In The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent, Gideon Haigh paints a picture of an Evatt who is both fresh and familiar. There have been many previous books on Evatt, including five that might be called ‘biographies’ – the most recent being John Murphy’s admirable Evatt: A life (2016). But Haigh’s book returns us in spirit to a much earlier account, Kylie Tennant’s Evatt: Politics and justice (1970). Tennant’s book was in many ways a memorial to what Evatt meant to her generation of left-leaning intellectuals. This was how Evatt seemed from the inside looking out, among the writers, artists, and intellectuals who knew and admired him, and who saw him as one of their own. Haigh, decades on, is obviously writing from outside that world. Yet his is, no less than Tennant’s, a loving act of historical and biographical recovery. It is not hagiographical in the way Tennant’s book often was – Haigh’s capacity for appraisal is too cool for that – but rather an effort to explain why Evatt should still matter to us.

H. V. Evatt photographed in 1925 (Swiss Photographic Studios, Wikimedia Commons)

The Brilliant Boy is not conventional biography. Its focus is on Evatt and the law, that aspect of his career least adequately covered in existing work. Not that anyone has sought to deny the importance of the law in Evatt’s make-up. Its impact on his practice of history and politics is a major theme of Murphy’s biography, while several commentators have stressed the basic – and sometimes incapacitating – legalism of his diplomacy. But no one until now has found a way of explaining why Evatt’s judicial thought matters for Australian history in the broader sense. And no one until Haigh has worked out how to turn it all into a compelling story. This is the singular achievement of one of Australia’s finest non-fiction writers.

Haigh weaves his account of Evatt around the Chester case, which came before the High Court in 1939. The plaintiff, Golda Chester – a recent Jewish emigrant from Poland – had sued Sydney’s Waverley Council for the shock caused to her through the drowning of her seven-year-old son, Max, in an unfenced trench left exposed by council workers. The case, taken up by the solicitor and sometime Labor parliamentarian Abe Landa, is hardly famous outside the technical field of tort law. And if it is a landmark, it is not because of any immediate effects. Evatt’s was a dissenting High Court judgment. Golda received nothing for the loss of her ‘brilliant boy’.

The book’s title refers both to Golda’s description of her Max and to Evatt himself. Much of the story’s power derives from the resonances of Evatt’s own life experience with that of this Jewish migrant family. The Chesters’ existence was humble and undistinguished compared with that of Bert and Mary Alice Evatt and their two adopted children – with their wealth, glamour, shelves of books, and a Modigliani on the wall – and their paths crossed only for the brief duration of a single court case. But the experience seemingly stayed with the Doc for life. In the early 1960s, as a Chief Justice of New South Wales of declining mental power, he unsuccessfully importuned a young and embarrassed articled clerk, Murray Gleeson, to write an article vindicating his dissent in Chester.

Evatt lost two brothers during World War I, and his mother – who had supported their enlistment – never recovered. Nor could Evatt himself, rejected for service on medical grounds, ever forget. Haigh surmises that this family trauma lay at the heart of Evatt’s view that the damage to Golda of the council’s negligence was real, lasting, and worthy of compensation. One of the virtues of The Brilliant Boy as social history is that it returns us to the Australian past as another country, one in which trains lurched around at high speed with their doors wide open – resulting in regular injury and death – and in which judges were pleased to treat the victims of such institutional recklessness as if they were at fault for their own fate. Evatt’s creativity as a thinker and a judge is that he refused to accept this order as beyond the intervention of the law.

The law – at least as represented by so many of the Australian judges we encounter in this book – regarded the deaths of ordinary people with callousness, even brutality. One of these was John Latham. Haigh is a master wordsmith, with a remarkable ability to convey much with little. Latham, he says, ‘had almost but not quite enjoyed a distinguished career in the law and politics’. So far as Chester went, Latham thought it ‘not a common experience of mankind that the spectacle, even of the sudden and distressing death of a child, produces any consequence of more than a temporary nature in the case of bystanders or even of close relatives who see the body after death has taken place’.

It seems astonishing today that any man of ordinary intelligence – let alone the above-average intelligence one might expect of a Chief Justice of the High Court – could deliver an opinion so wanting in feeling, humanity, or even basic common sense. It would be tempting to treat Latham as singular: a man so lacking judgement and integrity that he would secretly and repeatedly tender advice on political matters to his conservative cronies in government, as we know he did, while maintaining a hypocritical and fraudulent public posture of judicial independence. But, aside from Evatt, Latham’s fellow judges reasoned along similar lines. The ‘shock’ experienced by Golda was not, according to the deeply unpleasant Justice Hayden Starke, ‘within the ordinary range of human experience’. For lazy Justice George Rich, possibly having to write his own judgment this time because Owen Dixon wasn’t around to do it for him, the ‘suffering’ would rarely take the form of ‘shock’: it would more commonly be ‘worry and impecuniosity’.

Haigh’s account of Evatt’s dissent in Chester is a tour de force: not courtroom drama so much as a study of the exercise by a judge of formidable intelligence. It is unusual, these days, to think of Evatt as emotionally intelligent. There are plenty of stories of his bad behaviour, such as his bullying of staff, and Haigh does not gloss over them here. But it was a deep emotional intelligence that saw Evatt do his best in a lengthy dissenting judgment to step into Golda’s shoes, to try, however incompletely, to see and feel the world as she would have.

He did so, Haigh suggests, by drawing on his own love and loss. He did so by applying his formidable skills of legal reasoning. He did so by reference to his knowledge of the very latest jurisprudence in Britain and the United States, judgments that had recognised and compensated nervous shock. He also did so, boldly, with Australian literature, famously quoting the lost child episode in Joseph Furphy’s classic novel Such is Life (1903).

It was a remarkable performance by a man at the height of his powers, one that would reverberate for decades through its influence on the judicial treatment of nervous shock, in Australia and internationally. Personally, I have never doubted that Evatt was among the greatest of Australians, and this book reinforces that view. All the same, Haigh has helped me to see this greatness in a new light.

Most significantly, he reveals Evatt as a skilled storyteller, and a storyteller of a particular kind: Evatt, the great jurist, was also a historian. We know this, of course, from his distinguished historical scholarship, and Haigh provides a well-informed overview of it. But it is striking that the Evatt judgments to which Haigh draws most attention are examples of superior storytelling that deploy the narrative skills of the historian. In Chester, this was storytelling in which a narrator steeped in law, literature, and history sought to enter the mind and heart of another whose sensibilities, class, gender, and general life experience as a Jewish immigrant could hardly have been more different from his own. And he did so in the cause of giving her justice.

Historians, in their own way, try to do that too. Haigh has done so superbly in this splendid book.