What the The Crown got wrong about Bob Hawke and the Queen

The most unforgivable aspect of the once-stellar Netflix series The Crown is the portrayal of Bob Hawke.

Bob and Hazel Hawke meet Charles and Diana during their royal visit in 1983. Picture: Austral

There are few television programs I look forward to more than The Crown. The acting, writing, direction, music and production values are first-class. The series provides a compelling insight into the royal family, the relationship between the monarchy and politics, and usually with sympathy and understanding for the Queen.

But the fourth season, which recently premiered on Netflix, is riddled with historical errors, drama more akin to a daytime soap opera and a rendering of the monarchy so distant from reality that aspects of it are high farce. It may lead some, especially younger generations, to believe that fiction is reality.

The most unforgivable aspect of the new season is the portrayal of Bob Hawke during the visit by Prince Charles and Princess Diana to Australia just weeks after he became prime minister. It is staggering just how utterly ridiculous the sixth episode — “Terra Nullius” — actually is.

The premise is that Hawke (Richard Roxburgh), on the eve of winning the election on March 5, 1983, was eager for Australia to become a republic. Hawke thought the royal visit could be “the tipping point” needed to energise Australians to sever links with the monarchy. “Maybe now’s the moment,” he says.

Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher in the fourth season of The Crown.

But the royal visit goes so well that Hawke’s republican plans are thwarted. “When you arrived,” he confesses to Charles (Josh O’Connor), “I thought your visit might inspire Australians to finally throw off the shackles and stand on her own two feet. And, no offence, but if it’d just been you, you know, I might’ve got my wishes. But then, you know, she comes along.” He tells Charles that Diana (Emma Corrin) made them both “look like chumps”.

The notion that Diana effectively stopped Australia from leaving the Commonwealth and becoming a republic because she spellbound the nation is a preposterous fabrication. There is no evidence to sustain it. It is the stuff of fairytales. That this has largely been accepted in reviews of the program is disappointing.

The Crown sets the story with an interview Hawke gave to the ABC’s Four Corners program before the election where he said Australia should be a republic and we would be better off if Charles did not become our king. The Crown says the interview took place on February 26 in Canberra but it was actually February 12 in Melbourne.

The bigger blunder is leaving out what Hawke also said in that interview.

“We’d be better off as a republic but I don’t think it’s a matter of great importance,” Hawke actually said. “If we become a republic tomorrow it wouldn’t improve (our) condition one iota. But I think in terms of being our own country, the time will come when Australians would prefer to be a republic.” He added: “I don’t think it’s (the) No 1 issue on the agenda when Prince Charles and Princess Diana come.”

The truth is that Hawke never saw the Charles-Diana visit as a chance to advocate a republic. Hawke always got on well with the Queen. He believed Australia should not become a republic until the Queen’s reign ends. This is a testament to the respect most Australians have for her.

Emma Corrin as Princess Diana and Josh O C as Prince Charles at Llano del Buho, Almeria. Picture: Netflix

Yet we see Hawke in The Crown trashing the royal family, hoping it will stir republican sentiment in the antipodes. He refers to Charles as a “jug-eared bonehead” and the Queen as a “pig”. Hawke says: “You wouldn’t put a pig in charge of a herd of prime beef cattle — even if it did look good in a twin set and pearls.” This is nonsense. It demeans not only Hawke but all Australians.

Sir William Heseltine was the Queen’s private secretary from 1986 to 1990. He was deputy private secretary in 1983. Heseltine, 90, is not a fan of The Crown. He shudders at how the royal family has been portrayed. He can easily identify “a multitude” of major and minor errors from improbable utterances and events to settings, dress and behaviour.

“I don’t approve of this kind of program being made about living people – mixing fact and fiction in such a way that most viewers will believe that even the worst inventions are gospel truth,” he tells Inquirer. “But it is handsomely put together, which enhances the possibility of egregious error being accepted as fact.”

Heseltine is oddly not shown in the series, nor is Sir Philip Moore who was the Queen’s private secretary from 1977 to 1986. Instead, Sir Martin Charteris still runs the royal household into the 1990s even though he left in 1977. It is just one of many historical inaccuracies in The Crown.

“As for Mr Hawke, with whom I had been acquainted since our university days in Perth, I can vouch for the fact that I never heard from him a rude or disrespectful word to or about the Queen,” Heseltine says. “Indeed, with a common devotion to horse racing, the two got on well together. Hawke was an avowed republican, but he did not allow that to affect the very proper relationship with Her Majesty.

“The visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales to Australia, which features large in the series, I can attest was certainly not conceived as a weapon to ward off any move to a republic. It was one in the regular series of visits by Her Majesty herself and members of her family undertaken as one of the ways in which the family showed their devotion to the overseas monarchies.”

Richard Roxburgh as Bob Hawke in The Crown.

Graham Evans was Hawke’s principal private secretary (chief of staff) at the time of the royal visit. Evans is depicted in The Crown as being on the receiving end of Hawke’s republican frustrations and provides updates on how well the tour is going.

“The republic was not a priority issue for Hawke in March 1983,” Evans, 77, told Inquirer. “He was focused on bedding down a new government and on addressing the serious economic challenges facing Australia. I cannot recall having a conversation with him at that time, or subsequently, about how a republic might best be achieved.

“As regards what transpired on the royal visit, Hawke was delighted by how the official arrangements went. He hosted a luncheon for Charles and Di at The Lodge and he made favourable comments to the media about the visit. For him, it was an early test of his capacity to handle prominent international visitors.”

Evans, who led Hawke’s office from 1983 to 1986, adds that it is completely false to suggest Hawke would have denigrated the Queen as a “pig” or Charles as a “bonehead” in private conversations let alone in television interviews.

“Hawke always respected and liked Queen Elizabeth II, whom he met on a number of occasions as prime minister,” Evans says. “The reference to the Queen that Hawke is reported to have made in a TV interview in The Crown episode is totally at odds with this, and is not a description I ever heard in the period I worked with him.”

When the royal couple departed Australia, Hawke sent Charles a public message. “Your visit to Australia in company with the Princess of Wales and Prince William has delighted the people of Australia,” he said. “I hope you and your wife have felt this yourselves from the enthusiasm of the people who have greeted you as you travelled through the country.”

Yet in The Crown, Hawke is depicted as angry about the success of the royal visit. He claims that Diana had ruined his republican ambitions. “That superstar may have just set back the cause of republicanism in Australia for the foreseeable future,” Hawke laments to Charles. It is a ludicrous rewriting of history.

The idea of an Australian republic was hardly on the agenda in the 1980s. It was never a focus for Hawke. In Hawke’s final year in office, 1991, the republic could muster only 34 per cent support among Australians, according to Newspoll. The Australian Republican Movement was not formed until 1991.

Roxburgh captures Hawke brilliantly. I have no qualms with this performance or his portrayal of Hawke in the television movie of the same name (2010). Roxburgh has been let down by The Crown’s creator and writer, Peter Morgan. Australians will be dismayed by this fictional Hawke.

Sir William Heseltine has criticised and dsimssed much of the royal content in the fourth season of The Crown. Picture: Tony McDonough

he fourth series also dwells on Charles and Diana’s courtship, marriage and relationship breakdown. Heseltine finds this series overall, and especially how it deals with Charles and Diana, to be “the most offensive so far”. He does, however, acknowledge “the undeniable animosities which broke out in the marriage” during this period and beyond.

Another emphasis of this series of The Crown is the relationship between Margaret Thatcher (superbly played by Gillian Anderson) and the Queen (Olivia Colman). While there was occasional awkwardness and some tension — namely over apartheid — there was also mutual regard. The Queen attended Thatcher’s 70th and 80th birthday parties, and her funeral in 2013. The only other prime ministerial funeral attended by Elizabeth II was that for Winston Churchill in 1965.

“(The) relationship between these two considerable personalities was one of mutual respect, if not always great warmth,” Heseltine recalls. “It was sufficiently close, however, for The Queen to bestow on Mrs Thatcher, on her leaving office, the great honour of the Order of Merit, one of the few honours within her personal gift.

“It is absurd to think that Thatcher might ever have lectured the Queen on her supposed errors, and almost equally absurd to imagine Her Majesty taking her prime minister to task. Their weekly audience covered an agenda agreed in advance. It is (also) monstrous to suggest that the family could have been rude to the Thatchers on their first stay at Balmoral.”

The larger problem with The Crown is that we now live in a post-truth world where facts are malleable to suit predetermined views. Too many historians, journalists and politicians would rather satisfy their emotions and egos rather than use evidence along with reasoned and logical judgment.

The rise of sham history is evident in the debate over the recently released Palace Letters between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace during the 1975 constitutional crisis. When the letters did not support a theory directly implicating the Queen in Gough Whitlam’s dismissal — allegedly giving it the “royal green light” — the response was to simply double down on the original claim regardless of the documentary evidence.

The Crown, as television, is entitled to a degree of dramatic licence. But the blurring of fact and fiction is an insidious force that is becoming more difficult to counter. The trouble is that many people simply believe what they read and see without question. Hawke, if he were still with us, would be appalled. He probably would have sued for libel — and won.