Wednesdays with Bob Read online

  And it’s here, on the threshold of the terrace, overlooking the yachts of Sailors Bay, where Mr Bob Hawke, who is eighty-six years old, has left his sudokus and cryptic crossword to examine the visitor.

  The eagle face and roaring hair are so familiar, the visitor feels like he’s addressing an old friend. The rehearsed greetings (‘Oh, Mr Hawke, it’s a pleasure beyond my imagination to be in your company…’ ‘Good afternoon, Mr Hawke, I’m extremely delighted to…’) are forgotten.

  ‘Mate. Mate. Hello… mate!’

  ‘Did you bring a cigar?’ Hawke greets me in return.

  I present a $45 Davidoff from the Dominican Republic, Hawke gently repeating the name to correct me on the pronunciation. (Note: lengthen the ‘a’ – Daaahvidoff.) The shopkeeper had placed the cigar in a plastic bag with a photograph of a cancerous mouth, although I have disposed of the state-mandated packaging prior to presentation.

  I tell Hawke I hope these interviews will lasso his legacy and, by virtue of what I presume is still the sparkling intellect I witnessed growing up, demonstrate the drudgery of modern politics.

  What I don’t reveal is my fear that Australia’s most-loved prime minister, whose 75 per cent approval rating in 1984 is better than the combined total of the current prime minister and his opposite, has been out of the game for so long there is a danger his charisma, the breadth of his achievements, the scope of his wisdom, will be forgotten.

  Is this a fan book? Maybe it is.

  Or maybe it’s the natural result of nostalgia for a time when politics did mean something to a young man; when the great game had the potential to engage not alienate; when the media didn’t manipulate every honestly spoken word, thereby creating a climate in which a politician, if he values his existence, must robotically repeat, and never deviate from, carefully vetted slogans. A time when politicians, or at least this one, arrived on a platform of ideas, with an inquisitive, intellectual nature, and therefore wasn’t harnessed to immovable positions.

  Three days before his election as prime minister in 1983, Hawke had fronted the National Press Club in Canberra, dazzling, cajoling and teasing the mob like no one before or since.

  I watched the footage on the news as a teenage boy, hypnotised by the revelation that a stud was going to wrench the tiller away from that overweening broomstick, Malcolm Fraser. From the post of my older brother’s bed swung a necklace with a plastic disc that read: Shame Fraser, shame.

  Hawke’s reply to a question about the press going soft on him during the campaign: ‘I’ve been around in public life since the early sixties. If it’s a honeymoon, it’s about time we consummated it.’

  And there was his exchange with a reporter who accused the prime ministerial candidate of secretly betting on the election. For any other politician, the question was potentially ruinous. It demanded a careful answer. Circumspection. An avoidance of admission. For Hawke, it was an opportunity to further cement – as if the further application of cement was necessary – his everyman appeal.

  Reporter: ‘Would you care to comment on a weekend newspaper report that had a sixty-thousand-dollar betting plunge made on your beha—by people…’

  Hawke (jauntily): ‘You went very close to being… you were dangerously close there – you were going to say on my behalf, weren’t you?’

  The crowd roared.

  Reporter: ‘If I could go on… reportedly, within the ALP, and can I quote from the report, sixty thousand dollars is believed to be part of a nationwide betting plunge organised by sources close to ALP leader Mr Hawke. Nationwide plunge on Labor is masterminded by a known Canberra figure.’

  Hawke (through the crowd’s laughter): ‘Well, I don’t know what people around me are doing. I must say that they’ve been very close to me most of the time … [pulls earlobe]… but they have snuck off to do other things, I understand, occasionally … [crowd laughs]… It may be that because they think they’re not sufficiently well-paid they’ve tried to add to their income by having a bet…’

  When was the last time the sight of an Australian politician caused people to weep with joy? The chief political correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, Paul Kelly, witnessed the phenomenon himself.

  ‘This was very early, February 1983, just after he’d disposed of [former ALP leader] Hayden,’ says Kelly. ‘The campaigning has started. Fraser’s called the election. We went to Brisbane with Hawke and he had a street walk along Queen Street on a Saturday morning. This was his first street walk as the new Labor leader and the crowd reaction was extraordinary. People just flocked to him, particularly women, housewives doing the shopping. Some of them were crying. The sense of emotion and delight and hope was amazing, and I said to a colleague at the time, “I know it’s the opening days of the campaign, but as far as I’m concerned you can put down the binoculars.’”

  Kelly explains the crowd’s reaction: ‘Fraser had had three terms as prime minister and the third term hadn’t been terribly successful. And while Bill Hayden was a highly competent leader of the Labor Party, and Hayden had done very well in the 1980 election, there was a… unique… quality to Hawke. He was able to really inspire public opinion and harness a lot more popular support as leader. And so the things Hawke campaigned on were reconciliation, recovery and reconstruction, which were quite powerful ideas at the time. Hawke offered hope to a country divided by Fraser.’

  Even the prime minister’s wife, Tamie Fraser, fell under Hawke’s spell, describing him as ‘sexy’ and adding, ‘Like most women in Australia, I quite like him.’

  A newspaper headline the following morning was the world’s most succinct, and public, cuckolding.

  HAWKE. SEXY. TAMIE.

  In the book Time of Testing, that follows the build-up to the 1983 election, Craig McGregor describes witnessing the hero-worship amongst Hawke’s supporters. The crowd clapped and reached out to him, parting ‘like the Red Sea’ as he approached the stage. They hung on his every word. He looked ‘like some mythic figure… in a corrupt world, [he was] the image of a plain man, good and true, keeping faith with the people.’

  A brief examination of Hawke’s eight years and nine months of government reveals the sweeping scope of his achievements: Four election victories. Australia opened to global markets via the floating of the dollar and the deregulation of the financial system. Consensus between employers and unions, saving the economy from the inflationary devil of indexed wage increases. The spigot to universal healthcare turned back on after Fraser binned it, reinventing Medibank as Medicare. Australia, in cahoots with Jacques Cousteau and the French government, saving Antarctica from mining for fifty years. The Gordon River in Tasmania saved from damming by the state government. Compulsory superannuation paid by employers. Unemployed benefits indexed to inflation. Retention rates in high school lifted from 30 to 70 per cent. Little Australia so instrumental in the abolition of apartheid that Nelson Mandela and Bob Hawke would become firm friends, Mandela telling Hawke during a visit to Australia in 1990 that he was here today ‘because of you’.

  Take off the rose-coloured glasses and the Hawke government also oversaw the worst recession since the Great Depression. Houses and businesses were lost when interest rates on mortgages soared to 17 per cent as the government moved too late to knife an asset bubble. (It’s inescapably ironic that Hawke was able to afford the waterfront hunk of land his house sits on because of the plunge in property prices during the recession.)

  And the miserable end to Hawke’s prime ministership: the electorate delivering a satisfaction rating of 28 per cent as Paul Keating carped from the sidelines, destabilising, contradicting. ‘We’ve never had one leader, not one,’ Keating claimed, twisting the dagger further with, ‘Leadership is not about being popular. It’s about being right and about being strong.’

  ‘Paul’s performance was vainglorious and arrogant, disloyal and contemptuous of everyone on the political stage but himself,’ the deposed prime minister wrote in The Hawke Memoirs. ‘Paul,
unable to come to terms with or to understand the rapport I enjoyed with the Australian public, made disparaging references to me, glibly reducing my leadership style to “tripping over television cables in shopping centres”.’

  ‘Keating was a saboteur, pure and simple,’ says Paul Kelly.

  Hawke prepares the Davidoff.

  He snips the end off with one of the two cutters on the table, takes the cigar in his mouth, and strikes a match. He lets the match burn for a few seconds to get rid of the sulphur smell. He then avoids touching the cigar directly with the flame. To aficionados like Hawke, the lighting of a fresh cigar is an art. The smoker must kiss it gently, drawing the smoke slowly, lest too much air is pushed through the cigar and it overheats, ruining its quality.

  ‘I dunno what we’re going to talk about,’ says Hawke, sceptical that there’s anything of value left to mine after his memoirs and his second wife Blanche’s books, including the seminal Robert J. Hawke and its sequel, Hawke: The Prime Minister, Paul Kelly’s masterful The Hawke Ascendancy as well as a two-part episode of the ABC TV program Australian Story, histories of Labor in government, Gareth Evans’ Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary and an endless ream of newspaper and magazine stories.

  I tell Hawke I want to interview him about the joy of love. Desire. Finding true love through infidelity. Fatherhood. Success. Friendship. Religion in the modern world. Sport. The making of a man and what manhood is. Women. The lingering tang of any political bitterness. Enemies. The state of geopolitics. Death.

  And sconcing, of course.

  Sconcing is the Oxford University tradition of making students scull two-and-a-half pints (1.4 litres) of ale as punishment for breaches of etiquette (or ‘grievous sins’) in relation to dinner in the university’s great hall. Arrive late, forget your gown or start eating before the saying of grace had concluded and you had to drain the sconce in twenty-five seconds or less.

  Hawke’s record of eleven seconds, set in 1955, was as pivotal to his enduring popularity, he says, as the statesmanship that would protect a pristine continent for two generations and ensure the long-term prosperity of Australia.

  As one university don described Hawke at the time: ‘In summer he drank excessively, wenched excessively, played cricket excessively. We thought he was going to the dogs. When winter came, he stopped drinking, stopped wenching, and studied excessively. We thought he’d do himself an injury from overwork. But when summer came he forgot the library, returned to his girls and his beer. That was Digger for you.’

  At my first meeting with Hawke – who today is squeezed into an Italian-made black leather bomber jacket that would appear fashionable on a twenty-year-old (a gift from a friend) and raw denim jeans, with a hearing aid peeled over his left ear and neck wrapped in a gold chain – it seems appropriate to investigate, before anything else, this ability to evaporate beer.

  ‘I was born with one of those throats that just opens,’ says Hawke. ‘The president of the junior common room then had to drink one and beat the time. But he had no chance. He spattered it all over himself.’

  It’s a trait that remains undiminished by age. Search YouTube and you’ll find videos of Hawke in various locations disappearing schooners of beer, even as he approaches ninety.

  At the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 2017, Australian batsman Peter Handscomb, who’d just scored a century, was asked what he thought the highlight of the day was: his century or Bob Hawke sculling a beer, which was played live on a giant television screen at the ground.

  ‘It was in between overs and he was cheers-ing the crowd, and [fellow batsman] Hilton [Cartwright] and I were talking to each other, like, Surely not – is he going to do it?Is he going to do it? As he did we both started going nuts out in the middle. And the crowd joined in as well. It was… cool.’

  At the centenary of Oxford’s Rhodes House in 2003, alongside fellow Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton, Hawke was asked if he would take another swing – for old time’s sake.

  ‘They went fucking mad,’ says Hawke. ‘They brought the beer in after a couple of courses. We had Clinton standing up with Hillary, going, “Go, Bob! Go, Bob!” I got it down in twenty seconds.’

  Hawke’s tone is beautiful when he’s engaged. Those heavy lids lift and the pale blue eyes pop. Eyebrows like pampas grass invigorated after monsoonal rain shoot northwards. (In 1983, one economics writer imagined a thousand women orgasming every time they shot up.)

  While he talks, I stare at the clear brown skin, the precise shave that has missed only one hair, the crown that is still a cyclone swell of marching silver waves. Even two droplets of sweat clinging to his chin can’t ruin the tableau.

  Hawke isn’t the prolific talker I’d imagined from the one-time ACTU advocate who’d harangue the arbitration commission’s judges in opening addresses that could last three days and replies that went on and on and on, until, in the words of Sir John Moore, the presiding judge of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission,‘He physically couldn’t stand, except by hanging on to the lectern… we were adjourning at regular intervals because his voice was giving out.’

  But ask a question and, if he’s into it, he’ll answer it precisely. If he isn’t, Hawke takes his responses to a certain level and then snaps shut.

  When I ask his dream of happiness, he says, ‘It’s being with Blanche. It’s impossible to describe the sublime happiness that I experience in our relationship.’

  Does he often think about that chance meeting in Jakarta in 1970?

  ‘It comes to mind occasionally. I was on my way to Geneva because I was on the international executive of the International Labour Organization and a friend of mine, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Rawdon Dalrymple – he went on to become one of our leading diplomats – was then our second in the embassy to Indonesia. And we were sitting on a very warm, sunny morning on the verandah of his home in Jakarta and this vision in white walked around the corner. She wore a white dress and was beautifully tanned.’

  Was she the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen?

  ‘Yes.’

  Was the attraction reciprocated?

  ‘She didn’t appear unhappy.’

  Did you say anything to Dalrymple after she’d walked away?

  ‘Of course I spoke to him.’

  Do you remember what you said?

  (Abruptly): ‘No.’

  When Hawke’s done with a topic, he nods and picks up his cigar.

  So you wait a little.

  He’s polite enough to not draw on his cigar if you’ve asked a question. Even if it’s poised on his lips, he’ll put it down, answer, pick it back up.

  So you wait a little longer. Give him time to circle the vapour in his mouth. Reflect. Consider. Determine what can and can’t be told.

  After two hours, we’ve talked near-death experiences, the losing of his religion, the wellspring of love that was his childhood, Mandela, Curtin, Cousteau, his great pals Bush Senior and George Shultz, the disaster of invading Iraq and Afghanistan, the lack of any progress on the Israel–Palestine question (the great disappointment of Obama’s presidency, says Hawke) and the curveball of bringing the Chinese in to mediate, the booze, the importance of kids learning Mandarin and …

  I see a look that says, Mate, I’m tapped.

  You had enough? I ask.

  ‘Just about, yeah …’

  As I pack away the three recording devices (my paranoia of technical failure was justified: one didn’t work), Hawke looks at me, grins, and says, ‘This one is off the record.’

  He slings me an insight into a significant figure and a major upcoming event in world politics that in print would seem poisonous, a sabotage with tints of international intrigue, but here it is told with a wink and such a boyish grin that it shows what a natural performer he still is.

  With that, Hawke snorts a laugh and, like any good eighty-six-year-old, returns to his cryptic crossword.

  — CHAPTER 4 —

  A POP QUIZ
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  MARCEL PROUST WAS A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD IN 1885 when he first filled out a questionnaire for the daughter of the French prime minister, Antoinette Faure. Mademoiselle would invite her friends to answer a series of identical questions designed to reveal the subject’s innermost feelings. In 1993 Vanity Fair adopted the practice in an abbreviated version, asking notable figures – including Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr, Allen Ginsberg and Salman Rushdie – questions that were then published on the back page. As a warm-up to our dozen interviews, Hawke humours me by participating in something similar. I figure a dozen breezy questions tossed at Hawke will give him a chance to exercise those velvet tonsils.

  You good? I ask.

  Hawke belts a hit from his cigar then nods, leans forward in his chair, gaze fixed, as alert as if he were a contestant on Sale of the Century.

  Tell me, what fault do you have the most compassion for?

  Hawke swats the question away easily. ‘The fault I detest most is a lack of compassion.’

  Compassion. The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. They’re enduring themes of Hawke at eighty-six, at fifty and at thirteen, when his dad first tutored his son on the interconnectedness of humanity.

  The 2010 telemovie Hawke opens with this scene of a post-copulating Bob and Blanche in bed.

  Blanche (nude): ‘What do you believe in Bob? What ignites you?’

  Hawke (nude): ‘I believe in equality… honour… and the Brotherhood of Man.’

  All through our interviews Hawke will circle back to the impact his Congregational minister father, Clem, had on him. He’ll think for a few seconds then, letting out a long breath, begin his answer: ‘It fits in with what I said in the beginning about my father’s influence on me…’ Or: ‘I can probably best explain it in reference to my father…’