NATIONAL
TRUST S H ERVIN GALLERY
EXHIBITION
OF THE WORKS OF MARY ALICE EVATT 'MAS'
1898-1973
CURATOR:
DR MELISSA BOYDE
MARY
ALICE EVATT - SPEAKING TO THE HEART
The
Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG
Justice
of the High Court of Australia
LONG SUFFERING SPOUSES
Have you noticed a subtle change
that has come over the Australian political scene? Not
so long ago the spouses and partners of our political
leaders lived entirely private lives. They might turn
up at a few political functions. They might occasionally
be photographed arriving or departing at Fairbairn airbase
or at some other place of passage. But they were definitely
in the background.
In our public life, we disdained
some of the features of American politics. In fact, we
rather tended to look on their showiness as un-Australian.
We did not touch our hearts when the National Anthem was
played. We just stood to attention. Our political leaders
were never seen in stretch limousines with out-riders.
As for their lives' companions and their families, they
were definitely not on public display, not public property.
They enjoyed the privacy of ordinary citizens.
Now, all that is changing as,
in so many things, Australians imitate the American features
of public life. Today, spouses and partners are often
treated as fair game for the media and the public. Indeed,
political leaders are virtually forced to introduce them
into their high powered world.
The very private Helena Carr,
definitely a backgrounder in previous years, was thrust
into the foreground of the recent New South Wales election
campaign. The compulsory appearance of candidates with
their spouses is now a feature of virtually every major
political rally. On election night, the victor at least
must turn up with spouse, children, siblings and parents
if they are alive. I feel sure that before long the family
dog or cat or hampster will make a cameo appearance on
such occasions.
The latest evidence of this
was seen during the contest for the leadership of the
Federal Parliamentary Labor Party. Mrs Crean and Mrs
Beazley made their appearances. Interviews with them
were played and replayed on television. The phenomenon
is not confined to Australia. It has spread even into
the musty halls of Downing Street. Although a distinct
person in her own right, Cherie Booth QC, as Mrs
Tony Blair, appears hand in hand with the British Prime
Minister when needed and sometimes expresses personal
views that are given wide publicity. It is as if matrimony
or domestic partnership to a person in public life is
now thought to confer on the beneficiary a special status:
a kind of vicarious public role and popular legitimacy.
In Australia, we are well on
the way to having a "First Lady". The modesty
of the old days is disappearing before our eyes. Aspirants
to public office must choose their partners very carefully
because, in the future, those partners too will play a
role in the pursuit of ambition and the performance of
public duties. To some extent this change has come about
as a result of the advent of television, satellites, global
media and the internet. Increasingly, politics is the
world of infotainment. Spin and image are replacing ideas
and proper differences about fundamental values and national
or global directions.
This was not the world of Australian
politics when I first became aware of it. In those days,
Mr Menzies seemed to be Prime Minister for life. We knew
of his wife and family from an occasional story in the
Women's Weekly. But Mrs (late Dame Pattie) Menzies
disdained the cult of personality. So did the wife of
the Opposition Leader, Dr H V Evatt. Mary Alice Evatt
(born Sheffer), like Mrs Menzies, did not feel that marriage
to a political leader attracted legitimacy to her political
views or impose burdens of duty, beyond the bare necessities,
that invaded her rights to privacy as a citizen.
We cannot go back to those
days. But it is a healthy corrective to the present era
to remember them. Everyone who serves for a time in public
office knows how important it is to have a companion who
does not hesitate to speak home truths privately. In
this respect, Bert Evatt was greatly blessed in Mary Alice.
In a different way, she was greatly blessed in him. In
their distinct fashions (and in their strong and enduring
marriage) they shared a sustaining love of each other
and of their children. Mary Alice developed her own life
as a student and practitioner of art. Not for her a public
involvement in the detail of her husband's tempestuous
national and international career. Instead, she sought
her private fulfilment in the world of painting and drawing
and later sculpture. Indeed, by choosing something so
very different from the world of politics, law and international
affairs that preoccupied her husband, she provided an
island of stability, rationality and beauty that was a
solace to the unsettled world in which Bert Evatt lived
and which he often made more tempestuous than it needed
to be. Mary Alice was her own person. She lived her
own life. Her interests were not precisely the same as
his. But they had their own importance.
In a way, the ideas that visited
Mary Alice Evatt's mind were ideas of an eternal kind:
of forms, and shapes, and images and reflections of reality.
In the world of ideas, politics and law and human rights
and freedom are crucial for the welfare of humanity.
But so are the ideas of art and poetry and music. In
this sense, the two Evatts were suitably matched. They
were both searching ultimately for good, for the noble
things in the human spirit - things that inspire and project
the best that human beings can attain. But whereas Bert
Evatt's world was one of politics, deals and law and compromise,
Mary Alice lived, for the most part, in a kinder world
involving a quest for beauty. On essentials, each, in
their own sphere, was ardent, uncompromising and unwilling
to bend to prejudice or attitudes they regarded as outmoded
and yoked to the attitudes of the past. Each was a person
of the spirit; but each drew on a different spring -
and this explained their different approaches to life
and to others.
WHO
WAS MARY ALICE?
As a young schoolboy I admired
Bert Evatt for his struggle against the Communist Party
Dissolution Act. He won a challenge to its validity
in the High Court. Then, against all odds, he triumphed
in the ensuing referendum campaign. The people of Australia
rejected the attempt to amend the Constitution to permit
a law against communists. In politics, H V Evatt did
not embrace a minimalist position. He did not seek to
reduce the political target that he presented. He and
Menzies, bold spirits in their different ways, engaged
each other before the Australian people in a mighty struggle
of ideas. At that vital point, important for our constitutional
liberties, Evatt won.
I could identify with him because,
like Evatt, I had attended Fort Street High School in
Sydney, Australia's oldest public school. I knew of his
fame. He was a Justice of the High Court at the age of
36; Australia's Foreign Minister and Attorney-General
during the Second World War; leader of the Australian
delegation at the establishment of the United Nations
and later President of the General Assembly; and Opposition
Leader after Mr Chifley.
Unlike Mary Gaudron (who was
once handed a copy of the Australian Constitution by Bert
Evatt) I only ever saw him from afar. I knew nothing
of his Titanic temper, his outrageous suspicions, the
flaws in his personality and the lapses of judgment that
are so well documented as to be incontestable. At the
end of his career, to remove him from the Parliamentary
Leadership of the Australian Labor Party, he was appointed
Chief Justice of New South Wales (the kind of delicacy
not observed in the case of some of his successors).
As a young lawyer, I saw him sitting as Chief Justice
in the Banco Court in Sydney. By then, he was in terrible
decline. Yet shining through his defects and human flaws
were flashes of the mind of a genius, the courage of a
lion and the valiant perception, when it truly counted,
of the need to safeguard political diversity in Australia
and the importance of building a new world order.
Evatt's nature and his life
and times did not make him an easy man to live with.
He was very combative, including to Mary Alice. Doubtless,
it was this streak in his behaviour, and his commitment
to the Labor Party, that made him an unwelcomed son-in-law
to Mary Alice's father, a conservative American. She
had been born in Iowa and came with her family to Australia
at an early age. In Peter Crockett's biography of Bert,
she is described as a "young woman of beauty, dignified
with classical features". The pair met when they were
both undergraduates at the University of Sydney. Mary
Alice studied architecture at the University - a
talent she later turned to good use in the design of the
Evatt home in Leura. When, in the midst of one of the
most brilliant academic careers that the University has
seen, Bert proposed to Mary Alice, her parents tried to
head off the wedding by offering her a world tour: a
big thing in those days. She declined and the couple
were married in November 1920. Thus began a loving relationship
that lasted until Bert's death in 1965.
Evatt hated to be parted from
Mary Alice. He wrote loving letters and even poetry to
her:
"…
and I am in a narrow place
And
all its little streets are cold!
Because
the absence of her face
Has
robbed the sullen air of gold"
The letters between them were
full of expressions of tenderness. They addressed each
other as "Lover" and throughout their marriage,
in times of triumph and in periods of catastrophe, they
never let up in the exchanges of love.
Mary Alice supported H V Evatt's
original foray into New South Wales politics. She became
engrossed in the works of the English socialist, William
Morris.
Privately, she was foremost in supporting women's education
in those years. Over many years she tried to soften his
insensitivity to the feelings of others. One of the officers of the Department
of Foreign Affairs who later worked closely with him in
his years in Federal Government, Paul (later Sir Paul)
Hasluck remarked in his book Diplomatic Witness::
"[Evatt] relied greatly on her.
He could not have sustained his intense efforts without
her. More than that, she had influence on him in two
ways that directly affected his work as Minister. She
influenced him in his judgment of other people. In many
instances, I heard her tell him that he should not trust
such and such a person or that so-and-so was working against
him. He took notice of her warnings. Less frequently
but on several occasions I heard her warn him against
doing something, just looking at him fixedly and saying:
'Don't do it Bert' or 'No, you must on no account do that'.
… Her role seemed to me to be protective".
According to some reports it
was Mary Alice who urged Bert Evatt to resign from the
High Court in 1940 to re-enter politics on the federal
stage. Yet despite this intervention,
critical for all that followed, Mary Alice did not intrude
inappropriately into the substance of his professional
life as a judge, Minister or political leader. In one
letter Evatt wrote to her:
"I'm afraid I have at times led
you a merry dance into politics, things outside the beaten
track - but through it all - our love has survived - you
have been the perfect wife and the perfect mother too".
It has been suggested that
so absorbed and intense was Bert Evatt's love for Mary
Alice that it left insufficient space for sensitivity
on his part for other people. His tempestuous temper
would often lead him to extreme, and unforgivable, rudeness
to those about him. One biographer records how, in 1948
in London with Mary Alice, he showed extreme rudeness
to a young Australian diplomat Peter (later Sir Peter)
Heydon.
It was left to Mary Alice to send ameliorating gifts to
Heydon's two children - "a tacit apology for her
husband's behaviour and an occurrence that was repeated
after Heydon had again been unjustifiably lashed by an
Evatt storm".
This story is now confirmed
by one of those children, Justice Dyson Heydon, like me
one of Evatt's successors on the High Court of Australia.
Not only did it happen once, it happened three times in
quick succession. The young Dyson was obliged to write
a child's obedient letter to the grumpy old man. Sir
Peter Heydon, still nursing Bert's wounds forty years
later, held Mary Alice in high esteem:
"I often wonder how much Mrs Evatt
spent on presents for the children of officers over those
years. It does illustrate how she tried to reduce the
ill effects of Evatt's irrationality, rudeness and rascality.
Generally she was liked and although like any of us she
had prejudices and foibles, she had dignity, balance and
generosity in all of which he was badly deficient".
It cannot be said that repeated
unpleasant storms of this kind passed Mary Alice by without
having their impact on her. This sensitive artistic woman
was subjected not only to his unruly, awkward, eccentric
behaviour over many years but also to an extended vilification
of him by many Australians, often urged on by a hostile
media. At one stage in the 1940s, according to Crockett,
it led to a period when Mary Alice came to drink heavily
- as a way of coping with the stresses of her life with
Bert at the centre of seemingly endless political monsoons.
It would not have been easy
living with a man brilliant and personally loving; rude
to others yet infatuated with human rights. There is
more than a hint of a bipolar disorder in Evatt's makeup.
For the most part, he lived in the world of his very considerable
brain. As sometimes happens, he loved human rights but
found human beings messy. Only Mary Alice and his children
seemed to engage a sustaining personal human love for
him. Little wonder that Mary Alice, for her part, sought
an escape from the pressures - beyond the work at home
and with the children - into the realm of art and the
world of her own creativity.
ESCAPE
TO THE WORLD OF ART
When one knows the background
facts, the escape of Mary Alice Evatt into the world of
art is relatively easy to understand. She and Bert shared
a love of modern, abstract art. In the 1920s they made
friends amongst artists of all descriptions. But it was
not until the 1930s that Mary Alice took lessons with
Russell Drysdale and Peter Purves-Smith at George Bell's
School in Melbourne. It was there that she met Sam
Atyeo, a young painter who became a lifelong friend of
the Evatts. It was he who, in 1946 in Paris, introduced
Bert to Picasso.
In the comparatively tranquil
years of the 1930s when Evatt served as a Justice of the
High Court, the seat of the Court was in Melbourne. This
kept Mary Alice in that city, away from her home for
long periods. She filled the hours with training at art
schools where her talent began to bloom and was disciplined
and taught. In 1938 the couple went to Paris. Whilst
Bert haunted the Louvre and other galleries, Mary Alice
took a studio of her own in Montparnasse. On their return
to Australia in 1939, Bert Evatt performed the opening
of the first exhibition of the Contemporary Arts Society
at the National Gallery of Victoria. It included works
by Drysdale, James Gleeson, Sidney Nolan and many other
artists who later became friends to the Evatts. At a
time when most Australians were very sceptical of modern
art or even hostile, the Evatts, with mutually supporting
enthusiasm, challenged orthodoxy and embraced the new.
Bert Evatt and Mary Alice purchased
many works that were later to be extremely valuable, including
a painting by Modigliani and a work by Vlaminck. When,
later still, he became President of the United Nations
General Assembly, the couple invited Picasso to come to
the United Nations in Paris. He did so and the artist
was greeted with a standing ovation.
During the unsettled years
of Evatt's political life that followed, when the prize
he most cherished, Prime Minister of Australia, eluded
him, Mary Alice continued her painting, mostly in pastels.
There were occasional exhibitions. For Mary Alice painting
was a place of peace in which she could be herself, searching
for form and beauty in a world in which both must often
have seemed distant dreams. Mary Alice Evatt was appointed
in 1943 as the first woman member of the New South Wales
Art Gallery Trust. In that role she stood valiantly against
philistinism. She supported young and new artists. She
even extended her own skills, after Bert's death, by training
in sculpture at the Canberra Art School. In the closing
years of their life together, she did everything possible,
with their daughter Rosalind, to protect Bert's reputation
from the dark and sad times into which his mental deterioration
had plunged the one-time intellectual giant.
Recently, when I was off to
Paris for a meeting at UNESCO, I met Elizabeth Evatt,
a famous member of the family on her way to a body of
the World Bank in London on which she serves. We are
both children of the United Nation system H V Evatt and
Australia helped to establish. She told me of how Mary
Alice, as a trustee of the Art Gallery, had encouraged
her and other schoolchildren to contribute their children's
works to an exhibition designed to foster a love of art
in the young. Nowadays, Elizabeth Evatt ruefully remarked,
this would probably be denounced as corruption and investigated
as such. For Mary Alice, at the end of her life, Bert
was gone and art and sculpture filled the great void left
by his absence.
An exhibition of the works
of Mary Alice Evatt affords a glimpse into the life of
a highly intelligent, creative and sensitive woman. Her
spirit was undaunted by the travails to which it was subjected
over five decades. She shared with Bert the pinnacles;
but also the nadir of despair, defeat and humiliation.
Yet in art she found her own expression. She embraced
the modern schools. She supported Australian exemplars.
She served in art administration. It is fitting that
we should remember her spirit, for when all else is gone,
the spirit of an artist endures.
I am glad that this exhibition,
which began at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, has
come to Sydney to remind us of a distinguished fellow
citizen and, indirectly of the husband whom she loved,
and who was truly larger than life. With the paintings,
drawings and sculpture come numerous photographs, letters
and memorabilia of Mary Alice and of the turbulent times
in our country's story through which she and Bert lived.
It is appropriate that in 1990, the Evatt Foundation decided
to provide an annual art award in the name of Mary Alice
Evatt for the best final year student art work chosen
from the students' exhibition at the University of Western
Sydney. I feel sure that Mary Alice, and Bert, would
have preferred such a memorial to a bronze statue or a
marble tombstone.
It is in the love of others
and in acts of goodness and kindness and beauty that most
people live on. Mary Alice was an example
of this truth. Although others of lesser spirit and ignoble
disposition mocked H V Evatt in his decline, and some
justly criticised his rudeness and irrational suspicions,
none could take from him his enormous achievements, as
a judge, as a brilliant member of the War Cabinet that
saved Australia at a moment of true national peril, as
a founder of the United Nations and as the guardian of
the Constitution against the largest blot upon our civil
liberties attempted in the first century of federation.
Mary Alice knew all these things. To the end, she preserved
her love for "the Doc". As a story of fidelity
and endurance, it is a passionate tale. It is worth remembering.
Her art gives us a glimpse into her private world. It
was her sanctuary. It was a place of beauty.
