ABSTRACT
It is not a simple matter to know what Evatt thought of Palestine. For years, he told almost no-one, and rarely without circumlocutions that concealed his intentions. He knew little enough of Jews at first and even less about Arabs, an unsurprising state of affairs for his time and place. Australia at this time adhered to a policy of exclusive European immigration, the ‘White Australia’ policy, of which Evatt was an unexceptional but open advocate.1 A bipartisan consensus regarded it as a prime national interest, in pursuit of which Evatt laboured at San Francisco to enlarge the scope of domestic jurisdiction in the Charter to exclude national immigration policies from the ambit of potential United Nations intervention.2
