Annette Sharp: My visit to Hawke’s house last week

The editor looked up from his 18-hour, slow-roasted beef brisket, the not-up-to-the-task sustainably sourced birchwood fork rigid in his hand: “Bob,” he said simply. “Where’s Bob?” It was 11 days before the federal election and “Bob” hadn’t been seen in public for months.

The editor looked up from his 18-hour, slow-roasted beef brisket, the not-up-to-the-task sustainably sourced birchwood fork rigid in his hand: “Bob,” he said simply. “Where’s Bob?” It was 11 days before the federal election and Australia’s oldest living prime minister hadn’t been seen in public for months — that was until a photograph appeared in a rival newspaper on May 7 showing him having a cup of tea on a porch with his old adversary Paul Keating, the man who succeeded Hawke in 1991.

The Northbridge house Bob Hawke recently sold. Picture: Brett Costello

Everything about the image was contrived.

According to the copy, the joint statement accompanying the picture had been conceived “some weeks ago” yet its lack of currency hadn’t stopped Nine’s Fairfax Media pulling it out strategically one week before the election.

“So how is he?” asked the editor. “I’ll make some calls,” I muttered, heading back to my desk.

Who would I call? My line to the Hawkes had been severed some 20 years earlier after I’d written a series of stories championing Hawke’s first wife, Hazel, the long-suffering mother of his three children, and to whom Hawke had been famously unfaithful for decades.

Hazel, by then divorced from her great love, was in her 70s and doing it tough.

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When her health and circumstances deteriorated and she was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2002-03, I focused on Hawke, who, as I laboriously pointed out in a series of columns penned during my career at Fairfax, was living a splendid life with his glamorous and accomplished second wife, Blanche d’Alpuget.

Hawke responded by making a call to a member of the Fairfax executive or board. Fairfax chairman Ron Walker would soon intervene, putting a stop to my narrative.

By the time Hazel died in 2013, I was working at The Daily Telegraph and free to write with as much affection as I dared about her. The editor had no interest in my ancient history.

I made some calls.

Former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and his wife Blanche d'Alpuget. Picture: William WEST/AFP

Given I have spent three decades assiduously avoiding the carpetbaggers, windbags and dulled-eyed bureaucrats who inhabit Canberra, I don’t possess a contact book or phone full of the numbers of politicians, ALP party members or gossipy politicos.

This was going to be hard and it would be harder still, I knew, to persuade an ailing Hawke to give News Corp a pre-election day photo.

I made some more calls.

Ten minutes later I popped my head back into the boss’s office: “He’s ageing, frail and depressed,” I said. “Other than that, no one seems to know much.”

“Depressed?” he replied, not buying it.

Given Hawke and Blanche had recently sold their Northbridge home, the first thing I needed to establish was where Hawke might be.

Was he convalescing in the couple’s prized $14.5 million clifftop home among packing boxes, was he in hospital or a respite facility, or had he and Blanche moved into their flash new city apartment?

Days, calls — and one futile four-hour photographic reconnaissance later — I was running out of time.

On Thursday morning I decided to head to Northbridge for one last look. After spending a couple of hours watching the house and trying to establish if the Hawkes were indeed still in residence, I came to the realisation there was only one way to know.

I would have to knock on the door.

At about noon I approached the security intercom adjacent a gate on the footpath without a plan.

The buzzer tone peeled for a moment and then a small thickly accented woman’s voice answered: “Hello?”

“Hello,” I responded. “Is Blanche home?”

Wordlessly the security gate buzzed open. I stepped on to the property and five steps later was at the front door. It too swung open to me before I had a chance to knock.

A tall man, aged about 60 and dressed semi-formally, invited me inside.

I stepped in, offering an apology: “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t expect to be buzzed in.”

“It’s OK,” he said, pleasantly, “What can I do for you?”

I explained I was from The Sunday Telegraph. The newspaper was hoping to persuade “Bob” to pose for a pre-election photograph, I explained.

“Is Bob about?” I asked.

The man thought for a moment — and nodded towards the sunlit space to my right, beyond the formless marble statue in front of me.

There wasn’t a sound emanating from anywhere in the house. It was eerily silent.

There were no voices, no radios, no music, no horse races on the telly.

“He’s tied up at the moment,” said the pleasant man. “Perhaps you could contact, um, what is it? … er, the party,” he suggested, trying to be helpful.

“I know there were some shots taken recently of Bob with Bill Shorten,” he added as an
afterthought.

I apologised again: “I think the cleaner must have let me in,” I mused, turning to leave.

“She did,” said the polite man, who was clearly unfamiliar with an inquisitive media.

Possibly a doctor, I reflected as I departed.

Seven hours later, before the news of his death broke, my sources returned my calls.

“Bob has just died with Blanche at his side,” they said.

Yes, I could have added, and me just a few paces further away.

Bob Hawke — approachable and accessible to the very end.

Twitter: @InSharpRelief

Originally published as Annette Sharp: My visit to Hawke’s house last week