The Parallel Ambitions of Menzies and Evatt (Part III)

Peddlers of the pro-Evatt, anti-Menzies counter-factual narrative were given some sustenance by the publication in 1974 of a disgraceful book titled Nest of Traitors: The Petrov Affair, co-authored by John Stubbs and Nicholas Whitlam, one of Gough Whitlam’s sons. Professor John Blaxland, in his bland official history of ASIO from 1963 to 1975, passed it off in a single sentence as painting “a bleak and incomplete interpretation of the Petrov defection and the royal commission that followed”. The book was in fact a shameless travesty of those events and of the Royal Commission’s conduct.

The fact that one of the book’s authors was a son of the Prime Minister might at first have been overlooked by ASIO in the belief that parents need not be held responsible for the delinquency of their offspring. There was however a catalogue of events which if then known to ASIO should have given them pause. And they were to be disabused of any such nonchalance soon enough!

The book was derived from a mini-thesis submitted in part-performance for an Honours Arts degree conferred by Harvard to which Nick Whitlam had been admitted on a sports scholarship. It can be safely said of the examiners of Whitlam fils that their level of knowledge of the subject would have been minuscule. Only a good many years later was it revealed that Gough Whitlam himself had made a significant input into that thesis. Correspondence between father and his student son during the 1960s is to be found online, having been deposited in the Whitlam Institute, University of Western Sydney. Gough never guided Nick to such indispensable sources as the Royal Commission’s Transcript of Proceedings, its Interim Report, and its Final Report. Copies of those publications Whitlam had mailed to son Nick were limited to communist sources.

I shall now deal with aspects of Gough Whitlam’s scandalous treatment of ASIO after becoming Prime Minister. These include his emphatic public support for Senator Murphy’s wholly unjustified raid on ASIO’s Melbourne headquarters on March 15-16, 1973. David Horner’s official history of ASIO from 1949 to 1963 recorded:

the false claims that Menzies and ASIO had engineered Petrov’s defection continued to sour relations between the Labor Party and ASIO for decades. In August [1973] the Director-General of Security, Peter Barbour, briefed the … Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, on the reason for Petrov’s defection and the value of the information provided by him. Whitlam was not fully convinced, arguing that it was unclear whether the value of the Petrovs “outweighed other disadvantages such as the effect on trade etc”. The defection and the royal commission might have brought ASIO into the light, but Evatt’s accusations continued to cast a long shadow.

And Horner then end-noted this: “A biography of Whitlam—[Jenny] Hocking, Gough Whitlam, published in 2008—repeats many of the claims about the defection that had been refuted by Manne in 1987.” Whitlam’s observation on the “disadvantages” of the Petrovs was asinine. Yet he could have been petulantly goaded into making it because of his inability to challenge Barbour’s briefing on the reason for the Petrovs’ defection. This briefing would have completely confounded Evatt’s accusations and the whole accumulation of tripe associated with them. ASIO, without being able to reply, then had to endure Whitlam’s public endorsement of Evatt’s very accusations.

On November 27, 1974, Gough Whitlam spoke in support of Nest of Traitors when formally launching it. In his speech there was much ducking and weaving. “You needn’t think the present Prime Minister is going to give a serve to any preceding Prime Minister.” But he implicitly identified Menzies for just such a serve in spades. “I cannot verify the facts because I haven’t taken time off to look at the closed documents.” But thanks to Barbour’s briefing of August 31, 1973, he would certainly have been better informed on the subject than the two wretched authors he was commending. Then there was this broad spray: “The principal actors were a pretty sordid shabby lot. Nobody emerged from the Petrov affair with credit. It diminished everybody it touched and everybody who touched it.” Then a direct reference to Menzies: “How much did my distinguished predecessor as Prime Minister know about it? How much did he use what he knew about it against the party of which I am the Leader?”

To the first question it has been established that Menzies had no more than the mere possibility of a defection confided in him by Colonel Spry on February 10, 1954. The defection on April 3 was notified to Menzies just as soon as Spry could brief him. To the second question the answer has been well established: Menzies and the coalition parties did not exploit the Petrov defections in campaigning in the 1954 election. Then this: “One of the features of the Petrov case is that for years there has been in the Labor Party a suspicion about the Security service …” This utterly baseless suspicion, which Barbour’s briefing should have comprehensively dispelled, was one which Whitlam himself then and since was only too keen to encourage. And also: “it is possible for a great political party to involve itself in dirty tricks”. This was an undisguised reference to Menzies and the coalition, as was the following, which encompassed ASIO and many others: “It is possible for the leader of a great political party to have people that will do the dirty work for him.” And then this:

I am satisfied that there will be a great number of people in Australia and elsewhere who will be fascinated by this sordid episode, this episode in Australia’s history which produced nothing, which achieved nothing, which did destroy a great number of reputations, which sullied institutions, the Parliament, the security service for so many years—for almost two decades.

In this vindictive diatribe Whitlam singled out blameless individuals while ignoring the Doc’s unpardonable role in stigmatising and traducing them. As to the Petrov defections producing nothing and achieving nothing, this was a direct taunt at Barbour’s briefing on the scope of the Petrovs’ information which had been acknowledged by overseas security services and on which I shall have more to say.

Michael Thwaites who, as head of ASIO’s Counter-Espionage Branch, B2, had supervised the Petrov defections, was to remark in his book Truth Will Out: ASIO and the Petrovs (1980): “many Australians today, with no political bias, and only a vague memory of the events, retain an impression that there were unexplained mysteries and sinister undercurrents to the whole affair”.

I had occasion to remark of Thwaites’s book in a Bulletin article on June 17, 1980, “The Petrov Affair: Let’s Bury the Legend”:

It does not detract in the least from Thwaites’s account to say that the absurdity of the legend he demolishes has been obvious from previously published sources, nor that some will still cling to its supposed orthodoxy, smelly as it is, as tenaciously as a Pharisee would cleave to his phylacteries.

Gough Whitlam, with his malicious and innuendo-spiked reflections on so many blameless individuals, set out deliberately in that deplorable speech to reinvigorate those very misguided impressions with what might be termed Pharisaical tenacity. This he did even after he had been unable to challenge Peter Barbour’s detailed briefing that they were without foundation and, to cite the Royal Commissioners’ Interim Report, “fantastic and wholly unsupported by any credible evidence”. And how must ASIO have reacted to that speech when fully apprised of its contents? ASIO must surely have concluded that their Prime Minister was wholly untrustworthy. Indeed, did not that speech raise serious questions as to whether his loyalty to the country which had made him its Prime Minister was undivided? Such a view ASIO might well have confided in the security services of friendly powers which would have reacted in disbelief to news of that speech.

ASIO’s skilful handling of the Petrovs’ defections had earned that security service, established as recently as 1949, golden opinions from longer-established overseas intelligence services in the non-communist orbit. In the year the Petrovs defected, 1954, three other KGB operatives also defected: Yuri Rastvorov in Tokyo, Pyotir Deriabin in Vienna and Nikolai Khokhlov in Bonn. Petrov outranked them all as the most senior Soviet intelligence operative to defect to the West since Walter Krivitsky in 1937. Those overseas intelligence services which had benefited so greatly from the Petrovs’ disclosures, in comprehensive and exceptional briefings, of the KGB as an organisation, its personnel, its codes and methods of espionage and subversion were bewildered by Australia’s domestic controversy inflamed by Evatt’s demented antics and those of his camp followers. The resurgence of this domestic controversy courtesy of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister must have appalled them.

This domestic controversy was to be sustained and was to embroil the Hawke government in 1983, its first year in office. ASIO’s role in what came to be known as the Combe-Ivanov affair was strictly limited. ASIO correctly identified one Valeriy Ivanov as a KGB agent operating under diplomatic cover as First Secretary in the Soviet Embassy. By bugging Ivanov’s home, ASIO was able to monitor conversations between Ivanov and David Combe. One-time National Secretary of the ALP turned lobbyist, Combe had ambitions to make a fortune from Australian-Soviet trade. ASIO was only too familiar with the KGB’s techniques in the attempted subversion of citizens in non-communist countries. From these bugged conversations ASIO concluded that Ivanov was on the brink of compromising Combe irreparably and they promptly moved to avoid this by having Ivanov declared persona non grata and expelled. All subsequent actions in this connection were taken by the Hawke government without any input from ASIO.

Once again Robert Manne was to be the unanswerable chronicler of what followed when Combe breached an agreement with the Hawke government within hours of concluding it. This agreement when made public emphasised that Combe was not a Soviet spy but that “he had been, or appeared to have been, compromised by Ivanov”. It was agreed that with this statement’s publication nothing more need be said or done. But Combe swiftly dishonoured that agreement. Manne’s clinical dissection of the resultant media pile-on can be found in his “David and Goliath: The Media and Mr Combe” (Quadrant, October 1984), reprinted in The Shadow of 1917 as “The Combe Affair and Political Culture”. It is hard to identify any journalists quoted in Manne’s account who through their unreasoning hostility to ASIO and to Hawke did not disgrace themselves unpardonably. ASIO was given a wholly undeserved shellacking in spite of their slight but decisive professional involvement. Manne’s chapter is too comprehensive to be quoted in extenso. Interested readers are advised to read it in full. In his conclusion Manne had this to say:

During the course of the Combe affair Mr Hawke contended that in his public life he had never come upon a more glaring instance of journalistic laziness, unprofessionalism and bias. Readers of this chapter may not find it difficult to agree with Hawke’s judgment…

Other contributions worth consulting are Anthony McAdam’s articles “What the Combe Affair Tells Us About the Media” (Quadrant, September 1983), “Mr [Brian] Toohey, Mr Combe and Mr Justice Hope” (Quadrant, November 1983) and “Reflections of a Media Critic” (Quadrant, January-February 1984).

The media’s disgraceful conduct in this affair prompted Hawke to appoint Mr Justice Hope of the New South Wales Supreme Court to conduct a Royal Commission to inquire into the matter. Justice Hope had been appointed by the Whitlam government to conduct an inquiry into Australia’s intelligence and security. Whitlam could not have been overjoyed when Hope in that report upheld the Royal Commission on Espionage’s finding that a Soviet espionage network had operated successfully in post-war Australia: “Material placed before me both in Australia and abroad has satisfied me that this finding was correct.”

After a summary running to almost two pages Manne concluded of Hope’s report:

In all major matters Mr Justice Hope approved the Hawke government’s and ASIO’s handling of the Combe affair in which he had no doubt there were “serious implications for national security”. His report was tightly argued, extremely fair-minded and revealed a mastery of the evidence which had been presented to him over four and a half months. The soundness of his conclusions will, I hope, be evident to readers of this chapter …

While in December 1983 those who sided with Combe at least felt obliged to attack Hope’s findings, by middle 1984 they were able to put it around in the media—without any apparent opposition—that Hope had cleared and totally exonerated David Combe.

Combe’s dishonouring of that agreement strongly suggested that prominent identities in the press gallery had heavily leant on him so to misconduct himself. This would not only explain the gallery’s consistent support for him thereafter but also the likelihood that such support had been promised in return for his repudiating the agreed statement. If this had not been the case, then it would seem that members of the press gallery had gullibly submitted to Combe’s shrewd and sustained manipulation. But their consistent and mindless hostility to ASIO throughout this controversy amounted to more than this. It was evidence of that lingering but barely articulated influence of the Petrov affair and of the innuendoes surrounding that celebrated event to which Dr Evatt had contributed his own uniquely reckless and villainous charges. Most media commentators in this light continued to regard ASIO as an object of loathing and suspicion. Confirmation of this lingering influence of the Petrov affair was to be revealed the following year.

The year 1984 was the thirtieth anniversary of the defections of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. It was therefore the year ASIO under the thirty-year rule opened their archives covering those events. I made my own contribution to the subject in two articles: “The Petrov Documents: The Last Chapter”, (Quadrant, November 1984) and “The Petrovs and the Journalists: The Conspiracy Theorists’ Flea Hunt” (Quadrant, December 1984).

The opening of the archives should have settled all arguments, but thanks to a largely corrupted media that event was thoroughly distorted and travestied. The Sydney Morning Herald led the way, to the undisguised dismay of its proprietor, Sir Warwick Fairfax, chiefly at the direction of one Evan Whitton. The Herald’s guiding lights were prepared to cover themselves with ridicule in acclaiming Whitton as “Australia’s most respected authority on the Petrov affair” when he could be best dismissed as one of its more conspicuous dupes. He displayed himself in this instance as an obsessive conspiracist with tunnel vision blindsided by his overweening confidence in his own disabilities. He was at the time the Herald’s correspondent in London but was honeymooning in Rome. For all the light he was able to cast on the opening of ASIO’s archives, the Herald might just as well have left him undisturbed in his nuptial bed and saved themselves the cost of a return airfare. The Herald kicked off in a leading article by quoting that indispensable source, Gough Whitlam, as claiming that the opening of ASIO’s archives would put “an end to one of the most blatant abuses of Royal Commissions” and hinting darkly at a possible “Royal Commission conspiracy”.

Another identity to distinguish himself in the Herald’s coverage was Hugh White, now Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the ANU, whose consistent line has recently been that Australia would best serve its interests in dealing with Communist China by being its doormat. What was striking in his Herald article was his uncritical repetition of Rupert Lockwood’s tissue of falsehoods in his testimony before the Royal Commission—falsehoods which Lockwood tailored as best he could to conform with Evatt’s charges and which the Royal Commissioners had very properly dismissed. White’s article was so misconceived that he might just as well have entrusted the composition of most of it to Lockwood himself. If those responsible for the Herald’s disgraceful coverage of this event had consulted that paper’s responsible coverage of the Petrov affair in 1954-55 under John Pringle’s editorship, they might have been utterly shamed, had they not been so utterly shameless.

The myrmidons in Australia’s taxpayer-funded fifth column, the ABC, predictably surpassed themselves. The ringmaster in their particular circus was David Marr, who had led the media lynch mob in their coverage of the Combe-Ivanov affair. (Marr, now aged seventy-six, has recently been promoted by ABC Radio as one of their hardy perennials in filling the slot recently vacated by another, one Phillip Adams.) Marr’s characteristic contribution to the Combe-Ivanov affair prompted me to write a Quadrant article (December 1983) on his treatment of the Petrov affair in his gravely flawed but extravagantly acclaimed biography of Sir Garfield Barwick published in 1980. My article in response to this was titled “David Marr on That Other Royal Commission”. As far as Marr was concerned in his ABC coverage, the only disclosure from ASIO’s archives worthy of comment was the full text of Exhibit J, and for the enlightenment of his viewing public he invited onto his program one Rupert Lockwood whom the Royal Commissioners had written off as a serial liar and rightly concluded was the document’s sole author and typist. Lockwood predictably enough trotted out his tissue of brazen lies in the confident expectation that they would pass unchallenged on that program—lies which the Royal Commission had so scornfully dismissed. But the campaign in sustained misinformation did not end there.

In 1990 the Australian Dictionary of Biography published Evatt’s entry submitted by Professor G.C. (Geoffrey) Bolton. His treatment of Evatt’s involvement in the Royal Commission on Espionage was grotesque. He did not cite the Royal Commissioners’ Interim Report in his sources of information, but a cursory reading of it might have enabled him to avoid amassing his collection of howlers. He misstated the involvement of Grundeman and Dalziel as being due to their alleged “communication with the Soviet Embassy” when it had amounted to no more than their being cited as sources in Rupert Lockwood’s Exhibit J. He then asserted that Evatt in defence of his staff against this non-existent allegation had “made some progress against ASIO’s witnesses” despite the “hostility” with which he claimed the Royal Commissioners had treated him from the very time he appeared. Contrast this to the Royal Commissioners’ observations:

37. Charge followed charge with bewildering variations. Suggestions were made of blackmail, forgery, uttering, fabrication, fraud and conspiracy and—upon the repeated assurances of Dr. Evatt that his examination of witnesses was directed to these matters and would prove them—we felt constrained to permit him great latitude in his questioning. This we felt bound to do, since an exhaustive inquiry by us into the authenticity of Exhibit J was part of our duty.
38. Lockwood was very willing to follow and exploit the line taken on behalf of Grundeman and Dalziel.
39. As day followed day and all that we heard was constant reiteration of vague charges of infamy, we demanded of counsel, on 1st September, that they formulate with some exactitude their allegations. Dr Evatt then charged that Exhibit J had been fabricated by the Petrovs as part of a political conspiracy with the enforced aid of O’Sullivan who, he alleged, had been blackmailed into collaborating in the fabrication of the document and into inserting therein as sources the names of himself, Grundeman and Dalziel. The political conspiracy was alleged to be one to injure Dr Evatt and the Australian Labor Party by procuring the false insertion in Exhibit J of the names of three of his secretaries as sources with the intention that the Petrovs should so nicely time their actions that Exhibit J could be produced and published on the eve of the federal elections in 1954 …

Rather than revealing “hostility”, this extract attests the Royal Commissioners’ extraordinary patience which was to give way to exasperation. Evatt first appeared on August 16 but it was not until September 1 that they had anything like a showdown with him. And Evatt’s accusation fell to the ground of its own volition. The full text of Exhibit J remained undisclosed until 1984 and not one portion of its text was revealed before the 1954 election! It was plain from the text of Exhibit J itself that its author must have lived in Sydney for a great many years. This would have excluded the Petrovs and the youthful O’Sullivan. The Doc in bringing O’Sullivan into his alleged conspiracy so alarmed Lockwood and his counsel that they subsequently sought to distance themselves from the generality of his charges when it came to formulating their own.

Dealing with Parliament’s consideration of the Final Report, Bolton referred to its non-existent “muckraking” and trotted out the old furphy about its inability “to furnish the basis for a single prosecution” as demonstrating its “futility”. And all this was parroted in 1990 when the documentary evidence confounding it had been available for years. Professor Bolton seems to have regarded the Doc’s letter to Molotov as no more than an irksome distraction from the fantasy he was weaving.  The learned professor in this instance seems to have disdained the sober garb of a scholar to put on the motley of a hack.

In 1991 Vladimir Petrov died. In a reference to Senator Lionel Murphy’s raid on ASIO early in 1973 which had amounted to a drunken rampage (see my “The Downfall of Gough Whitlam Part I” Quadrant, March 2013), Professor Blaxland observed:

One apparent side-effect of the raid was that Vladimir Petrov … had a stroke. The ASIO officer who was assigned to care for Petrov and his wife in later life believed that the stroke was caused by the stress of the raid, Mr Petrov believing that Murphy would abolish ASIO and send the Petrovs back to Russia. This stroke left him needing full-time care for the rest of his life.

On the news of Petrov’s death Gough Whitlam distinguished himself once again by appearing on television to propound his own wilfully misleading interpretation of the Petrovs’ defections and what followed. This drove a despairing Robert Manne into print with a Quadrant article, July-August 1991, “Is There No End to the Petrov Affair?” One particular question arises from this. What interest had Whitlam been consistently serving in his unrelenting propagation of such codswallop?

In 1992 David Marr published another edition of his biography of Barwick. The 1980 edition had carried the stark title Barwick. The 1992 edition slightly embellished this: Barwick: The Classic Biography of a Man of Power. I had hoped that Marr might also have revised his chapter on Petrov to account for the significant growth in the volume of published material on that subject since 1980. Some hope! That chapter, which could have been so effortlessly pilloried when first published in 1980, was reproduced with no alteration at all. Apparently, as far as Marr was concerned, time had stood still and ASIO’s archives which had been closed in 1980 were still closed in 1992. I suppose it was as convenient a method as any of flushing the inconvenient down a memory-hole.

In 1995 the Petrovian saga should have been closed finally. Rupert Lockwood in the expectation of death had finally admitted to what the evidence heard by the Royal Commission on Espionage had so conclusively pointed. He admitted without equivocation that he was indeed the sole author and typist of the whole of Exhibit J. This he admitted separately to David McKnight and on July 13 to Professor Desmond Ball, who wrote, “I believe Lockwood lied to the Petrov Commission” (Weekend Australian, April 23-24, 2011). Lockwood’s dedicated claqueurs whom he had for so long played for suckers were left with their faces liberally bespattered with egg. But Jenny Hocking was not alone in continuing to ignore the irrefutable documentation which had demolished Labor’s Petrov legend. Others were also to blame.

Menzies, in dealing with the Petrov affair in The Measure of the Years in 1970, was already aware of the counter-factual campaign being waged by Evatt’s camp followers and he obviously hoped with that publication to dispose of it. He lived long enough to witness the publication in 1974 of Nest of Traitors. And in that event he might have despaired of Labor’s Petrov legend ever being laid to rest. I hope in the preceding paragraphs to have made some contribution to giving it a decent burial.

Herewith I return to the triumph of Robert Gordon Menzies in 1955 when he so comprehensively demolished his great rival, Dr Herbert Vere Evatt. In dealing with Evatt in 1954 in the debate on the Interim Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage, Menzies remarked (and in his memoirs quoted with emphasis):

I feel bound to say that there can have been few instances in the whole history of judicial investigation in which charges so wildly made have been found to be so utterly without foundation. Therefore they were presumably made without real instruction wantonly and recklessly.

As to the Final Report he recorded the following in his memoirs:

Normally a fairly brief speech would have sufficed. But Evatt had, in spite of his experience before the judges, and in spite of their findings in both their reports, decided to make his last desperate throw, and had sprinkled his charges with recklessness and violence, including charges against me which, if they were only partly justified, would have unfitted me for the high office of Prime Minister or, indeed, for public life.

So I decided that I must dispose of the charges once and for all without any mercy for the man who had made them.

Menzies could have added that such charges would have complimented him undeservedly, if perversely, as a manipulative politician of super-human capacities. While ASIO’s operatives were fully justified in considering Evatt’s charges against them to have traduced them scandalously, the more cynical among them must have marvelled at their very ambit for they were so sweeping as to imply, if only partly justified, that their organisation could have been so extravagantly funded and so multi-skilled.

In a profile of Menzies in the Observer (London), June 3, 1962, the anonymous author—who I deduced to be J.D. Pringle, its Deputy Editor, who was between stints as Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald—declared that that speech “crushed, brutally and finally, the unfortunate Labor leader Dr Evatt”, adding, “Those who heard it will not easily forget [it].” Menzies’s peroration is worth quoting in full:

I have referred to those who are charged by the right honourable gentleman. Honourable public opinion will acquit them beyond question. But the same honourable public opinion will not acquit the man who made those reckless and villainous charges, nor will it acquit those who have, in this House, authorised those charges and, by their presence and support, countenanced them. If there is a charge to be made it is this: the Leader of the Opposition, from first to last in this matter, for his own purposes, in his own interests and with the enthusiastic support of every Communist in Australia, has sought to discredit the judiciary, to subvert the authority of the security organisation, to cry down decent and patriotic Australians and to build up the Communist fifth column. I am, therefore, compelled to say that, in the name of all these good and honourable men, in the name of public decency, in the name of the safety of Australia, the man on trial in this debate is the right honourable gentleman himself.

And those who have since persisted in those “reckless and villainous charges” deserve to be impeached no less ferociously.

Menzies, even after he had dealt harshly with Evatt over the Interim Report, still tried to maintain some semblance of civility. Evatt and his wife, Mary Alice, were both invited to the wedding in mid-1955 of Menzies’s daughter Heather to Peter Henderson, a diplomat who was to rise to the highest rank in the Department of Foreign Affairs. Both Evatts accepted the invitation and, unlike the Doc’s approach to functions connected with the Commonwealth Finance Ministers’ Conference in January 1954, both attended the service at St Andrew’s Church in Canberra and the reception afterwards at University House.

After the electoral reverses in December 1955 and November 1958, Evatt lingered on until his appointment as Chief Justice of New South Wales in February 1960. Menzies must have cast a pitying gaze on the Doc’s tragic last years. When it became obvious that the Doc could no longer continue as Chief Justice, the question was raised as to whether he still had the legal capacity to sign his letter of resignation. Might not his removal have to be secured by both houses of the Parliament passing a motion to that effect on grounds of proven incapacity? The dodgy device on which Bob Heffron and his ministers relied in avoiding this was pitilessly described by Arthur Calwell in his memoirs Be Just and Fear Not (1972).

While he was still active, the Doc had shown an eagerness to deal spitefully with those against whom he harboured a grievance. Victor Windeyer had been a member of the University of Sydney’s Senate since 1949. In 1955 he was appointed that university’s Deputy Chancellor but in 1958 the Doc drummed up enough of his fellow Senators to depose him from that position. Sir Victor Windeyer did not seek re-election when his term as Senator expired in 1959. As Chief Justice of New South Wales, the Doc was able to make a distinctive contribution of his own to a High Court appointment. When Sir Kenneth Street retired as Chief Justice of New South Wales, Sir William Owen had been Senior Puisne Justice since 1955. It was widely believed in the legal profession and beyond that he should have been appointed Sir Kenneth’s successor, but the Doc in being given that appointment aroused a great deal of controversy. When the Doc in 1940 stepped down from the High Court, Owen, already a Supreme Court judge, was widely tipped to succeed him, but the appointment went to Sir Dudley Williams. Owen was also considered in 1952 on Sir John Latham’s retirement but Sir Alan Taylor was appointed instead. On two occasions in 1958 Owen was again disappointed. In 1961 on the death of Sir Wilfred Fullagar, Owen at last was appointed a High Court judge but the circumstances were unusual to say the least. Menzies’s preference was for Sir Alistair Adam of the Victorian Supreme Court, but he decided in favour of Owen because his life was being made a misery by a vindictive Evatt.

The Doc died on November 2, 1965. Menzies’s record-breaking term as Prime Minister ended on January 26, 1966, so it fell to him to move the formal motion of condolence in the House of Representatives. Menzies was not unaccustomed to pronouncing eulogies in that forum on those he had privately detested; and he had had a couple of trial runs in 1962 and 1963 respectively with Sir Earle Page and Eddie Ward. I listened to the direct broadcast. When Menzies was called there was a disturbance which emerged as a low growl from the Opposition benches as if they were saying, “Let’s see how you eulogise the great man you destroyed”. Poor deluded creatures: they were unable to acknowledge that the Doc had destroyed himself! Menzies’s tribute lacked nothing in its formal acknowledgment of the Doc’s achievements, although one journalist pronounced it cold and frosty. But there was a marked infusion of warmth as he came to his conclusion:

I should like particularly to offer rather more than formal sympathy to his widow who, as his wife, was with him through all the vicissitudes, all the successes and all the defeats. She was there always faithful and always a great comfort and strength to him. I should like her to know that, whatever side we may be on in politics in this House, we have a very deep feeling for her and for her family.

In the Doc’s last years, Mary Alice had moved his household from Mosman to a house in Canberra. I recall subsequently that Mrs H.V. Evatt was listed in the vice-regal notices as a luncheon guest of Lord De L’Isle VC at Government House, Yarralumla. Could this extension of vice-regal hospitality have had its source in a quiet suggestion from Sir Robert?

John Paul taught British and Australian politics at a university in Sydney from 1973 until his retirement in 1996. This is the final part of a three-part series that began in the July-August issue and continued in September