The Parallel Ambitions of Menzies and Evatt (Part II)

On August 16, 1947, the Chifley government announced its proposed nationalisation of private banking. Anne Henderson recorded that Menzies’s immediate reaction was to assume that “the move would not be unpopular”, citing memories of the banks’ unpopularity “for their refusal of credit in the Depression”. Menzies might also have nursed a private grudge. As a child he would have been aware of his father, a storekeeper in Jeparit in Victoria’s Mallee, giving unsecured credit to needy farmers whom the banks refused to assist.

Within a day these hesitations were swiftly buried. Menzies seized the opportunity of utilising the hostile reaction of the banks in mounting a national campaign upholding personal freedoms against a menacing dictatorship. Anne Henderson vividly described the extra-parliamentary campaign. Menzies was aware that in Parliament the battle was as good as lost. The Chifley government had comfortable majorities in both Houses: the Senate divided thirty-three-to-three in their favour. Menzies gave a masterly, measured and seemingly imperturbable speech on the Bill’s second reading, but this concealed those inner tensions which he often experienced in parliamentary stoushes. On being congratulated he remarked, “If you’d slapped me, I would’ve splashed.” Thereafter the battle was joined in constitutional challenges in the High Court and Privy Council. Through a misbegotten confidence in his forensic gifts, Evatt decided to lead for the Commonwealth.

Anne Henderson described Evatt’s erratic conduct before the High Court when he was driven by his imagined vulnerability to chills—and this during a Melbourne heat wave! He reportedly exhibited that same extreme obsession elsewhere by thrusting rolled newspapers into his trouser legs and encasing newspapers front and back beneath a tightly buttoned jacket. Those within earshot were puzzled that he rustled when he walked. He addressed the High Court in his grating unworldly monotone for eighteen of the thirty-nine days of that record-breaking hearing.

Reversed in the High Court, the Commonwealth, again led by Evatt, in 1949 appealed no less unsuccessfully to the Privy Council. The Appeal Cases recorded that the hearing “lasted for 36 days between March 14 and June 1 inclusive—a record for length of time”. The Doc lectured that judicial committee for fourteen days in opening his case and eight days in reply. In boring Their Lordships unutterably for twenty-two days Evatt thereby level-pegged with Edmund Burke at the impeachment of Warren Hastings but without a flicker of Burke’s eloquence. And Burke stretched his twenty-two days in bursts over three years!

During that hearing, Lord Uthwatt on April 24 and Lord du Parcq on April 27 were summoned to the bosom of Abraham or, to vary the metaphor, to rejoice “upon another shore and in a greater light”. The timing of their seemingly enforced departures occurred after Evatt had concluded his opening but with the dire prospect of his reply still looming. The Board’s five surviving members might well have speculated among themselves as to which of their number might be the next to make a similarly induced egress. Their decision was announced on July 26, 1949, and their judgment was fully expounded on October 26. Given the length of that hearing, Their Lordships in giving judgment unsurprisingly made no acknowledgment of the contribution of counsel. This can be compared to another great Privy Council case which, like the bank nationalisation case, revolved around Section 92 of the Constitution. Menzies as Attorney-General unsuccessfully represented the Commonwealth in James v the Commonwealth in 1936. In concluding their judgment, Their Lordships expressed “their appreciation of the help given to them by counsel who have argued in this appeal, in particular the Attorney-General for the Commonwealth, the merit of whose admirable argument is in no way diminished because it has not succeeded”. 

Menzies’s triumph in the 1949 federal election not only buried nationalisation as a domestic policy but also the Doc’s emphasis in foreign policy on working through the United Nations—Menzies privately dismissed that outfit as “the Great Experiment”. He was consistently sceptical that it could exercise any beneficent influence at all. Just consider how that talking shop has since degenerated, when the expressions “thieves’ kitchen” and “sink of corruption” can be applied to it interchangeably! The other policy initiative Menzies emphasised was banning the Communist Party, yet it was one he had previously repudiated. Recall the Second World War. Australia’s Communist Party slavishly fell into line with the Nazi-Soviet (Ribbentrop-Molotov) Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 by systematically undermining their country’s war effort. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in July 1941, in the eyes of the gullible, miraculously converted Stalin’s mass murdering dictatorship into a gallant and glorious ally. Menzies, out of a concern for the rights of innocent people, only reluctantly banned the Communist Party in June 1940 under the Defence power. And the Doc did not lift that ban until December 1942.

Menzies’s disinclination to ban the CPA in peacetime placed the Liberal Party’s policy at odds with the Country Party’s in the 1946 election. Then why the 180-degree turn in 1949? The explanation lies in his visit to Europe in 1948, a visit his doctors dictated. (Menzies’s delicate health was a recurring problem.) He arrived in Europe in the middle of the Berlin blockade and was briefed extensively on the communist-directed coup d’état in Czechoslovakia earlier that year. Czechoslovakia, a democracy, had been subverted from within and thereby converted into one of the USSR’s more monstrously tyrannical satraps. Why then should Australia avoid that same fate, given the Communist Party’s strength not so much politically as industrially? Or so Menzies reasoned. And then the battle between the two great rivals was joined.

The Menzies government, re-elected on April 28, 1951, gained a Senate majority denied it in 1949. Evatt became Labor leader on Chifley’s death in June 1951. The battle over dissolving the Communist Party was first fought out in Parliament. It then moved to the High Court, where Evatt appeared this time successfully. A referendum very narrowly defeated it. Evatt’s whirlwind campaign displayed seemingly inexhaustible energy as he crisscrossed state boundaries by air despite his fear of flying. Menzies did not even attempt to match Evatt’s gruelling schedule, but defended his cause in ten speeches as against the Doc’s thirty. Chatting years later with Lloyd Churchward, an avowedly communist academic, I remarked that Menzies struck me as being less than fully committed in that campaign. Lloyd agreed. Menzies was relatively subdued in defeat while the Doc celebrated his victory by joining his family in viewing the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classic The Red Shoes.

The year 1954 proved to be the culmination in that great rivalry. At its beginning I had my one meeting with Menzies. This occurred in the wake of a Commonwealth Finance Ministers Conference held in Sydney in early January. Menzies chaired it and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, R.A. “Rab” Butler, was also present. Butler’s biographer, Anthony Howard, observed:

Rab flew half-way across the world as leader of a powerful British delegation to a conference on which a lot of hopes had been pinned. In the event, as is the way of such gatherings, it failed to fulfil expectations or, indeed, to justify all the careful groundwork that had gone into it …

Friends took me to The Lodge on the Sunday after that conference ended. We were received by the Prime Minister and his wife, Dame Pattie, who had been listed in the New Year Honours as a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) to join, among many others, Dame Mary Hughes, Dame Enid Lyons and Dame Isobel Cripps, wife of Sir Stafford Cripps. I mentioned the Doc’s dismissal of that conference’s communiqué as platitudinous. This was all Menzies needed to dump upon the Doc. He recounted that Rab Butler was keen to have a talk with Evatt. Menzies had assured him that the opportunities for such a talk were plentiful given that the Doc had been invited to every function connected with that omnium gatherum and that he had accepted every invitation. A somewhat puzzled Menzies then remarked that the learned doctor had failed to appear at any of them—not even the luncheon hosted by the New South Wales Labor government! Menzies’s loathing of Evatt was obvious, but so too was his bewilderment. And Butler! It was plain enough to Menzies that all he could expect from the Doc was the unexpected. In the course of 1954 and subsequently Menzies’s bewilderment was to be reinforced dramatically.

The election date, May 29, 1954, was set in early February and announced in early April. Evatt and Menzies contemplated this election with vastly differing expectations. While the Doc viewed it with over-exuberant optimism, Menzies carefully masked his sense of impending defeat. Menzies was wrongly accused of conspiring with ASIO somehow to contrive Vladimir Petrov’s defection on April 3 as an election-winning gambit. Yet his reaction to Petrov’s defection when it was unexpectedly sprung upon him was anything but exultant: he was unable to see how it could improve his fortunes. Menzies entertained his Ministers at a dinner at The Lodge on the very evening, April 19, when Evdokia Petrov departed from Mascot with thuggish Soviet escorts who were later disarmed in Darwin, where she in turn defected. This dinner was reportedly bibulous but sobered to a degree by Menzies’s observation that this would be the last time he would be able to entertain his colleagues on those premises. Ian Fitchett recalled that in 1954, when he and other journalists attended pre-election drinks at The Lodge, Menzies off the record made that same despairing observation. Menzies in fact comported himself after Petrov’s defection as if Evatt would be the Prime Minister after May 29.

In passing I should mention the significant contribution made by Professor Robert Manne in his The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (1987) and The Shadow of 1917: Cold War Conflict in Australia (1994). I am unable to see how his conclusions in The Petrov Affair can be seriously questioned, however consistently they have been ignored. One Labor identity prepared to break ranks was a former Senator and Whitlam minister, J.R. “Diamond Jim” McClelland who, in reviewing it, claimed that it had “killed the Petrov conspiracy theory stone dead”. And he was dead right! Those who might need fortifying, despite Manne’s conclusions, should consult Desmond Ball and David Horner: Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network 1944–1950 (1998).

On two points I would depart from Manne’s assessment. While dealing justly with Evatt, Manne harboured a barely concealed dislike of Menzies which I found puzzling. In that vein he dealt with Menzies savagely in respect of Evatt’s absence from Canberra, of which he was accused of having prior knowledge, when he announced Petrov’s defection to the House of Representatives on April 13, 1954. Manne dealt no less harshly with those who sought to justify Menzies’s conduct—I know this because I was one of them. Menzies’s biographer, Allan Martin, has settled all doubts on this score to my satisfaction in his article “New Light on the Petrov Affair” (Quadrant, June 1995). To state the matter briefly, I am persuaded that, due more to omission than to calculation, Menzies was first made aware of Evatt’s absence only a short time before he announced Petrov’s defection. But Evatt remained convinced that Menzies, in order to place him at a disadvantage, had knowingly exploited his absence in the timing of his announcement.

Anne Henderson, relying on David Horner’s The Spy Catchers: The Official History of ASIO 1949–1963, recorded that MI5’s liaison officer, Derek Hamblen, had revealed that Petrov “had made a strong suggestion that Australia’s External Affairs department—of which Evatt had been Minister for many years—was thoroughly penetrated by a circle of Russian agents”. Hamblen also reported that Menzies regarded the situation as “so serious that everything must be done in the national as distinct from political party interest to prevent Evatt from becoming Prime Minister”. The fascination in this lies in the fact, which the Evatt camp would contest ad nauseam, that Menzies resolutely declined to stoop to conquer. He ensured that the Petrov defections did not feature in the coalition’s campaigning. He also obtained the ready concurrence of Victor Windeyer QC, Senior Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission on Espionage, that in its preliminary and pre-election hearing in Canberra he would not disclose the names of any Australians: the names of those to be mentioned remained undisclosed until after the election. Manne also emphasised that Windeyer carefully extinguished “any suspicion that Labor politicians might be involved in Soviet espionage”. As to the principal feature of the government’s campaigning, Manne stated unambiguously:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that it was not communism, let alone Petrov, that was the dominant issue. The overwhelming issue, which in reality swamped all others, was Dr Evatt’s startling proposals … for the extension of the welfare state in Australia …

And Manne thereupon spelt out those “startling proposals” in detail.

The election of May 29 resulted in the return of the Menzies-Fadden government with a reduced but still comfortable majority. Menzies most probably resigned himself to his confounded expectation of defeat with the thought that he would have to postpone his retirement. He could not have known then that that event would be postponed for almost twelve years. As for Evatt’s response, it is no exaggeration to claim that the extinction of his exalted hopes of victory left him so unhinged, so disoriented that he, in colloquial terms, fell off his trolley—and in that prostrate and floundering condition he was to remain. His lasting conviction, which subsequent electoral studies have demolished, was that Petrov’s defection explained everything. He was to give this fantasy a first airing at a lunch at the Sydney Morning Herald offices on May 31, the Monday and the second day after the election. Board members present included Rupert “Rags” Henderson, the Fairfax group’s general manager.

John Douglas Pringle, the Herald’s editor, drew upon his diaries to record this event in memoirs published with the clanging title Have Pen Will Travel. From these diaries, held in the Mitchell Library, I was able to set the exact date of that lunch. Without this source Manne understandably speculated that it might have occurred later that week. Evatt, in accepting this invitation before the election, had clearly expected to arrive at Broadway on May 31 as a conquering hero with his prospective swearing-in as Prime Minister providing him with the keystone to his arch of triumph. In the event he presented himself as a pathetic figure indeed. Pringle wrote that he was appalled by the deterioration of Evatt’s mind:

He blamed his defeat on a conspiracy … At one moment he accused Menzies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization who, he firmly believed, had timed the defection of Petrov … so that Menzies could use it against him. (In my opinion there is absolutely no evidence for this. Petrov’s defection was precipitated by the Soviet Ambassador’s accusation on April 1, that he had dealt improperly with a secret document. There is no way in which the Government or the ASIO could have arranged this …) At another moment Evatt blamed certain forces in the Labor Party which were plotting against him … His mind seethed with plots and conspiracies.

Pringle thereby neatly disposed of the Menzies/ASIO conspiracy theory in three deadly sentences in brackets. Ignoring Pringle, many Herald and Fairfax correspondents revealed in subsequent decades that they remained convinced of the validity of that conspiracy theory, however conclusively it had been exposed as fantastic.

Three days later, Thursday June 3, Evatt’s Press Secretary since April 1953, Fergan O’Sullivan, belatedly informed him of his authorship of Exhibit H. This was a document he had completed in 1951 when employed as a Herald journalist. Petrov claimed he had received it in February 1952 from one Pakhomov, then the representative of the Tass agency and said to be a cadreworker of Soviet Security. Pakhomov in his turn had received it from O’Sullivan. Victor Windeyer identified that document in general terms in the Royal Commission’s opening session in Canberra as one of the documents Petrov handed to ASIO on defecting on April 3. The Doc’s reaction to O’Sullivan’s admission was, in Manne’s words, “predictably and characteristically explosive and violent”. He summarily and noisily dismissed O’Sullivan from his service. Manne, after reflecting upon the dark possibilities O’Sullivan’s admission might have fomented in the Doc’s addled thinking, concluded:

Psychologically speaking O’Sullivan’s confession … appears to have broken through some dam which held back the flood waters of his paranoia. Politically speaking this is the turning point of our story. Without Dr Evatt there would have been no Petrov affair.

During the Royal Commission’s post-election Melbourne sittings O’Sullivan in his testimony on Exhibit H had “adventitiously” (their word) introduced the name of Albert Grundeman, an Assistant Private Secretary to Dr Evatt. Exhibit J, another of the documents produced by Petrov on his defection, had listed as sources of information Grundeman and Allan Dalziel, the Doc’s long-standing Private Secretary, as well as O’Sullivan. The commissioners on incontrovertible evidence, and independently of the Petrovs’ evidence, had established at the conclusion of their Melbourne sittings on July 23, 1954, that a communist journalist, Rupert Lockwood, was Exhibit J’s sole author and typist and, in their words, “there was not a scintilla of evidence to the contrary”. These events goaded the Doc into barnstorming the Royal Commission in its resumed Sydney sittings on August 16. Ostensibly appearing as counsel for Grundeman and Dalziel, Evatt’s sole purpose was soon revealed: it was to fish for evidence to support his addled conspiracy theory. Unsurprisingly, he failed to uncover any such evidence for one glaringly obvious reason: it was non-existent.

The significance of Evatt’s emphasis on Exhibit J as the sole foundation of his charges of conspiracy and the like can be gleaned from this extract from the Royal Commissioners’ Interim Report:

1. 43. It was apparent from the outset, and it was ultimately conceded by counsel for Grundeman and Dalziel and by counsel for Lockwood, that if Exhibit J had, in fact, been typewritten wholly by Lockwood, then and for that reason alone, all the charges of conspiracy and the like against the Petrovs and O’Sullivan, and those made against [Ron] Richards and the Security Service, would fall to the ground. [Emphasis added]

And the Royal Commissioners had already incontrovertibly established in Melbourne that Lockwood was the sole author and typist of Exhibit J. Evidence taken at the resumed Sydney sittings only confirmed this finding.

Anne Henderson has competently covered the Royal Commission’s proceedings after Evatt’s intervention, setting them against the background of the often turbulent proceedings in the Labor Caucus. She reported:

The Royal Commission on Espionage handed an interim report to Parliament in late October 1954. It found the Petrov papers to be legitimate, that the Soviet Embassy in Canberra had been used for espionage between 1943 and 1954 and that the only Australians who knowingly assisted Soviet espionage were communists.

Unfortunately, in this single passage Mrs Henderson has conflated the findings in the Royal Commissioners’ Interim Report with the more extended findings in their Final Report. Their Interim Report had merely established the authenticity of Exhibits H and J and disposed of Dr Evatt’s accusations against the Petrovs, O’Sullivan and the Security Service. The totality of the Doc’s accusations they had dismissed as “fantastic and wholly unsupported by any credible evidence”. And it is hard to see how any other three judges, who had examined those charges as comprehensively and as exhaustively as those Royal Commissioners, could have found differently without violating their judicial oath. I challenge any rational person to read their Interim Report and remain satisfied that there was any substance at all in the Doc’s charges. Mrs Henderson’s conflation was of no great moment because she then dealt competently with the debate on the Interim Report. She omitted to deal with some details; but then she could hardly be expected to cover everything! So, I propose to fill in a few gaps.

In the second volume of Menzies’s memoirs, The Measure of the Years (1970), he gave a separate chapter to “The Petrov Spy Case”. He recorded therein that when he received the Interim Report, he tried to discourage Evatt from making it the subject of a full-scale Parliamentary debate. But the Doc responded that he would insist on such a debate. Menzies retorted that in that case he would have to deal with him unsparingly. Should this be cited as evidence of retrospective finessing, the Cabinet papers dealing with this subject are consistent with Menzies’s account. In the event the Speaker, Archie Cameron, gave as his judgment that Dr Evatt, by appearing before that Royal Commission as counsel, was debarred from participating in any debate on its findings and called upon the House for guidance. Menzies then intervened and, while acknowledging the soundness of the Speaker’s judgment, said that as Dr Evatt was “eager and insistent” he would move for the suspension of so much of Standing Orders as would prevent him from speaking on that Interim Report. If the learned doctor had either accepted Menzies’s immediate advice or abided by the Speaker’s ruling, he would have saved himself from the pitiless drubbing Menzies inflicted on him. Menzies was able to do this immediately after Evatt’s speech because he had said nothing in that debate which he had not already said “with much reiteration” before the judges. Mrs Henderson has vividly described that debate.

A mistaken and mischievous belief was encouraged because the Royal Commissioners recommended that there should be no prosecutions. From this it was claimed that the Royal Commission itself had been no more than a mare’s nest. The Royal Commissioners themselves gave the sober answer to this picturesque slander: they concluded that such prosecutions were impossible under the existing state of the law. This in no way affected their identification of several Australians as having engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. The Commissioners fully explained their position in Chapter 20 of their Final Report.

The debate in the House of Representatives on October 19, 1955, on the Final Report was highlighted by Dr Evatt’s disclosure in his opening that he had sought by correspondence—his letter was dated February 17, 1955—to bolster his case by invoking the testimony of the Soviet Foreign Minister, V.M. Molotov, of all people. As Manne put it, “Evatt’s letter to Molotov must rank as one of the strangest ever sent by a responsible western politician to a Soviet leader.” Evatt’s startling disclosure tended to bury the fact that Exhibit J was totally ignored in the whole of his speech. And yet Evatt, on the pretext that Exhibit J alone was the foundation of all his charges, had derailed the Royal Commission from August 16 until September 7, 1954, and his juniors had continued along those lines until October 8! Manne speculated at some length on how Evatt’s letter to Molotov might have been processed within the Soviet Foreign Ministry. He observed that the reply, despatched six weeks later on April 9, 1955, had been signed not by Molotov but by a junior Foreign Ministry official, one L. Ilyichev, head of its Press Department, who claimed to be writing on the Foreign Minister’s “instructions”. Manne described its contents as “bland and non-committal” and provided evidence of this. These details encouraged me to engage in a little speculation of my own.

Anyone who has served as a private secretary in a Minister’s office will be familiar with a species of inward correspondence which is so loopy that no diligent and world-weary private secretary would dream of placing it before his Minister or of referring it to his department for comment. Instead, in such cases, a letter would be drafted for the private secretary’s signature with this bland opening, or something like it, “I have been instructed by the Minister to inform you that your views have been noted …” as indeed they would have been, but not by the Minister. As to the Doc’s letter to Molotov, might not L. Ilyichev have taken it upon himself to place it in the loopy category and to respond to it accordingly? It would be a tragi-comedy of some poignancy if it should ever be revealed that the first intimation Molotov received of that letter was when word trickled back to Moscow that the Doc had disclosed it to the House of Representatives on October 19, 1955, to be greeted by a loud and prolonged chorus of derisive laughter. Mrs Henderson quoted Evatt’s biographer, John Murphy, as acknowledging of his Molotov “moment” that “for many it was here Evatt’s career ended”. That certainly proved to be true of his prospects of ever becoming Prime Minister. But what of his Parliamentary supporters and their continued indulgence of him!

Why have Evatt’s apologists so conspicuously failed to come to terms with his madness? The explanation seems to lie in the fact that from the very first obvious manifestation of Evatt’s madness he was entrenched in his party’s leadership and remained so until February 1960. That period included his splitting of his party and his disastrous leadership in two elections. And he relinquished that leadership only on condition that the Labor Premier of New South Wales, R.J. Heffron, and his ministers be bullied into choreographing for him a lateral arabesque into the Chief Justiceship of New South Wales. And this when his mental state had so obviously deteriorated as to place him far beyond meeting that office’s requirements. It often amuses me to picture the Doc pirouetting into robes of scarlet and ersatz ermine while crowning himself with a full-bottomed wig. The wig the Doc discarded in 1940 he donated to the Federal Parliament. Archie Cameron as Speaker from 1950 to 1956 wore it under protest because no other wig was available. Did the Doc attempt to have that wig restored to him in 1960?

If the Doc’s madness and its causes are the obvious explanation of his erratic conduct to the uncommitted, to his committed supporters they had perforce to be suppressed or explained away. And in this endeavour they have exacted a remorseless revenge. In defiance of all the evidence, they have built a counter-factual narrative by trashing the reputations of all those prominent figures of unblemished integrity who were resistant to Evatt’s demented charges.

This counter-factual narrative runs along these lines. Evatt’s ludicrous claims to have been the victim of Menzies’s diabolical but successful plotting to rob him of the Prime Ministership are accepted without qualification or question. Here I quote Menzies in his devastating reply to Evatt on October 25, 1955, on the Final Report: “Yet according to [Evatt], I, last year … made myself the party to a swindle and was able to secure the collaboration of those distinguished men whom I have named in order to make that swindle effective.” Those distinguished men included, among many others, ASIO’s Director-General, Charles Spry, Victor Windeyer and all three Royal Commissioners. Be it noted that the Royal Commissioners were all distinguished Supreme Court judges whose judicial competence and integrity had never previously been questioned. Gough Whitlam placed himself at the forefront of those peddling this malicious libel, undeterred by the fact that Sir William Owen, the Royal Commission’s chairman, had engaged him as his Associate from 1945 to 1947 when he was a fledgling barrister. This detail Whitlam studiously omitted from his first entry in 1955 in Who’s Who in Australia and then in subsequent entries. The fact that other judges’ associates have included that detail in their Who’s Who entries establishes that Whitlam’s omission was deliberately his own and not an editorial deletion.

An instalment in this counter-factual narrative, which Gough Whitlam gleefully outlined in the 1960s in his correspondence with his Harvard student son Nick, was to this effect. Victor Windeyer, it was maliciously asserted, had so comprehensively messed up his brief that Sir Garfield Barwick had to intervene, as ASIO’s leading counsel, to take on the mammoth task of saving the Royal Commission. In fact, Windeyer was from start to finish on top of his brief and the Royal Commission had no need to be saved by Barwick or by anyone else. Barwick intervened only after the Royal Commissioners had managed in the teeth of much prevarication by the learned doctor to prise from him charges of conspiracy which affected ASIO. Recall the significance of Exhibit J and the Royal Commissioners’ already established finding as to Lockwood’s role as sole author and typist. Far from Barwick’s intervention in the Royal Commission proving to be a mammoth task, he must at times during his appearance there have wondered when he had last accepted such an undemanding brief. The details which exonerated ASIO from any conspiracy had already been established. This was a lily which Barwick simply needed to gild, but he was able to drive home a devastating condemnation of Evatt’s flouting of the fundamental principles of advocacy.

Not content with unjustly branding Windeyer for incompetence before that Royal Commission, Gough Whitlam claimed further that he would never have been appointed to the High Court in 1958 but for his allegedly flawed role before that tribunal. In fact Menzies made that appointment on the recommendation of the Chief Justice, Sir Owen Dixon, and neither was disappointed by Windeyer’s performance as a judge.

John Paul taught British and Australian politics at a university in Sydney from 1973 until his retirement in 1996. The first part of this series appeared in the July-August issue; the third and final part will appear next month.