AUSTRALIANA LAW Politics Biography –

Winner of The Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year 1984

Almost six decades after his death, the work of Henry Bournes Higgins remains the subject of bitter controversy. To some, notably the members of the H.R. Nicholls Society, his championing of the arbitration system is the root cause of many of Australian society’s ills. To others, his support for basic living standards established a principle which afforded protection for the least powerful members of society.

H.B. Higgins: the rebel as judge is a life of one of Australia’s most unusual ‘great men’ – the maker of the Harvester Judgment and pioneer of social justice – whose controversial public career was marked not only by the stubborn pursuit of unpopular causes, but also by a number of apparent contradictions. A radical lawyer, a ‘father of federation’ who opposed the Constitution, upper middle-class hero of the labour movement and Protestant supporter of the Irish cause, Higgins was also an Irish-born classical scholar who helped nurture Australian literature.

This biography focuses not just on the public figure, but also the private man, from the ‘delicate’ son of an Irish Wesleyan preacher to the grieving father who lost his only child in the Great War.

The story is peopled with diverse characters: his devout father and indomitable mother, his incorrigible and ultimately tragic brother James, the imposing Mary Alice (sister of ‘Chinese’ Morrison), his son and his friends of the ‘Heronswood Push’, his niece, the writer Nettie Palmer and his communist nephew. In addition, there is a gallery of public figures, from Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes to Melbourne’s bohemian professor of music, Marshall-Hall and that greater of another ‘Henry Higgins’, George Bernard Shaw.