Memories of mum and mortality

People and places he’s loved are central to Steve Hawke’s work. His latest draws on the suffering of his mother, Hazel.

Steve Hawke, author of Out of Time, photographed in Perth. Picture: Colin Murty.

There’s a heart-stopping simplicity to the dedication in Steve Hawke’s new novel, Out of Time: “Always thinking of you, mum.”

“Mum” is Hazel Hawke, who died in 2013 after a diagnosis of ­Alzheimer’s disease 12 years earlier. Her son would regularly fly across the continent from his home in Perth to help his sisters, Sue Pieters-Hawke and Roslyn Hawke, look after their mother.

During those difficult years, Hawke’s activities extended across an eclectic variety of fields and disparate points on the compass. He was regularly visiting the Kimberley writing a play, Jandamarra, with local Bunuba elders, then touring the massive show; in Sydney, he’d be working with composer Paul Stanhope to turn Jandamarra into a cantata for the nation’s best children’s choir.

At home in the Perth hills, he’d sit with the door propped open so he could contemplate the bush while writing books. There was a biography of West Australian footballer Polly Farmer, a children’s book and his first novel, The Valley, a four-generation saga set in the Kimberley where he lived for nearly 15 years after university and raised two sons with his wife, Lesley.

And in between were those long-distance trips to greet a mother who recognised him less and less. That experience prompted his second novel, and as time ran out for Hazel, a change of title from “Making Memories” to Out of Time.

“It did grow very much out of watching my mother suffer from dementia,” he says. “It was a long sad process, seven or eight years, very gradual and terrible. It’s a shocking thing when someone loses their memory and their sense of self.”

Steve Hawke’s parents, Bob and Hazel Hawke, in Brisbane in 1984.

The novel features Joe, a gifted architect who finds he’s inexplicably forgetting where he parked the car. He loses track of conversations, makes drafting miscalculations and forgets entire days. The eventual diagnosis is early onset ­dementia and Joe connives to save his family from witnessing the anguish and debilitation that Joe saw in a similarly afflicted uncle.

“Joe has witnessed his uncle go through it and he felt, ‘That’s not for me, I’m not going to go there’. That’s very much my sentiment but it’s not as simple as that. It just isn’t.”

Hawke’s novel teases out the futility of “protecting” family from the vagaries of the disease. Joe’s partner, Anne, finds herself trapped in the black mire of his pain and his bleak resolve to end it; she has seen the contents of the bag he stows in the shed, the book with the ominous title, Final Exit.

“The book really arose out of me wrestling with the realities,” says Hawke. “If you hold that opinion, what does that actually mean in practice not just for you but for those around you? It was me trying to go beyond that glib statement. You see it a lot. Someone says, ‘Put a bullet in me first’ but that’s a cop-out. You can’t ask that of your kids.”

Hawke has the neat, small features of his mother, and clearly they were close. Out of Time is “about a lot more (than dementia). It’s about loving long-term relationships”, he says. Joe and Anne must navigate the emotional pitfalls of telling their daughter, who is already struggling with a strained marriage and small child.

Then friends and workmates must be let in on the secret of the “loops” in Joe’s brain that cause him to repeat the same question; Joe’s architect colleague, Tony, compares it to a Mobius loop, “a logic-defying shape with a single interminable edge, a single self-repeating surface”.

Mortality is a topic Hawke has been closely contemplating of late. His father and former prime minister, Bob Hawke, died peacefully, aged 89, in May. He was surrounded by people he loved, with none of the tricky ethical and emotional terrain of Joe’s torment at not being able to end it all.

Two days after Hawke’s death, his son wrote a short tribute for this newspaper. It began: “My old man was a far from perfect father. That was partly his nature, and partly the fact that he ­always tended to have just a few other things on his plate.

“But there is also absolutely no doubt that he was a loving father. I loved him back, and I love him back still. I’m not sure there is much more to be said on that front.”

That fierce loyalty — and Hawke’s intensely private nature — explain why he avoids any comment on the family tensions that, according to news reports, have seen Hawke’s younger sister, Roslyn, seek to challenge her father’s will. “The only thing I will say is I’ve got nothing to say,” he says.

His first novel, The Valley, emerged from a different kind of loving relationship, Hawke’s passion for the sprawling, raw-boned Kimberley that was ignited when he turned up as a 19-year-old in the town of Fitzroy Crossing.

Hazel would come up every year to visit her son and his family. “I did everything from land rights claims to store runs; I worked with community schools, a whole lot of different jobs.

“Fitzroy Crossing in the late 70s when I first got there was a hellhole,” he says. “It was Soweto on steroids, it was awful.

Hardly anyone could read or write and living conditions were atrocious.

“Not everything is perfect now, but compared with the immediate aftermath of people’s eviction from country and fringe camps, it is immeas­urably better. Those who think otherwise didn’t see what was going on back then.”

In 1980, he was a witness to the historic Noonkanbah clash when Aboriginal protesters sat in a dusty Kimberley creek bed, blocking the path of drilling rigs and facing off against a barrage of police and miners.

The Noonkanbah standoff put land rights on the national agenda, and Hawke documented it all in his first non-fiction book, Noonkanbah: Whose Land, Whose Law, with photographer ­Michael Gallagher.

The Valley, published last year and already into its third printing, is a fictional saga spanning four generations that Hawke wrote from a distance in time and place.

“The Valley is completely a product of my time in the Kimberley and the country I grew to love,” he says. “Among other things, I think of it as a love song to the Kimberley.”

It traces the impact of a murder in 1916 in the rugged Kimberley ranges that ripples through several generations of one family. Several characters were inspired by the visionary leaders he met at Noonkambah.

“I’ve never ceased to admire them. Those men are in The Valley, like Two Bob, wonderful old men who were skilful and often phlegmatic, tremendously knowledgeable about the cattle ­industry and traditional lore.”

Another hero who has preoccupied Hawke for decades is Jandamarra, a Kimberley renegade leader whose skirmishes with colonial police led eventually to his death in 1897.

Hawke worked on the play with Bunuba cultural leaders like June Oscar, now Australia’s ­indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice commissioner. The full-length play premiered at the Perth International Arts Festival in 2008, toured the Kimberley and was later staged in a cantata form in 2014 at the Sydney Opera House.

He says two career highlights were taking a bow on the stage of the Opera House for Jandamarra: Sing for the Country, the cantata performed by Gondwana Voices and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

The other highlight was standing on a raised platform in Windjana Gorge in the Kimberley, not far from where Jandamarra died, to greet the wild applause of an audience of Bunuba people.

“A lot of old people were in tears, and it was the first bit of theatre they saw or were part of. It’s not something you take on lightly.”

Hawke is now working on a third novel, based loosely around the entrepreneurs who brought down the Burke Labor government in Western Australia in the 1980s.

“I guess I’m eclectic, I go with whatever story is stuck in my head.”

Meanwhile, his musical activity with com­poser Stanhope (“a seriously good composer and a friend”) is stepping up. This month, Hawke’s lyrics for a song called I am Martuwarra, or “I am the river” was sung at the World Youth Choral Festival.

In October, the Jandamarra Cantata will be ­reprised at the Sydney Town Hall, this time sung by the Sydney Children’s Choir. Bunuba elders will travel from Fitzroy Crossing to add their ­traditional lament to the classical score by ­Stanhope.

“It’s a song about a black cockatoo mother that’s lost its chick. It’s a beautiful lament and Jandamarra’s mother, Ginny, sings it when he dies. Paul has created an incredible blending of Bunuba singing and choral music. It’s a great work.”

So what is it like when people recognise him as the son of a famous man?

“I am, I don’t run away from it. But I’ve followed my own course, and I like to think that my professional life as a writer, producer and a ­worker with the mob stands on its own two feet.”

Out of Timeby Steve Hawke is published by Fremantle Press.
Jandamarra: Sing for the Country will be performed at Sydney Town Hall on ­October 18.