Bibliograph

The brilliant boy, Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent, Gideon Haigh

Type

Label

The brilliant boy, Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent, Gideon Haigh

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references

resource.biographical

individual biography

Illustrations

illustrationsplatesportraits

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

The brilliant boy

Nature of contents

bibliography

Responsibility statement

Gideon Haigh

Sub title

Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent

Summary

In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy drowned in a ditch that had filled with rain after being left unfenced by council workers. How the law should deal with the trauma of the family’s loss was one of the most complex and controversial cases to reach Australia’s High Court, where it seized the imagination of its youngest and cleverest member. These days, ‘Doc’ Evatt is remembered mainly as the hapless and divisive opposition leader during the long ascendancy of his great rival Sir Robert Menzies. Yet long before we spoke of ‘public intellectuals’, Evatt was one: a dashing advocate, an inspired jurist, an outspoken opinion maker, one of our first popular historians and the nation’s foremost champion of modern art. Through Evatt’s innovative and empathic decision in Chester v the Council of Waverley Municipality, which argued for the law to acknowledge inner suffering as it did physical injury, Gideon Haigh rediscovers the most brilliant Australian of his day, a patriot with a vision of his country charting its own path and being its own example – the same attitude he brought to being the only Australian president of the UN General Assembly, and instrumental in the foundation of Israel

Table Of Contents

1. How I yearn for them and can't forget! -- 2. Let truth and falsehood grapple -- 3. The Legal Phar Lap -- 4. The extreme gradualness of inevitability -- 5. A good kick in the arse for the old guard -- 6. Only one's sense of duty prevents public scandal -- 7. He can do what he wants -- 8. Who is my neighbour? -- 9. The apparently trivial case of telling significance -- 10. The agony of hope and fear -- 11. Hell-bent on re-entering politics

Target audience

adult

resource.variantTitle

Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent

Classification