Bob Hawke’s secret brush with death

Bob Hawke has revealed he was ‘about three weeks’ from death in 2015 after contracting a deadly infection.

Bob Hawke from the book Wednesdays with Bob by Derek Rielly. Picture: Richard Freeman

Bob Hawke has revealed he was “about three weeks” from death in 2015 after contracting a deadly ­infection on a Middle East business trip that left him “wasting away” in Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital with a paralysed intestine.

In today’s The Weekend Australian Magazine, the former prime minister and wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, give a harrowing ­insight into their year from hell between mid-2015 and mid-2016 that prompted d’Alpuget to buy a smaller apartment to prepare for “life after Bob” and fast-track a planned gravesite in an undisclosed location with a rose garden and a seat where the public could reflect on the legacy of the most statistically popular Australian prime minister who ever lived.

“Yeah, I was very crook,” Mr Hawke, 87, said. “Very sick. They tell me I could have been on the way.”

“He was just so close to death,” said d’Alpuget. “It was awful. I went and bought our graves. I did it without asking him. I went with a friend who was advising a ­cemetery, a new cemetery, and I said, ‘I think it’s time I bought our graves’.

“They’re difficult decisions. Then telling the children. Telling them so they weren’t terrified, while also not letting the press know or any of the news media. That was really difficult and … umm … I was just sort of eyeballing the nurses … just saying it without saying it, you know.

“It was soon after that I put a deposit on an apartment in the city. Boom, boom, boom.”

D’Alpuget credited Sydney gastroenterologist Thomas Borody — renowned globally for his innovative clinical work on complex gastrointestinal disorders — for saving the life of the great political slugger, devising the miraculous cocktail of super-antibiotics that saw the unsinkable Silver Bodgie live to slam another pint, though easy-drinking strawberry milkshakes are more his poison these days.

Mr Hawke — who finds ­himself an unexpected hipster icon in 2017, his face adorning the craft beer labels, skateboard T-shirts and festival bills of generations “Y” and “i” — looked closer to home to credit his saviour.

“She was absolutely fantastic,” he said, nodding to the woman he has loved from as far back as the late-1970s when the married ­father of three first began the most controversial not-so-­clandestine love affair in Australian political history.

Mr Hawke canvasses his typically pragmatic thoughts on death — “I’ve never been worried about death and I’m not now” — in a new book he’s co-authored with Sydney journalist Derek ­Rielly, Wednesdays With Bob.

The sum of countless interviews Rielly conducted with Hawke on Wednesday afternoons across the past year, the book sees Hawke cast his ­famously arched eyebrows over everything from marriage to ­fatherhood to economics to global leaders — “Not one outstanding leader in the democracies anywhere in the world today” — to China relations — he recently chalked up his 105th China visit — to the two things he pities about his famed successor, Paul Keating. “Two things,” he says in the book. “One, that he’s such a hater. He just hates! And he just wants to claim a bit more than he’s entitled to.”

He says Malcolm Turnbull is politically crippled by shame. “He’s ashamed of himself for what he’s done in terms of compromising his beliefs to get the numbers against (Tony) Abbott,” he says in the book. “And if you’re ashamed of yourself that’s not a very good basis for leadership. It’s a very difficult position to find yourself in. So many people in the Liberal Party, both in the parliament and outside, just don’t ­regard him as a Liberal.”

He says nothing about Kevin Rudd: “Simply because I’d have to say things he wouldn’t find pleasing. I don’t want to hurt the man.”

Co-author Rielly enlists the help of several Hawke contemporaries in his dogged attempts to lasso the former PM’s sprawling legacy. “The guy was ultra-charisma,” says former deputy prime minister Kim Beazley. “He always looked to Australians like the quintessential Aussie bloke and talked like the quintessential ­Aussie bloke. They trusted and listened to him. And he used it ­relentlessly in areas where ­Australians have always been ultra-sensitive.”

Mr Beazley slams Mr Keating’s past suggestions an emotionally preoccupied Mr Hawke sleepwalked through much of his prime ministership. In 2010, Mr Keating, through this newspaper, penned an open letter to Mr Hawke saying: “I carried you through the whole 1984-1987 parliament, insisting you look like the prime minister, even if your staff, the Manchu Court I called them, were otherwise prepared to leave you in your emotional hole. No other prime minister would have survived going missing for that long. But with my help, you were able to.”

“It’s bull crap,” Mr Beazley says in the book. “It’s such a million miles from the truth … I don’t in any way belittle Paul’s contribution, it was substantial. (But) Paul tends to forget quite a bit.”

Entrepreneur John Singleton doesn’t mince words in praising his long-time friend’s dignity in political defeat. “No quivering of the bottom lip like that wuss ­(Malcolm) Fraser,” he says. “No self-important speeches like with Gough (Whitlam) and these other c..ts. F..king cop it on the chin and move on.”