Wednesdays with Bob Read online

  Hawke says he was ‘surrounded by love as a child’ and was ‘profoundly influenced by the best man I ever knew. I was extraordinarily close to my father and admired him enormously. He said, “Son, if you believe in the Fatherhood of God, you must necessarily believe in the Brotherhood of Man. You are brothers and sisters and you should live that way. You should try your best to improve the lives of others.”

  ‘I accepted that and so I’ve always felt impelled by the reality of that statement, even when I ceased to be a part of organised religion at the end of 1952. I’ve always felt that we are brothers and sisters and that carries obligations. I would identify that as the major characteristic of my life and the way I’ve lived my life.’

  Arthur Clarence ‘Clem’ Hawke turned eighty-five the day he saw his son become prime minister in 1983. He greeted reporters that morning by telling the press pack how lucky Australia was to have his son as PM.

  Hawke’s mother Ellie died in 1979, four years before her son became prime minister. But even now, when Ellie’s name is mentioned, the hooded eyelids peel back, the chin lifts and the eyes grow round. For a moment, it isn’t Hawke, the eighty-six-year-old with the pacemaker and the hearing aid; it’s little Bobby, the precocious three-year-old.

  When Clem became a chaplain in the AIF during World War II, the pre-teenage Hawke would stand on the fence at the front of their house in Tate Street, West Leederville, waiting for his father to walk up their street.

  Once he’d spotted Clem, Hawke would spring down off his perch and run towards him. ‘I just couldn’t wait to hug him and have his arms around me,’ Hawke recalls. ‘When he left I’d give him a big kiss and a hug and tell him he had to come back soon. We had a lovely, natural relationship … I just spent most of my time at home. I had a lot of friends but it was such a place of love and happiness. I didn’t want to be anywhere else, really. I feel so sorry for kids who don’t have a happy home life because it makes a difference to the whole of the rest of your life.’

  Is that where you learned the fundamentals of fatherhood? I ask.

  Hawke returns to the present, the hoods come down, the years return.

  ‘Well, I didn’t learn enough because I was so bloody busy,’ says Hawke, who won the 1971 Victorian Father of the Year award while president of the ACTU, despite the fact his first wife, Hazel, was virtually a single parent. ‘I just didn’t spend enough time with my kids. That’s why when I found out that Rosslyn was a heroin addict in 1984 I felt an enormous sense of guilt that I hadn’t been a good enough father.’

  He continues, ‘The first thing is you’ve got to show your love. And it’s got to be a real love. Let your kids know that they matter and that you’re going to do everything you can to help them develop their talents. One of the great sorrows in my life, and in hers, is with [eldest daughter] Susan. She was a very good student … she was going to do law … and then she got this bug about doing work to help prisoners, and she gave up on the law. I said, “Sweetheart, I admire your commitment to helping these people, but that can wait. You’ve got to equip yourself now because this will determine the rest of your life.” She doesn’t talk about it to me, but I know she’s deeply regretted it. She could have done anything.’

  The second of Bob and Hazel’s children, Stephen, ‘became alienated from me over uranium,’ says Hawke. ‘That was in 1979 when they had the passionate debate about mining and export of uranium, and Susan and Steve were among those who demonstrated against it. Stephen even changed the surname of his sons. The two grandsons have got their mother’s surname. That was deeply hurtful, but I understood. So it’s a question of loving your children and encouraging their talents. Steve was a brilliant student. He could’ve been a multimillionaire, but he devoted his life to the Aborigines. And I’m very proud of him.’

  What about faults you see in other people that don’t alter your perception of them, that you’re happy to indulge?

  ‘If I make a judgement that their heart is in the right place, then I’m happy to try to work with them.’

  What do you hate?

  ‘Well, I’m not a hater – and that’s an important fact to note. I’m not a hater of people. I can be terribly disappointed and angry with things they say and do, but I’m not a hater. I hate discrimination of any sort based on race, colour or creed. It’s just absolute anathema to me. So the institutions, the people who practise it, I hate the effects. And that very much includes sexual discrimination.’

  When I ask what historical figures he most despises, Hawke breathes a bored sigh and runs through the usual list – Adolf, Stalin – before suddenly becoming animated again.

  ‘At a lesser level, although still tragically in terms of the present day, Bush Junior. His decision to invade Iraq was a blunder of massive proportions. And I’m not just being wise after the event. Three weeks before he invaded Iraq, I wrote a piece for The Australian newspaper saying that Osama bin Laden must be on his knees morning and night, praying to Allah that Bush will invade, because nothing could do more to boost the cause and the activities of the terrorists.’

  Do you believe, Mr Hawke, that Bush Junior’s invasion was malicious or did it come from good intentions?

  ‘The fanatics of religion are the problem. And it was the Christian Right in America who pushed him into it. We’ve got [Tony] Blair. It was his religion that motivated him in the awful decision he made, which has all come out recently [in the Chilcot report]. No, it was not malice. It was prejudice and ignorance.’

  Hawke spits out a cloud of smoke in disgust.

  ‘Tony Blair,’ says Hawke, ‘is an actor. I always feel like saying, “Turn off the acting button.” His decision in regard to Iraq was even worse than John Howard’s. He just gave carte blanche to George Junior … They were both driven by their religion.’

  Would you say the effects of the Iraq War have been more disastrous than Vietnam?

  ‘Yes, a much more lasting effect … Many of these decisions to automatically go along with them are as bad as the decisions of the Americans themselves. It’s interesting that a number of the leading military figures have expressed their view about it, but the politicians involved have never apologised.’

  Are there any military events you admire?

  ‘There are just wars, and one which I supported was the first Gulf War. Bush Senior was the president and we were very close and he kept in constant contact with me. Some of my party were against it. They were very short-sighted. You had a situation where a dictator had gratuitously invaded a neighbouring country without a cause, without justification of any kind.

  ‘Then when the war was over, and the Iraqi troops had been driven back across the border, George rang me again. He said, “Bob, I’m being pressured very much by a lot of my people that we should press on to Baghdad and get rid of this monster.”

  ‘I said, “No way, George.” I said, “You have done a magnificent job in getting together a coalition, with the support of the United Nations and a lot of the Arab states, specifically to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait. It would, in my judgement, be breaking the trust of the people who have joined you to do this.”

  ‘He said, “Bob, I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you say that.” He said, “That’s my view too. We won’t be going alone.’”

  When I ask what historical and contemporary figures he admires, Hawke lists Mandela, whom he assisted from afar with trade union pressure on South Africa’s apartheid government in the seventies and as prime minister in the eighties, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who helped Hawke to protect Antarctica from mining.

  But, more than anyone, Hawke esteems wartime prime minister John Curtin. Hawke’s uncle Albert was a significant figure in Western Australian politics, premier for six years and leader of the Labor Party for fifteen, and he once introduced ten-year-old Bobby to Curtin. There are the obvious parallels between Curtin and Hawke, of course. Both drunks. Both being handed the keys to Australia at crucial points in its history: Curtin with Japan on Australia
’s doorstep in World War II, Hawke with an economy on its knees.

  ‘Even in the dark days of war, he was thinking of Australia after the war,’ Hawke explains. ‘Since the nation was formed at the beginning of the century, Australia had never experienced full employment or anything like it, and he had the idea that the Australia he was fighting to save was going to be a bigger and a better Australia. And so, during the war, he established a Department of Post-War Reconstruction. The head of that was Nugget Coombs, a great Australian public servant.

  ‘They set about planning what Australia was going to be like after the war. And the most significant feature of that, of course, was the commitment to a massive post-war immigration policy, which was the single most important decision ever taken by any Australian government, because it absolutely changed Australia. We opened the country to people from about 180 different nations. While there have been some problems, essentially it’s been a peaceful revolution; I’d say the most peaceful change in the composition of any country ever. I hold him in the highest regard for his integrity.’

  I switch tack. Of the two parents, I ask, can you recognise what characteristics you inherited from each of them?

  ‘Well, you know what I got from my father…’

  The Brotherhood of Man.

  ‘From my mother, I got the importance of education, because that was one of my major commitments when I became prime minister: equality of educational opportunity. When I took office, Australia had the lowest retention rate in secondary education of any developed country in the world, only 30 per cent, and I was absolutely dedicated to moving on that immediately, so we brought in means-tested education and educational grants. By the time I was out, it had gone up to 70 per cent.’

  What do you believe your main fault is?

  ‘Alcohol has been a problem. Once I made up my mind I was going to pursue a parliamentary career and aim for the prime ministership, I knew I couldn’t continue drinking because I couldn’t ever do anything to disgrace my country, so I gave it up in May 1980, and I didn’t have a drop for thirteen years. I never had a drop while I was prime minister.

  ‘I took it up again in 1993 and, again, on occasions I overdid it. It put a great strain on my relationship with Blanche. She was quite upset at the time. I’ve gotten on top of it now. I only have a single glass of red every night with dinner.’

  (When I ask Blanche later about the one-drink-at-dinner she says that in the early days the glass was more like a bucket.)

  How do you want to die?

  ‘On a golf course. Blanche’s stepfather did it that way. He completed a round of golf and he was sitting in the cart, filling in the card. Fell over dead. I reckon that was pretty cute.’

  Cute!

  Hawke’s been thinking about death just a little lately, calling the lack of political will to legalise euthanasia ‘absurd’.

  ‘It’s just an unarguable case. I can see no logical or moral basis for such an absurd position,’ he had told ABC Radio National, a week earlier.

  Hawke said he and Blanche, who is fourteen years his junior, had an arrangement: ‘If I was to lose my marbles… then something is done about it. I don’t expect it to be a pillow pressed exuberantly over my nose, but I’m sure that she could organise something with a family doctor.’

  Not that Hawke sees dementia on the immediate horizon.

  ‘I’m in tremendously good health. And I have an absolute determination that I’m not going to lose my marbles. That’s why you see me every day doing at least two hard cryptics and a couple of hard sudokus. As you get older, mental exercise is as least as important as physical exercise.’

  Is there anything that keeps you awake at night? Night thoughts?

  ‘No. I’m the world’s best sleeper. I have at least ten hours a night.’

  How did you age so well?

  ‘The most brilliant decision I ever made: my choice of parents.’

  Of course, says Hawke, ‘The sensible thing to do is to look after your body. Eat well, don’t smoke cigarettes.’ He pauses and adds, ‘Smoke cigars and don’t inhale. That’s very good for you.’

  — CHAPTER 5 —

  DICK WOOLCOTT

  WHAT KIND OF MAN IS HAWKE WHEN THERE ISN’T A microphone conspicuous under his chin? How does he behave among friends, for instance? Does the brotherhood rhetoric match the behaviour of the man who in 1979, while ACTU president, called the leader of the Labor Party, Bill Hayden, ‘a lying cunt with a limited future’? (In his defence, he was extremely well irrigated. Later in the course of our interviews, I’ll show him the famous scene as portrayed in the telemovie Hawke. He’ll recoil, saying, ‘Yeah, well, I did a lot of silly bloody things.’)

  Seeking a little illumination on what Hawke was like away from the gaze of the press, I visit significant figures in his life. Some are obvious choices: Kim Beazley, Gareth Evans, Ross Garnaut. Others less so: John Howard and John Singleton. My first stop, however, is the celebrated Australian diplomat Richard ‘Dick’ Woolcott, Hawke’s friend for over fifty years.

  Woolcott served under prime ministers Menzies, Holt, McEwan, Gorton, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating. He was the third secretary for the Australian embassy in Moscow at the time of Stalin’s death, Australia’s high commissioner in Ghana, and ambassador to Indonesia, the Philippines and, later, the United Nations. Gough Whitlam called Woolcott ‘Australia’s leading diplomat for a generation… he also possesses a great sense of humour from which even prime ministers were not spared.’

  A sketch of Woolcott and his Danish-born wife Birgit – the epitome of the glamorous diplomat couple – would include their movie-star looks (he Cary Grant, she Anna Karina) and the fabulous parties, rich with conversation and gloss, held in embassies around the world.

  Woolcott is eighty-nine years old and, a widower, lives alone in a Potts Point apartment building accessed down an alley and through multiple security doors. He greets me in a long-sleeved shirt, pants and socks, which he quickly apologises for.

  An amalgam of two apartments, in a fifteen-storey building that sits atop the suburb’s ridgeline, Woolcott’s home has 180-degree views, taking in Woolloomooloo, the Opera House, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Hyde Park and Sydney’s puny skyline. A two-metre wide painting titled New Australians Try to Light a Barbecue, bought from the Australian artist Elaine Haxton for forty-five pounds sometime around 1954, fills a wall above a well-worn leather couch.

  Woolcott is over six feet tall and slender, his good looks hardly diminished by age, his hair still with veins of black. He walks to a bureau and fishes through files before joining me on the balcony with a sheaf of photos: Bob and Dick with George Bush Senior; Dick and Bob and Gareth Evans peering worriedly at an out-of-frame television screen as Iraqi scuds rained on Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. Dick and Bob and others in tails before a dinner with Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1989.

  And so: What kind of man was Hawke? I ask.

  ‘Well! Ha!’ laughs Woolcott. ‘When I first met him, he smoked heavily and drank heavily and I thought he was destined to go downhill. In those days, he was wild … Once, when I was ambassador in Indonesia, I was having a farewell party for the Austrian ambassador because he lived near me. And he wanted to have it in black tie. And I thought, Christ, if you want to have it black tie, fine.

  ‘Well, Bob Hawke and Jim Ralston, who was from the left wing of the Labor Party, were visiting Jakarta to protest to the Indonesians about their policies towards East Timor. And I said to Hawke and Ralston, “Look, I’ve got this boring dinner. You’re very welcome to come if you want to.” And I thought they’d both say no but they turned up and, of course, they didn’t have black tie, so I said, “I’ll lend you formal Indonesian batik shirts.” I put out these two shirts and they put the wrong ones on. Hawke was bursting out of his, while Ralston was swimming in the other.

  ‘I remember the Austrian ambassador said to Hawke, “Mr Hawke, it’s come to us from our embassy in Canberra that you’re contemplatin
g going into politics.”

  ‘Hawke banged down his pot of beer and looked at the Austrian ambassador and said, “YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE NEXT BLOODY PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA!” Now, I had grave doubts about that.’

  How did the Austrian ambassador respond to the bombast?

  ‘Oh, he was amazed!’ says Woolcott. ‘I often wonder what he reported back to Canberra. But it was not all that long after that Hawke gave up drinking …’

  I mention that there seems to be two Hawkes: one playful, childlike, the other curt.

  ‘He can be a bit curt. On this particular visit, Adam Malik was the Indonesian foreign minister and Hawke wanted to call on him, so I arranged it. And –’ Woolcott laughs at the memory ‘– the treasurer was also in town, so I had to get somebody else to meet Bob and bring him to the foreign minister’s house. Anyway, I got there and saw no sign of Hawke or Richard, but all the dogs are barking. And they’ve come in the back way and are sitting there chatting away with Malik, the foreign minister. Malik says, “Well, I hope you’ve had a useful day, Mr Hawke. I believe you’ve called on the head of our trade unions.” And Hawke says to him, “Your trade union movement is worth four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck-all!”

  ‘Then he said to Malik, “You’ve been to the Philippines – you got any of those nice cigars that General Romulo has over there?” Malik says, “Yeah, I’ll go upstairs and get one.” Then Hawke, forgetting there were four Indonesian officials in suits who all spoke good English sitting nearby, turns around and says, “Amazing bloke, Malik. He used to be a fucking communist and now he’s working with this bastard Suharto!” And Hawke ended up as prime minister! I thought that somebody who drank that much wouldn’t be able to give it up like that, but he did. Completely. He didn’t have an alcoholic drink for years.’

  Still, for all his earthy charm, Woolcott says that as PM Hawke could be positively regal.