By Nick Miller
Oxford: At Oxford’s centuries-old temple to undergraduate boozing, Bob Hawke is the patron saint. And on Thursday night, Aussies came to re-enact his first miracle.
The Turf Tavern doesn’t leave tourists to dig through their phones for information – luckily, because the university city’s medieval walls loom over the pub on all sides, wreaking havoc with mobile reception.
Painted boards around the paved courtyards tell the story of its most famous visitors, and Hawke is the most prominent.
A sign at the Turf Tavern in Oxford.Credit: Nick Miller
One board titled “Famous people through our doors” briefly name checks Elizabeth Taylor, Stephen Hawking, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway, but devotes an entire third of its area to Hawke (the other third notes that it was here too that Bill Clinton famously “did not inhale”).
Another big sign in the beer garden instructs visitors “Whilst here at Oxford University in 1963 at the Turf Tavern, Bob Hawke, former Australian prime minister, entered the Guinness Book of Records after downing a yard of ale in 11 seconds”.
For a group of millennial Australians – students and ex students – who gathered at the pub on Thursday evening, it was a fitting memorial for the PM they remembered.
Or, rather, didn’t remember. Millennials grew up under Howard. Hawke, to them, was a mythic figure from the brash 80s.
“He was the platonic ideal of a Labor politician,” says one. “I just knew about the beer and cricket, really.”
They were sitting at a table under Hawke's sign not out of an upwelling of emotion at the loss of a beloved national figure, but because when they arrived it had been recently vacated by an Australian TV crew filing a piece to camera.
But they thought of Hawke fondly. They had a sense of his authenticity – a quality they said was lost in the modern crop of Australian politicians.
Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke having a beer in the Trades Hall Hotel on Sussexx Street on 17 April 1974.Credit: Rick Stevens
“Him and Howard were the end of an era,” says another of the group.
They didn’t have memories of Hawke to share, so over a pint, and another, and one more, the conversation meandered.
It included a hefty whack of Australian politics – they are keeping up with developments – but they were more engaged with next week’s European elections, where they hope to send a message about the stupidity of Brexit.
Hawke would probably have approved. Politically engaged, and looking to the future.
The pub doesn’t sell beer by the yard glass any more. But in another group an enterprising Aussie had brought one along – and the pub filled it for him. There were cheers as he downed it, in nowhere near Hawke’s time.
Then the Aussie contingent faded away, citing tomorrow’s responsibilities, replaced by locals.