BIOGRAPHY
Young Hawke: The Making of a Larrikin
David Day
HarperCollins, $49.99
The title of this volume might at first seem misjudged. Young Hawke takes in the first 50 years of Bob Hawke’s life and leaves his story on the brink of election to the House of Representatives. Most of us have probably become pretty much whatever we are going to be by the time we reach that age.
In this as in so many other ways, Hawke was different. David Day quotes Vera Wasowski, then a researcher for the ABC’s This Day Tonight, on a television appearance Hawke made with Germaine Greer in the early 1970s: “They’re twins in their vanity, also in their immaturity. Both are adolescents forever.”
Bob Hawke gesticulates during a speech in 1975 while he was president of the ACTU and the Labor Party.Credit:
Perhaps that might form part of Day’s defence of the title – to which he could add that Hawke was also about to remake himself, to leave at least some of his old ways behind in his bid for the prime ministership. Yet, as Troy Bramston showed in his own recent Hawke biography, Hawke’s womanising continued into the 1980s, even if he no longer drank himself into a stupor.
That was the Hawke of the 1970s: boorish, aggressive, drunken, lascivious, sexist. And there were also the close relations with all those businessmen, some of them decidedly shady, who helped keep him in a manner to which he became accustomed. There is an amusing image in Day’s book of Hawke spending an afternoon in bed with one of his many lovers in the suite of a Sydney hotel “drinking champagne and singing Congregationalist hymns at the top of our voices”. The room was kept by a margarine company for the Labor nomenklatura.
All Hawke biographies live in the shadow of Blanche d’Alpuget’s 1982 classic, one very much designed as a selective coming clean in preparation for his bid for the prime ministership. But Day has written the kind of biography that could only have come after this famously thin-skinned subject’s death.
That is not to say it is relentlessly negative, but it is decidedly critical and often acerbic. The account of Hawke’s escapades of the 1970s might have made a suitable third instalment of a trilogy of Barry McKenzie films. One can easily imagine Hawke’s 1971 Victorian Father of the Year Award as its dramatic, hilarious climax.
Hawke the Rhodes scholar in 1956Credit:
Nor, Day suggests, was Hawke the superhero he liked to portray himself as. Many of his ambitious schemes, stretching back to the plan for an International House at the University of Western Australia in the 1950s, and forward to his efforts as ACTU president to remake the Australian union movement as a significant player in business, came to nothing or failed to live up to his hopes. He was no grand visionary or organisational genius.
Such efforts still had the not inconsiderable benefit of raising Hawke’s public profile. His student activism helped him win a Rhodes Scholarship. The ACTU’s business activities, such as Bourke’s department store and Solo petrol stations, gained him lots of good publicity, building his reputation as a doer, at the same time as his charisma, physicality and larrikinism were building his celebrity. “Let’s face it, Hawke is a pisspot like us,” was a focus group response of the era. Millions lapped it up.
Bob Hawke’s parents, Clem and Ellie.Credit:
His path to the prime ministership was God’s will – or so his mother believed. Day paints Ellie as a narcissist and negligent mother more concerned with her church and community activities than looking after her son, who inherits her narcissism along with a thirst for social recognition and public service. She wanted a daughter, got a son, and then lost an older boy, Neil, for whom Bobbie became a replacement for her ambitions. Bob’s relationship with his Congregationalist clergyman father, Clem, was much closer. They doted on one another.
Hawke’s public career became one of compliant rebellion. He would obediently meet the expectation of his domineering mother that he should become prime minister but refused to do it her way. Bob disappointed her by returning from Oxford with the same Aussie drawl. The young Christian became agnostic. Where she campaigned against the demon drink with a model of a damaged liver that she showed around to make her point, Bob swam in the stuff. His gargantuan sexual appetite was hardly wholesome Christian fare. Nor were his infamous rudeness, swearing and aggression the product of a Sunday school education.
Even the strange course of his career – from student and academic to union researcher and advocate, ACTU and ALP president, then to parliament and the coveted prime ministership – was a journey both unprecedented then and unemulated since.
Day shows that his rise to the top came on his own terms, built as much on his weaknesses – for women to whom he was not married, to the high life funded by rich friends, to the grog, to public adulation – as on his strengths. To use a (John) Howardism, the times suited him. Earlier, he would have been dismissed as a rogue. Later, social media and #MeToo would have done for him.
Hawke, in truth, could only have risen in the Australia of the 1960s and 1970s, a country that had translated to the city pub and union office something of the rugged, hard-drinking masculine world of the bush frontier. It is among Day’s achievements that we can better see how this career was of its time and place, even as it also had about it a touch of the miraculous.
Frank Bongiorno is professor of history at ANU. His most recent book is Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (Black Inc).
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