt. Such a charge, Murphy writes, ‘exaggerates his control over events, control over the party and perhaps control over himself’. In essence, Murphy concludes that given the powder keg ‘it is hard to imagine an alternative trajectory in which the split did not occur’.

The onset of dementia and a severe stroke ended Evatt’s brief reign as chief justice of the Supreme Court of NSW, which had been designed as an honourable exit from Parliament. A glimpse of him in court by the young Michael Kirby, who describes him as ‘Lear disconsolate’, captures this final stage. Coincidentally Murphy, in a much wider sense, also likens him to Lear, as a man of extraordinary talents, but a man blind to his own inadequacies for political leadership ‘driving himself forward to his ruin’.