Menzies and Evatt: the Great and Bitter Rivals

Menzies versus Evatt (above) was the most important rivalry in our political history. Present-day Australia is partly shaped by the duels between these intellectual warriors.

Born in 1894, a depressed year, they spent their respective childhoods in country towns. Their family background was in small business, Bert Evatt first living in a hotel in the Hunter Valley town of East Maitland and Bob Menzies growing up beside the general store in the smallish Victorian wheat town of Jeparit.

This review appears in October’s Quadrant.
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The two highly talented boys depended on scholarships for their later education, each attending a leading secondary school and a top law school: they were to be star barristers at an early age but their ultimate ambition was politics. Their families were similarly affected by the First World War, each sending sons away to the battle front in Europe, but young Evatt and young Menzies were not permitted to enlist for different but legitimate reasons. On the eve of the Second World War, the two men were in their mid-forties, and already in positions of power. Soon they were to be prominent in world-shaking events, though usually their remedies for the world’s troubles were far apart.

Each was affected by the long rivalry between Victoria and New South Wales. In the first half of the twentieth century, Evatt’s New South Wales was more a Labor state and Menzies’s Victoria was more a Liberal state. Each man sat first in state parliament before moving to the federal parliament in Canberra, which was then an infant capital city.

Herbert Vere Evatt when young seems to have had no strong political connections: he was only seven when his father died. In contrast the young Robert Gordon Menzies had an exceptional web of political links. Thus his maternal grandfather, a leader of the gold miners’ trade union in the Ballarat district, was a close colleague of William Guthrie Spence—the most powerful man in the nation’s trade unions. On the other side of politics, Menzies’s father briefly sat in the legislative assembly in Victoria, and his uncle Sid Sampson held a rural seat in the federal parliament. The young Menzies was also affected by a variety of cultures. His wheatbelt hometown of Jeparit was multicultural by the standards of the era, and Germans and their Lutheran churches were numerous around the district. Menzies himself was of Cornish as well as Scottish ancestry, the one primarily Methodist and the other Presbyterian, and in turn he imbibed each of these creeds.

During his career as a rising barrister, Menzies sat in Victoria’s legislative council and then in the legislative assembly. One would expect him to hold mainly intellectual portfolios but he also was minister for railways. As this was one of the largest businesses in the nation it must have been a challenging training ground for a young man on the go. Menzies entered the federal parliament in 1934, and within five years he was Prime Minister. That gave him an initial advantage when Mr Justice Evatt in 1940 resigned from the High Court with hopes of himself becoming Prime Minister.

Evatt’s political career began when, as a rising Sydney barrister, he became Labor member for Balmain. In 1930 his appointment to the High Court when so young was unique, as was his planned descent—or ascent, in his eyes—to federal politics during the wartime year of 1940. As his annual income thereby would be sliced, his willingness to become a politician was called “a patriotic decision” by some Labor members; but this argument did not persuade Menzies. He maintained that Evatt had been a partisan politician while sitting on the High Court. In Menzies’s words, Evatt seemed to be defying the principle that the “judiciary should be kept completely detached from politics”. On the other hand, Gideon Haigh’s illuminating recent book A Brilliant Boy is sympathetic to Evatt who as a youngish judge had to balance the demands of the law, his own personality and humanity, and the needs of a nation.

Evatt was not always a steadfast Labor supporter. Near the end of his ten years on the High Court he reportedly sounded out his political prospects over a cup of tea with a leading Menzies minister. He hinted or hoped that he might be invited to lead a national all-party government. After all, the United Kingdom had just called on an all-party government under Winston Churchill to win the Battle of Britain, and ultimately to defeat Hitler.

First, Dr Evatt had to find an enthusiastic electorate in Sydney, the federal election being due in September 1940. He stood for Labor in Barton, a suburban seat which the Liberals—then called the UAP—held by a large majority. Surprisingly Evatt won the seat with a massive swing: a victory that was significant nation-wide. Menzies was thereby deprived of a workable majority in parliament. He now could govern only with the support of two independents from Victoria, and a year later they withdrew that support. So in October 1941 John Curtin of the Labor Party became Prime Minister and Evatt became his Minister for Foreign Affairs and Attorney-General. It was a remarkable turn­around in Evatt’s career.

Two months later a Japanese fleet attacked Pearl Harbor. On February 19, 1942, Darwin and its ship-dotted harbour were bombed. Speedily the Japanese invaded New Guinea and dozens of other islands near Australia.

At times in the next three years Evatt was engaged in overseas missions designed to secure more British and American military support. While his energy and his willingness to learn were impressive, his personal traits sometimes nullified his work. Not a team man, he was “a chaotic manager, relying on minders and staff to tidy-up after him”. Anne Henderson in Menzies versus Evatt hints that Menzies at this time displayed, in lesser degree, an arrogance like Evatt’s. But Menzies rebuilt himself during the years from 1941 and 1944 when he was not only in the political wilderness but also seemed likely to stay there.

In contrast these had been wonderful years for Evatt. In San Francisco in 1945 he was a founder of the United Nations, and three years later—while he was still our Foreign Minister—he became the third person to chair its general assembly. For one year he presided over meetings that tackled such urgent questions as Israel and Palestine, and the Soviet blockade of Berlin. Anne Henderson concludes that no Australian leader, except Billy Hughes in 1919, was as well known worldwide as Bert Evatt became some thirty years later.

Throughout the nation many voters believed that Evatt was the most learned man ever to sit in an Australian parliament. As this was an era when only a tiny proportion of people had the opportunity to attend university, the typical voter showed some reverence towards a university degree. Evatt was not only a celebrated judge but one of the most diligent historians in the land and fully deserving of his doctoral degree from Sydney University. He was widely known as “The Doc” whereas his chief rival, Menzies, was plain Mister. In the federal election of 1949 the Mister won, and he kept on winning.

The rivalry of Evatt and Menzies became increasingly personal. As Henderson explains in her lively book, they disliked and even hated each other. Howard Beale, a leading Liberal politician, admired their talents but not the fierceness of their rivalry: “There was something slightly unpleasant in the spectacle of these two outstanding men struggling bitterly, pitted against each other in the political arena.” I think it fair to say that most journalists did not think their rivalry unpleasant but rather it provided a newsworthy and sometimes dramatic spectacle.

Oratory was part of their appeal and their fame. In about 1951, I heard Evatt speak in Dandenong, which was then more a market town than industrial hub. Most of those Victorians packed into the town hall that evening listened sympathetically but had to concede that Evatt lacked Menzies’s melodious voice, sense of theatre and his witty and spontaneous replies to interjectors. Certainly Evatt was logical, lucid and full of information. On the high platform he spoke without notes or with only hand-written headings on a sheet of paper: he was fluent and, on occasions, aggressive. We inhabit a very different media era, but if Evatt spoke today he would be regarded as impressive, partly because of the knowledge carried in his head, and instantly on call.

Already Evatt was beginning to suffer electorally from his intermittent sympathy for communism and his willingness as politician and barrister to defend the waterside workers and other powerful leftist unions. After the communists won control of China in 1949, and their army joined North Korea in the invasion of South Korea, the tense situation in East Asia favoured Menzies’s fortunes. At the federal election in April 1951, Menzies made communism a major target, insisting that it was “a set of ideas quite foreign to our civilisation”, and also an enemy of personal freedom. He denounced communism as a force for atheism when Australia was Christian. On election day, Menzies and his new Liberal Party seized control of the Senate from Labor and almost toppled Evatt in his own suburban seat.

Evatt’s opponent was Nancy Wake who, in the Second World War, had been a heroine in the French resistance to the German occupation. An articulate anti-communist in her late thirties, she was feted in the Anzac Day parade in Sydney in April 1951. Three days later—it was election day—she gave her celebrated, older opponent a severe shock. She lost by a mere 234 votes and, according to Henderson, “she came close to changing Australia’s political history in remarkable ways”. Victory would have been a landmark in Australian feminism.

Though not a communist, Evatt could be sympathetic to Russia and too eager, at times, to take the communist side. Now leader of the federal opposition, Evatt as an intellectual was still admired in many circles. Increasingly he impressed voters when during the winter of 1951 he led the No campaign in the referendum called by the Menzies government in order to thwart the High Court and ban the Communist Party. For the first time Menzies versus Evatt was definitely the match of the day.

The book’s discussion of the referendum is enlightening. The referendum campaign was to last only for five weeks, and Evatt, still untested as the party leader, jumped the gun by almost two weeks. Beginning his No campaign at an open-air meeting in Cairns on Friday August 17, 1951, he criss-crossed the continent even though he hated flying. Evatt covered more territory—thousands of miles every few days—than did Menzies, and made more speeches.

At first more than 70 per cent of voters had opposed Evatt, according to opinion polls, and eleven of the nation’s thirteen daily newspapers rejected his case. But by election day Evatt had turned the tide, and his No case won a narrow victory, capturing just over 50.6 per cent of the nation’s voters.

Early in 1954 Evatt seemed likely to win the next federal election. In the last two years his opponent’s reputation had been weakened by the nation’s economy with its burst of high inflation, its restrictions on imports, and the rising income tax on breadwinners. The existing government, as is the custom, was widely blamed.

And then a seemingly minor event began to threaten Evatt. In Canberra on April 3, 1954, a Soviet official named Vladimir Petrov defected from the Russian embassy. On May 17—just twelve days before the federal election—the Menzies government set up a royal commission to investigate this dramatic event. It was widely believed that Menzies so acted in order to emphasise communism as the major election issue, and to highlight the threat facing Australia if the Cold War became a Third World War.

The Labor Party, against early expectations, lost the federal election. Evatt himself lost his long-awaited opportunity to become prime minister.

The explosive Petrov affair is the theme of many books, and Anne Henderson probably has read them all. Her last chapters dwell on Evatt’s controversial appearances before the royal commission, and his private and somewhat naive contacts with Molotov, the Soviet Union’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. We are told of Evatt’s decision to fight the strong Catholic sector in his own Labor Party, thereby further alienating Bob Santamaria who was paramount as a Victorian party-leader though never a parliamentarian. The climax was reached in April 1955 when the Labor Party in Victoria expelled eighteen of its own state politicians and six of its federal politicians. In that year Menzies won yet another federal election. Labor did not win power federally for another seventeen years.

This cannot have been an easy book to write. Many relevant episodes had to be compressed or deleted in order to keep the story within bounds. Amongst the merits of this book are the vigour of the writing and the emphasis on events and trends which today still have significance.

Menzies Versus Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics
by Anne Henderson
Connor Court, 2023, 226 pages, $34.95

Geoffrey Blainey has written more than forty books on history; the first was published in 1954