Wednesdays with Bob Read online

  About Wednesdays with Bob

  On Wednesdays, Robert J. Hawke – Australia’s 23rd and oldest living prime minister – has welcomed Derek Rielly into his home to share fine cigars and irreverent conversation. On a sun-soaked balcony, the maverick young writer and the charismatic old master talk life, death, love, sex, religion, politics, sport ... and everything in between.

  On other days, to paint his subject’s enigma from the outside, Rielly interviews Hawke’s Liberal MP rival John Howard, Labor allies Gareth Evans and Kim Beazley, wife and lover Blanche d’Alpuget, live-in stepson Louis Pratt, and friends – diplomat Richard Woolcott, economist Ross Garnaut, advertising guru John Singleton, and longtime mate Col Cunningham.

  The result is an extraordinary portrait of a beloved Australian – a strange, funny, uniquely personal study of Bob Hawke ruminating on his (and our) past, present and future.

  Wednesdays with Bob

  Bob Hawke Derek Rielly

  CONTENTS

  1 The Old Man’s Lament

  2 The Pitch

  3 The Prime Minister Greets His Guest

  4 A Pop Quiz

  5 Dick Woolcott

  6 Finding Love Through Infidelity

  7 On Sonia and Islam

  8 Kim Beazley

  9 On Being a Politician

  10 Singo

  11 Ending Apartheid

  12 Gareth Evans

  13 The Election of Donald Trump

  14 John Howard

  15 Bob Turns Eighty-Seven

  16 The Stepson

  17 Col Cunningham

  18 ‘Hou Ke’ Goes to China

  19 Ross Garnaut

  20 Blanche

  21 Tapping a Keg

  22 Hawke Roars at Death …

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Endnotes

  For Jones, Gard and Shawnee and the miracle of second heartbeats.

  D. R.

  — CHAPTER 1 —

  THE OLD MAN’S LAMENT

  JULY 2016: BOB HAWKE IS MIDWAY THROUGH A HARANGUE on Machiavelli’s assertion that it’s better to be feared than loved (‘It’s bullshit!’ he growls), when he stands, theatrically hoicks his jeans upwards, eyeballs me and says, ‘Mate, I just gotta have a leak…’

  What strange interpersonal dynamics we have already. After only four interviews spread over four Wednesday afternoons, the country’s greatest living politician feels compelled to let the interviewer know he needs to use the toilet instead of excusing himself and briefly disappearing.

  But this isn’t any ordinary politician. This isn’t any ordinary Australian.

  ‘He always looked to Australians like the quintessential Aussie bloke and talked like the quintessential Aussie bloke,’ Hawke’s loyal pal Kim Beazley had told me.

  How quintessentially Australian?

  When John F. Kennedy was shot dead in 1963, Hawke was campaigning in the Victorian electorate of Corio, his first attempt to win a seat in the federal parliament.

  His campaign manager came to him, breathless. ‘Kennedy is dead!’ he said.

  Hawke’s face went white. ‘Graham Kennedy is… dead?’

  Hawke was the man who blew away the fog of prime ministerial power with a connection to the Australian people that was never severed over four elections. If Menzies was the suffocating conservative, Whitlam imperial and Fraser shorn from the aristocratic grazing class to become a divisive brute, Hawke was the beer-inhaling rogue who also happened to be a Rhodes Scholar.

  The word ‘messianic’ gets thrown around generously when talk turns to Bob Hawke. But the trajectory of little Bobby Hawke is, literally, biblical.

  When he was three he was serving as Jesus’ envoy to the invalids of Bordertown, South Australia, administering his father’s sermons when the Congregational minister was indisposed.

  His mother Ellie made her eight-year-old son sign a pledge that he would never drink and predicted Bobby’s ascent to the prime ministership before he was born, when her Bible kept falling open to Isaiah 9:6. The passage reads: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulders … And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’

  As Hawke’s first attorney-general and later foreign minister, Gareth Evans recalls the mood of 1983, when Hawke assumed the ALP leadership: ‘We were in the presence of someone who a lot of people perceived as God.’

  And here he is on a July afternoon in Sydney, a weak sun lighting up the channels and fjords of a face that has occupied Australian TV screens since the sixties, dying for a piss.

  ‘Now,’ says Hawke, ‘I do something very unusual.’

  He looks at me. Grins.

  ‘I’ll have a leak off my balcony.’

  Hawke zombie-walks to the southern corner of a terrace, next to the man-sized sculpture of a bateleur eagle, the cha-pungu, Zimbabwe’s national emblem. (Hawke loves the country, hates the dictator. ‘Mugabe was one of the most awful men I’ve ever met,’ he says. ‘He treated both blacks and whites like shit. He was a very, very unpleasant man. An awful man. It’s hard to describe how bad he was.’) The difficult soft-shoe shuffle in Skechers memory foam loafers – he’ll wear Swiss designer label Bally if he’s hitting the town – is a result of peripheral neuropathy, a disorder where malfunctioning nerves jumble the signal between brain, spine and, in Hawke’s case, feet. In public Hawke walks either with a cane – a gift from his driver Rob – or supported by his wife of twenty-one years (and lover for over forty) Blanche d’Alpuget. The perception of fragility is deceptive. Hawke’s mind is sharp and, though his body is a little stooped, he’s still as lean as a greyhound. Inconvenienced, but not at death’s door.

  I wrestle briefly with the ethics of watching an eighty-six-year-old man unholster. While watching would signal a perversion and an unholy breach of privacy to some, others might expect the journalist to examine every inch of the moment, however intrusive.

  I take a middle road.

  A swing of the head to capture a split-second of Bob Hawke crisply rocking back on his heels, a clear parabola disappearing into a little drain hole on the terrace’s ledge.

  He zips, swings around and shuffles back to our interview.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yeah. Have I told you about the old man’s lament,’ says Hawke. He sways from side to side and sings, ‘Jiggle, jiggle, dance and dance, the last drop is always in your pants!’

  Laughing, Hawke sits, reassures me that he hasn’t got the old man’s lament, picks up the cigar and swipes a match.

  Am I familiar with Winston Churchill’s famous put-downs?

  ‘So many marvellous cracks,’ says Hawke. ‘Lady Astor and he were at a party and she said to Winston …’

  Hawke turns mimic. ‘Winston, you’re drunk!

  ‘And you, madam, are ugly, but I will be sober in the morning.

  ‘Another time,’ Hawke says, chortling, ‘he was in the toilet having a shit when his private secretary knocked on the door and said this public servant had arrived and wanted to see him. Churchill replied, Tell him one shit at a time is enough!’

  Adman, entrepreneur and horse-owner John Singleton famously switched sides to run the ALP’s advertising in the 1987 election at Hawke’s behest. The friendship bloomed. Singo’s seventieth birthday gift to Hawke of a quarter-share in a promising mare in 1999 netted him over half a million dollars.

  Hawke, says Singo, ‘is a massively intellectual knockabout. It’s a weird combination. He can go on the world stage and discuss any subject at a top level with the president of the United States or the leaders of Russia, China, and change the whole face of Australia, and at the same time be able to drink twenty, thirty beers with you – this
is before he went off the beer – love cricket and football and racing and betting, and sit in the cabinet meetings with a form guide on his lap. It’s as though they’ve got him mixed up when they were making him. They didn’t know whether to put him in the public bar or the Lodge. So they made him a bit of both.’

  — CHAPTER 2 —

  THE PITCH

  THE IDEA OF WRITING SEVENTY THOUSAND WORDS ON Bob Hawke in his eighty-seventh year had started as a throwaway line at a publisher meet-and-greet three months earlier.

  Over cocktails, I tried to sell a surfing memoir that would be part Tim Winton’s Breath, part Barbarian Days, the autobiography by the New Yorker’s William Finnegan that had just won a Pulitzer Prize.

  The agent gagged theatrically then suggested I might like to try something she could sell instead. Did I have any ideas?

  As it happened, I’d always wanted to meet Bob Hawke and I did feel like the passage of time had begun to erase our collective memory of Hawke’s career and government.

  The pitch: ‘I want to secure the legacy of our greatest postwar prime minister.’

  The response: ‘I know a publisher who loves Bob. Get me a proposal.’

  It’s as easy as that? Throw out a name, skeleton a chapter outline, and I’m gifted the keys to a man I’d only ever seen on television, whose presence filled my teenage season, culturally and politically?

  There’s a false start. Turnbull’s disastrous double dissolution election has just been called and my idea is to ride in Bob’s slipstream during the campaign.

  I compile an elaborate description of how I’ll follow Bob on the hustings. Bob Hawke and Bill Shorten together. Who’s the intellectual superior, the more dazzling of the two close-up? How does the public react to each?

  I’ll watch Bob campaigning in Tanya Plibersek’s seat. Does she swoon in his presence? Does Bob flirt a little?

  Bob and I in Perth together, where he delivers a speech at his old high school, Perth Modern, on the importance of a robust economy and a strong social program. A visit to that lonely stretch of road in Kings Park where, seventy years ago, his motorbike slid out from underneath, nearly killing him.

  To the television studios on election night, where Bob delivers sage opinion as results tumble in. Later in the year, to the Melbourne Cup, where fans jostle to snatch his image on their phones. To a boozy dinner party with old pals from business, politics, the media and horseracing. To a game of footy where Hawke disappears a beer and the crowd reacts joyously. To a multi-faith event (Bob was famously hot for Israel but regards the misunderstanding of Islam as ‘one of the great potential dangers confronting the world’) in the name of bringing Jew and Muslim together.

  At home with Blanche, the lover turned second wife… Does he read? Write? Garden? Is his charisma as powerful away from the spotlight? Or is he a crotchety old prick jeering and stabbing fingers at the television when there’s no one to play up to?

  I hear nothing. The proposal withers on the vine.

  The next thing I hear is that Bob is frail. So I wind back my expectations. Who needs vaudeville if you can sit at the feet of Bob Hawke, almost nine years a prime minister, inhaling his cigar vapour and accumulated wisdom? Even in his harvest years, surely the wit and memory is still strong.

  I rename the proposal Wednesdays with Bob, a take on Mitch Albom’s bestselling book Tuesdays with Morrie, in which Albom visits his dying college professor one day a week and they talk about happiness, regrets and facing death.

  Not that Bob is dying, or close to it. (I’ll later discover Hawke greyhound-fit post-workout in a Nike jacket and skinny grey sweatpants.) And not that I’ve read Tuesdays with Morrie, if we’re going to be honest. I do know it sold like hell.

  A weekend lunch with Blanche is organised. If Blanche likes me, I’ll get a chance to front Hawke directly with the idea.

  Desperate to be adored, I read a third of Blanche’s oeuvre in less than two weeks. I knew she could write, but she can … write. Her 1982 biography Robert J. Hawke is the masterwork that convinced the ALP Hawke had the heft to lead the party.

  On Longing draws the reader into her clandestine affair with Hawke through the seventies, its dissolution in 1979 and its revival in 1988, leading to their marriage in 1995.

  The more recent historical quartet, beginning with The Young Lion, is bawdy as hell. Who knew Louis VII needed milking maids to ensure an even temper?

  His Majesty’s Masturbators, as Eleanor called them, were another cause for argument between Louis and his wife. Louis had assured her, ‘I find no pleasure in what they do.’

  ‘How strange, sire, the physician does not prescribe similarly unpleasant physic to keep me strong and healthy,’ she replied.

  The agent grins. ‘She writes sex very well.’

  At exactly noon on a midwinter Sunday, Blanche d’Alpuget sweeps into the vaulted-ceiling elegance of Sydney’s Bistro Moncur, looking absolutely nothing like her richly lived seventy-two years. My powers of observation are neutralised by her long lashes, tornado of fine gold hair and, as a new convert to her writing, intellectual authority.

  I’ve learned Blanche is a Francophile (emails to the agent commence with Ma très chère and close with Bisous) and so I call her Madame d’Alpuget (unaware there’s an emphasis on the ‘u’) and trip over my feet as I lunge to kiss her on each cheek while she offers a hand.

  ‘We can shake later,’ she says, surprised.

  My proposal slides into the conversation that has bounced back and forth between Blanche and the agent around the forty-five-minute mark, once the gossip surrounding political and literary figures is cleared away.

  ‘So tell me about your idea for Bob …’ Blanche looks at me expectantly.

  My prepared speech is a little stilted, which is always a problem when you don’t have the game to fire off the cuff, but it doesn’t seem to offend.

  ‘I want to, uh, create an essential document that snatches Bob in the second half of his eighty-seventh year. If Robert J. Hawke: A Biography convinced the ALP that Bob was ready for the leadership, Bob Hawke at Eighty-Six will remind Australia why we fell for him so hard.’

  ‘You’ll have to get it past his office manager!’ Blanche hoots, her verbal approximation of an exclamation mark. ‘But send me the outline and I’ll put it in front of her.’

  Later.

  Dear Blanche,

  Did I embarrass myself with the fawning Young Lion questions? It’s always a little surreal to be deep in a novel and to meet its creator. And, in this case, I’d just re-read Robert J. Hawke and On Longing, so the spell was stronger than usual.

  Anyway, more than anything, I believe we need to firmly lasso Bob’s legacy.

  Book proposal attached.

  Yours…

  Twenty-four hours pass without a reply. I figure I’m out. I experience professional failure regularly enough to be okay with rejection, but, goddamn it, so close!

  Then…

  Ding!

  Dear Derek,

  You’re in luck. Bob laughed at the ‘sitting in a cloud of cigar smoke’ and said yes. He feels no need to run it past the office wife.

  Hawke will later tell me, ‘Jill Saunders has been with me since 1983, from the day of my election as party leader and has been an indispensable part of my success.’

  I’ll ask her for an update of his calendar and get back to you with free days. Always afternoons, as he likes to sleep late and do crossword puzzles. You may want to do more than one a week. I didn’t mention that to him, but if you do it’s something you and he can discuss.

  Best wishes,

  Blanche

  PS There is another book with a lot of info about Bob, but it’s hard to get hold of. It’s Mediator: A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby, by moi, published by MUP in the 1970s. I have only one copy and won’t lend it, even to good and trustworthy people like you. It’s not essential reading because you’re writing about him now, but it shows what a young firebrand he was when he was advocate
for the ACTU and nearly gave the judges who listened to his arguments apoplexy because he was so disrespectful to Their Honours. And so abrasive. It covers ten years of his life. He became a rock star then, in 1958.

  Nine days later, I was parked out the front of chez Hawke–d’Alpuget, formerly chez Hawke–Hawke, rehearsing banter and wondering if the whole idea was infantile self-deception. Me? Unlimited access to this man?

  But there I was. Standing at the gate of Bob Hawke’s house with a bagful of recording devices and three sheets of questions. Deep breath. Buzzer hit.

  — CHAPTER 3 —

  THE PRIME MINISTER GREETS HIS GUEST

  INSIDE. A CITRUS SUN SOAKS THE WATERFRONT HOUSE BUILT on 952 square metres of elevated bushland on Sydney’s lower north shore; the prized piece of dirt in a blue-ribbon Liberal seat bought, unseen, at auction during the recession of 1991 for $1.23 million. The old timber house was knocked down and a four-level home with rooftop putting green was built.

  A 500-kilogram sculpture from Zimbabwe of an African woman’s head, with headdress, greets visitors in the foyer. Through an open door, a chair – bought in a Botswana market and whose postage to Australia cost considerably more than the chair itself – is fashioned to appear as a woman with a water jar on her head, inviting you to sit in her lap.

  This is Blanche’s home office, where emails are read and answered, appointments sought and made. If you were to step into this room, you’d see across a stair void and through a large window, and into Hawke’s own, largely ornamental, study. Blanche’s serious writing space is an ugly little flat in Cammeray, a six-minute drive away, where the computer has no access to email, where no phone calls are allowed and where, most importantly, there is no view to distract the writer. Blanche stops work once an hour to blink and stretch.

  At the entrance to the north-facing terrace on the second floor is the sculpture Whatever, which depicts a longitudinally distorted man wearing a hooded jumper and with his hands in his pockets, the insouciance obvious. It was made using a 3D printer by Blanche’s son Louis Pratt, who arrived for a three-week stay in 2009 and has lived in the house’s boatshed ever since.