AUSTRALIA: Out of the Billabong

The mysterious bunyip, the legendary beastie that lives at the bottom of the placid Australian billabong, is less strange to Australians than Herbert Vere Evatt. A shaggy intellectual who leaped zestfully from the High Court bench into the labor political swamp in 1940, Evatt was Minister of External Affairs in three successive Labor governments, was once (1948) president of the U.N. General Assembly, and was long a man expected by many to become Prime Minister. But Herbert Evatt’s public popularity and political power have been shaking apart since Australia’s Petrov spy case broke early last year, just as Evatt, leader of the Labor Party, was fighting to return to power. Spy Petrov, onetime third secretary at the U.S.S.R. embassy in Canberra, revealed that there had been information leaks to Russia from the External Affairs Department during Evatt’s leadership, even mentioned two of Evatt’s former secretaries in connection with some fast and loose handling of government secrets (they were later cleared). Evatt’s Labor Party lost the election, and Evatt cried that the Petrov case had been cooked up by the Liberal Party to keep it in power.

Honest Witness. No one accused tousled Herbert Evatt of any Communist affiliations or pro-Communist leanings. Still, he exploded like an enraged bull before a royal commission that set out to investigate the Petrov revelations (TIME, Sept. 27, 1954), and even questioned the motives of the commission itself when it ruled unanimously last August that Petrov was an honest witness.

Many were astonished at Evatt’s tactics, for royal commissions are highly respected institutions in the Commonwealth countries. But Australians were even more astonished last week when Herbert Evatt revealed that he had written to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov asking whether the Petrov documents, with their proof of energetic Soviet espionage, were valid. Said Evatt: “I duly received a reply which informed me that the documents given to the Australian authorities by Petrov ‘can only be . . . falsification, fabricated on the instructions of persons interested in the deterioration of Soviet-Australian relations and in discrediting their political opponents.’ ” Evatt asked that the Petrov case be reopened before an international commission, on which the Soviet Union would be represented.

Profound Naiveté. Australians could only wonder what Evatt thought he was doing. It had been possible for Evatt to claim with some justice that the Petrov case had been unfairly used to defeat his chance of becoming Prime Minister; it was also a fact that the Petrov disclosures had led to no arrests. But to suggest that the word of Moscow should be solicited, let alone be taken seriously, displayed at the least a queer and profound naiveté on the part of a longtime high minister who aspired to govern Australia. It seemed a blunder that could wreck the Labor Party’s chances of achieving office for some time to come. At any rate, the issue, all hotted up by Evatt’s dealings with Molotov, offered too good an opportunity for the Liberals to pass up. Last week, Prime Minister Menzies, with 18 months of office still to run, prepared to dissolve Parliament and call for a snap election in December.