Stories of the Dazzle Family

Rosalind Carrodus (1932-2025), daughter of history

It may seem strange to mourn the loss of a person you met only once. But let me explain my sensations on learning last week of the passing of Rosalind Carrodus, aged ninety-two.

I met Ronie, as she was known to everyone, in April 2019, when I trekked to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains while researching The Brilliant Boy. Ronie was the last surviving offspring of H. V. ‘Doc’ Evatt. Like most people, I had first known Evatt as the shambling, erratic opposition leader of the 1950s, perennially bested by Sir Robert Menzies. But I had more recently grown intrigued by the earlier Evatt, the dashing defender of civil liberties who had become the youngest judge in the High Court’s history prior to his detour into federal politics.

Ronie, warm and welcoming, was only too pleased to host me. Evatt’s previous biographer had not even troubled to contact her - the first the family had known of the book was an interview with the author on Late Night Live. Ronie was keen for me to know Evatt J as a father and husband, and also as one who doted on children, being drawn to their innocence and their spirit.

This interested me acutely, as the core of my book was her father’s famous dissent in Chester v the Council of the Municipality of Waverley - a case exploring whether the ‘nervous shock’ a mother experienced on the drowning of her seven-year-old son in a council maintenance ditch filled with water was compensable at law. The majority of the High Court dismissed the claim loftily; in a 12,000-word minority judgement, Evatt dictated to posterity the idea that psychological injury was as real as physical - something we now take for granted.

Evatt’s dissent is a virtuoso work of reasoning and an exquisite piece of writing that shows a sensitive grasp of loss - something Evatt knew well. He lost his father aged six, a majority of his seven brothers by his mid-twenties; his mother never recovered from the deaths of her sons Ray and Frank during World War 1. He also understood the hopes vested in raising a family. When Evatt’s wife Mary Alice proved unable to bear children, they adopted Rosalind and her brother Peter. Ronie was the six-week-old daughter of Josie Squires, the teenage daughter of a publican from Young, as the result of a brief union with Geoff Nuttall, a young farmer - she cherished the opportunity to meet them in later life.

I sat with Ronie beneath a copy of Arnold Shore’s lively portrait of her father, for which the artist mixed a special shade of vermillion that Shore christened ‘Judge Evatt Red’. As we pored over their photos and turned over their old love letters, Ronie talked of her parents’ tight marriage, their liberal sympathies and their cultural omnivorousness. She shared with me vestiges of the family library, its volumes bearing her parents’ bookplates.

Evatt was no distant paterfamilias - he was a thoroughly modern father, whose family nickname was ‘Ber-Ber’. With the benefit of Ronie’s memories, I wrote the following:

For Rosalind, access to her father was never an issue. She would await his nightly tread. Regardless of his day, Evatt would promptly launch into an epic made-up saga about the Dazzle family, an engine driver father, his wife and their two children who had magical adventures in the Blue Mountains. The door of his fawn-walled library was always open and a welcome awaited at its big white desk – Evatt liked pulling books from the floor-to-ceiling shelves and talking about them, or discussing the news or the plans for the weekend.

Life as an Evatt often felt like an adventure, too. Unlike most professional men of his generation, for whom work was a refuge from domestic life, Evatt wanted Mary Alice with him whenever practical. In the event of late night business in Sydney, the Evatts kept a pied-a-terre in the Astor Flats in Macquarie Street; for trips to Melbourne, they maintained a full-scale residence in the Ardoch, an apartment block on Dandenong Road in East St Kilda; for trips to Leura, Evatt reluctantly consented to Mary Alice giving him driving lessons, and invested in a Nash, inclined to overheat during the long, slow mountain ascents. When the Evatts moved from place to place, they upped camp like Bedouins, the family retinue of [mothercraft nurse] Clarice, various maids, associate [John] Brennan and tipstaff Percy Burgess encumbered by vast quantities of luggage.

Ronie met her future husband Peter Carrodus, a distinguished broadcaster, when he came to interview the Doc. When Peter took Ronie to the pictures for the first time, Doc sat in the row behind them; when her father walked Ronie down the aisle on 28 November 1953, at Reid’s St John the Baptist Church, his pockets were full of pills, potions, remedies and spare rings in case of emergency. Later he proved an exhaustively attentive grandfather and uncle:

When Rosalind’s daughter Kate had to be left in a Tresillian home in Willoughby because of stomach problems, Evatt would fly to Sydney, nervously, every couple of days, in order to walk her in the pram – afterwards ‘Ber-Ber’ was the only person for whom she would smile. When his barrister nephew, Phil, and wife, Nan, bore a son with a severe brain injury, Evatt took it on himself to deliver the child every day to Canberra’s Children’s Hospital for physiotherapy. Evatt would push the pram and rock the bassinet with tears in his eyes.

By modern lights, Evatt was an idiosyncratic man, isolated in the Labor movement by his intellect, empowered and burdened by a sense of personal destiny, inclined to short temper and suspicion. He was reviled by Cold War conservatives, and some of their descendants continue to diagnose character flaws even in Evatt’s eccentricities. Thus, for example, old mate Gerard Henderson:

As to personal behaviour, [Evatt biographer Peter] Crockett described a visit to the Middle East in the late 1940s where Evatt lined his chest with newspapers to protect himself against the elements and proceeded to meet his hosts accompanied by the sound of “crepitating paper”. Moreover Evatt was a bad traveller extraordinaire. Once he refused to board an aircraft because he had not seen it refuelled; on another occasion he travelled on a plane carrying a fishing line lest “his aircraft come down in the sea and food be needed before the rescuers arrived”.

Yet there was nothing so unusual about an anxiety around infection before antibiotics, particularly in a family that had known so much ill-health. A fear of flying was also entirely rational, especially during wartime. Three cabinet ministers had been killed in a plane crash in August 1940. Bravery is not an insensibility of fear; it is acknowledging fear and overcoming it, which is what, as John Curtin’s external affairs minister, Evatt did every time he set off to meet counterparts abroad. Before one such flight across the Pacific on 25 July 1943, Evatt sealed up this letter to his children, by which it is impossible not to be moved:

If anything bad happens I am sending you this message to tell you

1/ that your mother and father love you so very dearly always – thank you both for making our lives full of interest, happiness and fun;

2/ that we have done our best to provide for your future but you must both work hard for your country;

3/ that Peter must always, as the older child, do his best to help and guide Rosalind.

We have worked very hard together to serve and help Australia and the future of Australia which [includes] the children of Australia like yourselves. It is very very very trying . . . to be away from you especially when mother was so ill.

Bless you. Keep you safe and happy and busy, from loving
Dad and Mum

This isn’t the letter of a timid man; it’s that of a individual sensible to the risks that he is running, and the potential consequences for others. Two of Evatt’s nephews were airmen who lost their lives in World War II; two months had elapsed since the Americans had intercepted and shot down Isoruku Yamamoto, mastermind of Pearl Harbour. Flying great distances was not a matter of light-heartedness.

A risk that authors run - a necessary risk - is of families not liking what you write. I was lucky. Ronie took a deep interest in ‘The Book’, as she called it. She read it thrice, pored over the reviews very kindly sent to her by Sir Robert Menzies’ daughter Heather Henderson. I haven’t had a lovelier tribute as a writer than when Ronie told me I had made her father ‘live again.’ In actual fact, that’s exactly what she’d done for me.