Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards
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 squo;s loss was one of the most complex and controversial cases to reach Australiaesquo;s High Court, where it seized the imagination of its youngest and cleverest member.
These days, nsquo;Docbsquo; 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 squo;public intellectualsrsquo;, Evatt was one: a dashing advocate, an inspired jurist, an outspoken opinion maker, one of our first popular historians and the nation squo;s foremost champion of modern art. Through Evattgsquo;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
