To the Bench

"At last Doc Evatt has done something for his party," growled an Australian Laborite M.P. In the raucous and rowdy warfare of Australian politics, spades are called bloody shovels, and Dr. Herbert Vere Evatt is sometimes called worse. Last week, at 65, Doc Evatt ended his rambunctious political career by accepting appointment by the New South Wales Labor premier as chief justice of the state supreme court. This proud, stubborn, able, unpredictable barrister is remembered in the U.S. as the Australian Foreign Minister who took a leading part in launching the U.N. and served as president of its General Assembly. In the lobbies of Canberra and in every pub from Perth to Brisbane, he is commonly held to be the blankety-blank who led the once-powerful Australian Labor Party to ruin.

Taking over the leadership in 1951 at the death of ex-Prime Minister Ben Chifley, Evatt was immediately caught up in a bitter sectarian fight between Communists and Catholic Actionists inside the labor movement. When the Soviet Embassy defector Vladimir Petrov named two Evatt secretaries as accomplices in espionage (they were later cleared), Evatt appeared as their lawyer, thereby alienating the immigrant vote (many are refugees from Communism). Turning on the Catholic Actionists, Evatt antagonized many of the Irish Catholics who traditionally vote Labor. Conservative Robert Menzies has won a decisive victory in the last three elections.

Now Labor must rebuild in a prosperous land that plainly prefers Menzies' stable, free-enterprising Conservatism. Currently favored to be chosen party leader: Arthur Calwell, 63, a peppery, tousle-headed Roman Catholic who as Labor's last Immigration Minister fathered the program that has brought in 1,400,000 European settlers to keep Australia's postwar economy booming.

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