Wednesdays with Bob

by Derek Rielly

  At a black-tie dinner party, Hawke tugged Singo by the sleeve of his dinner jacket.

  ‘Unbelievable! Imagine this happening,’ says Singo. ‘He said, “Listen, mate, these polls, all the advertising, all the advice in there is all shit.” He said, “You’re the only one that knows this business, and I’ve got a deal for you. If I get you to handle the campaign, with all the differences we have philosophically, you have to be on my side. You have to sell my point of view and you have to promise never to dud me … ever.” I said, “Mate, I’d love to. I agree with everything you say, mate. You’re a genius, I’m a mug, but I will never ever dud ya.” And we shook hands, we went on with the dinner party.’

  Hawke, says Singo, had come to realise ‘that I was at least straight arrow. I wasn’t going to bullshit I agreed with all their policies. As if, you know? I said, “Mate, I’ll bloody get other people to think it’s good just as long as you realise I don’t. I’m not here to be brainwashed. I’m here to brainwash other people.’”

  The socialist left were apoplectic.

  ‘The next day he announced to the cabinet that I’d taken over. He had the mass walkout and resignations… They were all up in arms. “You can’t do this, you can’t do that. You never know what he’s going to do next.” And Hawke said, “He’s given me his word, that’s it. And if you want to resign, good. Please yourself.’”

  The campaign was classic Singo. It included the TV spot with the quickly immortalised Whingeing Wendy, an actor playing a suburban housewife. We find Wendy in her kitchen, facing the camera and delivering a monologue to wannabe prime minister John Howard in the broadest Australian accent:

  ‘Mr Howard, me and my family would like to ask you some rool simple questions, like about your free-money-for-nothing promises. Where is your eight-billion-dollar tax cut money roolly coming from? Will you cut home nursing? Will you cut out two million Meals on Wheels?’

  Coupled with the feel-good jingle, ‘Let’s Stick Together’, ‘We clawed back, we jumped back, raced back,’ says Singo. ‘I remember down at the Hyatt in Melbourne the night when the results were there. I was sitting in a room with Clem, Bob’s dad… Then the early polls come through from Vaucluse – box one or something ridiculous – and John Elliot… declared John [Howard] the new prime minister… And I’m just with Bob’s dad, who’s teary deary. He’s old, and he’s pretty emotional about his son getting flogged. I’m saying whatever reassuring words I can come up with at the time: “Don’t believe everything you read on the TV.” Then Hawkey comes and I say, “Hey, you better come sit with your dad. He’s pretty upset.’”

  ‘“Ah, that’s a lot of bullshit!” says Hawke.

  ‘Him and Richo, mate, they could read the polls. They would know hours before the media. Between Richo and Hawkey and [Bob] McMullan, they knew that we were going to shit in and so while the [television stations] were announcing the Liberals, they were quietly celebrating their victory.’

  Even when NSW Labor was buried in the 1988 landslide to Nick Greiner’s Liberals, Hawke had Singo’s back, calling to reassure him it wasn’t the fault of his agency.

  ‘He said, “Just want you to know that was a fuck-up, that campaign, and it wasn’t your fuck-up. We’re working together as long as I’m prime minister, right?”

  ‘“Right.”

  “‘So get that sad look off your face.”

  ‘I said, “I haven’t got a sad look on my face.”

  “‘Bullshit! You will have. You’ll be blaming yourself. Not your fault. Let’s get set down and stuck into this fucking Peacock now. I’m going to carve him up.”

  ‘That was a nice thing, he didn’t have to do that,’ says Singo. ‘Mate, he’s just been a treasure.’

  Tell me about women around Hawke.

  ‘Wandering around with him before and after he was prime minister, he’s like the Beatles. They want to touch him, have a piece of him. He was a freak show. Walked into a public bar at El Rancho at Epping one night when his driver was Graham Richardson, the later Minister for Health. A hanger-onerer was Bill Hayden, later governor-general. We were having a few schooners after a TV show and the birds all came from everywhere. This is a trade union leader. He had a charisma that was unbelievable, mate.’

  Can you explain that effect he had on women?

  ‘No I can’t, because I often thought about it. There I am and they’re all crowding around him. I was young, long blond hair. He had that bloody hair of his and that terrible ocker voice, more than I did. They were all going for him… I was just picking up the scraps.’

  And his ability to drink? Is the reputation warranted?

  ‘He drank like a twenty-stone bloke,’ says Singo. ‘A glass of beer was a glass of beer – you drink it then you have another one. I’m a fast drinker, but not in his class. He was world-class. But he would never become maudlin or reflective, as if he’d disciplined himself to become more intellectual. His embrace of general knowledge, world knowledge, currency exchanges, trade – and then straight on to the fifth at Canterbury. With equal enthusiasm. He’s only ever been touched on the other side of politics by Alan Jones. Totally different person, absolutely nothing in common, except they both know everything about everything. Mate, there’ll never be another Hawkey. He was just fabulous.’

  Sometimes, says Singo, Hawke’d call him up and talk ‘about nothing, because his mind was full of UNESCO and bloody NATO and all that other shit and pretending we had a defence force and having to suck up to America who’d made mistake after mistake. What were we supposed to do? Depend on these submarines now? Never been built, never going to be built. It’s always been a joke. So you’ve got to agree with America, no matter how dopey they are. And he’d just say, “Mate, why don’t you come over, we’ll just discuss fishing in Persia or something.”

  ‘I was someone he knew he could turn to despite our differences. He used to say, “Do you really believe that what we’re doing’s wrong?” I’d say, “Yeah, because I think this, and this, and this. But if you can’t get into office you can’t do any fucking thing. At least when you’re in office you can do something, so I’d rather be on your side…’”

  How do you compare Hawke as prime minister to Australia’s current leader, the thoroughly honourable Malcolm Turnbull?

  ‘One was the prime minister, the other is a debate about what he’s doing there and how long he is going to be there.’

  For Hawke’s seventieth birthday in 1999, Singo gifted his pal a quarter-share in Belle du Jour, a horse he’d bought on the Gold Coast for $200,000 earlier in the year. The filly would win millions, including a ‘freakish’ win at the 2000 Golden Slipper.

  ‘I wouldn’t have given it to him if I knew how much he was going to fucking make,’ says Singo. ‘I didn’t realise it was his seventieth birthday. If I went to your birthday I’d no more think of buying you a present than fly to the moon. You might take a leg of lamb if you’re a butcher or something, or because you’re walking past a butcher shop. Or when I owned a brewery, you might say, “Look, I’ll supply the keg.” But I haven’t bought anyone a present – sisters, brothers, fucking friends.’

  Uncharacteristically, however, Singo opened his mouth and told Hawke he was now the part-owner in one of his horses. Later in the night, Hawke asked for its name. Singo picked one out of his head. Belle du Jour. Other part-owners included the veterinarian Gerry Rose and his wife Helen.

  ‘And Gerry Rose fucking hates the Labor Party!’ booms Singo. ‘His wife even more so! I said [to myself], “Well, look, I’ve already done it, I can’t say take another one.” Mind you, his opinion was whichever one I gave him would have won. He’s that self-confident … cunt. Anyway, they [Hawke and the Roses] get on great!’

  If one of his horses has a real shot at winning, Singo always places a bet equal to fifth-place prize money. At the Golden Slipper in 2000 it was a hundred grand for fifth. Belle du Jour was ten-to-one to win. That meant a million for a win which, as Singo helpfully points out, is ‘a lot
of money. Sixteen years ago, even more money.’

  Singo told his partners they had around 250 K in winnings to date locked away. Did they want to share the $100,000 bet? ‘I don’t care. I’m happy with it all,’ Singo said. ‘But we do have the money in the bank.’

  To seal it, he tells ’em, ‘By the way, [trainer] Clarry [Conners] said first five for sure, unless something goes wrong. But we do have the money in the bank.’

  Gerry says, ‘Yeah, I’m in.’

  Blanche turns to Bob: ‘Well, we didn’t have it in the first place – why don’t we? Make a day of it, yeah? It’s not going to cost anything, it’s already in the bank.’

  Famously, the horse misses the start. Rears. Almost tosses jockey Lenny Beasley. Belted by nerves, Singo and Bob go to watch the race from the restaurant rather than the owners’ room.

  Bob says, ‘That’s not our horse is it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Bob: ‘Can’t win from there, can it?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless,’ remembers Singo.

  And then, on the home straight, as if guided by a divine hand, the pack parts and Belle du Jour rides straight through and wins by a nose.

  ‘Shits it in,’ says Singo.

  The three men are so aroused by the joy, by the disbelief, by the thought of a million bucks swinging into their joint bank account, ‘everyone thought Hawkey was on the piss again. They thought I was absolutely out of my tree on grog,’ says Singo. ‘It looked like three drunks dragged out of a pub after a race win. It hadn’t helped that Gerry Rose had put these hats on us back to front. Someone described it as I looked like a cross between Lleyton Hewitt and Dorian Gray. I had my hair cut short ever since. I used to have long blond hair, but long … Fuck it looked terrible. Then I shouted the whole pub. But not the members. Fuck the members.’

  The public bar is still named Belle du Jour in honour of Singo’s hour-long spree.

  ‘It was fucking unbelievable,’ says Singo. ‘Bob finished up from that horse probably winning one and a half million tax free.’

  Does he ever wish he’d bought Bob a tie instead?

  ‘I could have bought the very best tie,’ says Singo wistfully, though when I mention that it’s Hawke’s eighty-seventh birthday in two days’ time, and that if Singo could slip him another quarter-share it might reignite their old luck, he smiles.

  ‘I bought a horse called Big Brown which fucked up all my mares. I had twelve very good years and then two bad ones, but I’ll have a good year this year. I might do that.’

  Whatever happens, the friendship isn’t going anywhere.

  ‘I’m not a suck. I’ve never sucked up to him. I’ve never sucked up to any cunt, but I said, “I really think, mate, you’re doing great. And I like going out with ya in public because I feel like I’m the drummer in the rock band.”’

  Pointedly, ‘I never got a favour off him in my fucking life. I didn’t get any fucking thing, you know.’

  Except.

  ‘Except a great friendship. Which will do.’

  — CHAPTER 11 —

  ENDING APARTHEID

  THAT WHOLE THING ABOUT NOT REMEMBERING THE sixties because they were so damn fun?

  Everyone remembers the gloomy 1980s.

  Interesting sex was a death sentence, jobs didn’t exist and the planet teetered on the precipice of catastrophic nuclear war as the dying Soviet Empire bankrupted itself trying to match, ICBM for ICBM, an America emboldened by its hard-line, former-actor president.

  At school we practised scrambling under our desks if we heard the siren to indicate an atomic bomb had been dropped. At home, I examined nuclear shelter catalogues I found in my dad’s briefcase.

  Television forgot, briefly, its obsession with Holocaust porn and turned its lazy eye to end-of-the-world themes.

  Much worse was a radio awash in anti-apartheid songs. Peter Gabriel lamented the arrest, torture and death of activist Steve Biko at the hands of South Africa’s security services.

  Multi-racial ska band The Specials wanted to ‘Free Nelson Mandela’!

  In New York, a collective of righteous superstars, including Bono, Peter Garrett and Lou Reed, formed Artists United Against Apartheid and released the single ‘Sun City’, jerking around to an off-beat rhythm and vowing never to play the South African resort of the same name. Such beautiful, pointless sentiments, and as effective as posting a Free Tibet sticker on your car and expecting a monumental shift in Chinese foreign policy (Elton John and Queen happily played Sun City). What you’d call virtue-signalling in our current epoch. Hit the Share button on Facebook and watch the Likes climb.

  What the world needed, and what it eventually got, was the prime minister of a small Pacific country who was determined to skewer South Africa’s rotten regime. A man who’d been drilled in the absolute certainty of the Brotherhood of Man. A leader who would shuck diplomatic niceties and mobilise banks to squash what he describes as an ‘absolutely repulsive, unacceptable doctrine’.

  Hawke had form on apartheid.

  ‘I was conscious of apartheid very early and hated it,’ he says. ‘Seeing people discriminated against simply on the basis of their colour and not having the right, full rights of citizens of their nation, was against everything that I learned at my father’s knee and that had been imbued in me. Then it became a real issue when the Springbok tour came and I led the fight against it. We mobilised not just the trade unions, but a wide range of people in Australia. We significantly disrupted the tour.’

  In 1971, South Africa’s Springbok rugby team had banned two non-white players from joining their tour to Australia. ACTU president Hawke responded by saying South Africa should be barred from international sport and foreshadowed union bans should the tour go ahead.

  Hawke wrote to the South African prime minister, B. J. Vorster – who as the Minister for Justice had helped bang Mandela away for life in 1964 – requesting a non-discriminatory team be chosen for the Australian tour.

  The request was rejected.

  Therefore, said Hawke, union action was inevitable.

  In Australia, the panic button was punched. Newspapers complained in editorials and front-page stories that the unions, under the spell of their Svengali master, ran the country. How did that sit with Hawke?

  ‘If you allowed yourself to be dictated to by what the press thought it’d be a different country to what you have now,’ he says. ‘People knew that as far as Hawke was concerned there was no room for compromise.’

  Labor shrieked and distanced itself from Hawke and the ACTU.

  ‘They had some concerns,’ Hawke concedes.

  The McMahon government?

  Well …

  Hawke coughs. The eyebrows ramp north. He eyeballs me as if to say, You really need me to articulate anything about Billy McMahon’s sorry reign?

  I do.

  ‘The McMahon government was absolutely hopeless,’ Hawke obliges. ‘They had no concept of the enormity of what apartheid meant. That was why non-government acts were so important. That the world would know that within Australia there was a significant strong feeling of repulsion about this policy. And that we wanted to do what we could to bring the attention of the world to how unacceptable this was.’

  Not all the unions followed the ACTU’s lead.

  In Western Australia the Transport Workers Union fuelled the Springboks’ plane and shifted their bags. In Melbourne, two workers stood in front of Hawke and burned their union cards. The government said it would bring in the RAAF if any other branches of the TWU sided with the ACTU. Hawke said the ACTU would ruin South African Airways if it flew the team into Australia.

  Public opinion was divided, both sides equally passionate.

  Hawke’s mother Ellie received a call asking, ‘Why didn’t you strangle him at birth?’

  Another caller told her she’d given birth to a ‘monster’.

  Packages filled with shit were sent to Hawke’s Melbourne home. His kids were te
ased at school. Hawke’s youngest daughter Rosslyn was forced to watch ‘while a group of children symbolically killed Hawke by grinding his photographs into a paste’.

  ‘It wasn’t pleasant, but nothing was going to divert me,’ says Hawke.

  Did you speak about it as a family?

  ‘Oh yes. They didn’t need persuading. They were completely supportive of me and didn’t want me to give in. There was a lot of nastiness even among my own movement, because within the trade unions we had people with racist tendencies. It was my job to lead and show that they were wrong. And that it was not only wrong as far as individuals were concerned but as far as Australia was concerned – that it was a mark against our country if we were, in any way, directly or indirectly, to tolerate that sort of policy. We had an obligation to do everything we could.’

  Were you surprised by the depth of feeling on both sides?

  ‘I knew that there was a racist element within Australia. It would be foolish to be surprised by that; there’s been enough evidence of it. But that’s what the essence of leadership is. You’re aware of these things and you’ve got to set an example and try and persuade people that they’re not right.’

  On a flight to Europe, bound for Israel for an International Labour Organization conference, a person unknown phoned in a bomb threat to Hawke’s plane. The bird turned around and landed back in Perth. After it was cleared to fly and had reached its cruising altitude, the captain left the cockpit to talk to Hawke – specifically, to tell his famous passenger that he was ‘less than enthusiastic’ about the event and, ‘By the way, Mr Hawke, it may interest you to know that I am Rhodesian.’

  ‘He was not too happy,’ says Hawke. ‘But I made clear what my position was.’

  In Queensland, premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency. The old crook even brokered a secret deal with police to handle the expected anti-apartheid protests. And if in the heat of the moment they roughed up the protesters? Joh promised that zealous police wouldn’t be penalised for any action they took to suppress the protests.