Wednesdays with Bob

by Derek Rielly

  Tell me about the report you prepared for Hawke in 1989, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy. When it came out it was viewed as so radical you were threatened with an unpleasant death by neo-Nazis, and branches of BankWest, of which you were the chairman, were daubed in white supremacist graffiti.

  ‘It was the first policy-related document in Australia ever to talk about Australia having complete free trade. I talked about large-scale migration from China being a normal part of our story. No one had talked about it quite like that before and I got some negative reactions.’

  It’s not an exaggeration to say the report defined the final couple of years of the Hawke government. Are we still benefitting from those reforms?

  ‘Bob ceased to be prime minister at the end of 1991, just after the recovery got underway. We haven’t had a recession since then. We’re the only country in the developed world that hasn’t had a recession since then. And I think the reforms were pretty important to that. The decade after his prime ministership we went through the longest period of productivity growth in Australian history. We were top of the OECD of developed countries in productive growth and economic performance for the next decade, and we’d been down the bottom for the ninety years before that. [But] we’ve gradually lost the benefits of that period. We’re not doing as well now.’

  Why not?

  ‘I call it the Great Australian Complacency of the Early Twenty-First Century.’

  How do Hawke’s four terms in office over eight years compare to Howard’s five terms over eleven?

  ‘Well, the period of the Hawke government was notable for structural reform, setting up Australia for the future. Now the early years of the Howard government, he continued some of that but gradually lost momentum, and since 2001 we haven’t had any lasting productivity raising reform. The Reform Era came to an end, really.’ Garnaut sounds wistful. ‘And we entered the Great Australian Complacency of the Early Twenty-First Century, where vested interests gradually established dominance over policy. Governments were less and less inclined to make decisions in the public interest. They responded more and more to short-term political pressures. Through the twenty-first century, we’ve seen a gradual wearing away of that period of great dynamism and government in the public interest. We still retain a lot of the benefits of that period, we’re still a much more dynamic and flexible society than we were and would’ve been, but it’s no longer a political system capable of addressing hard questions – and, when changes need to be made, doing them, and making them stick. That’s the big difference now. And if we compare Hawke with the Howard period, we lost that capacity during the Howard period. I roughly date the turning point as the beginning of the twenty-first century.’

  Do you share Hawke’s enthusiasm for making Australia a repository for the world’s nuclear waste?

  ‘I don’t share it as a passion,’ he says. ‘But Bob’s right. For densely populated countries like China or India, where it’s not so easy to have a lot of renewable energy, [where they] don’t have the huge open spaces we have here, the role of nuclear is potentially very important in climate change mitigation. If you think that nuclear has a role for all those reasons, then helping them do that is valuable. Australia does have the geology to support that.’

  Garnaut might be down for hitting climate change in the guts, but he’s been in the game long enough to know it’s a hell of a sell, even for a master salesman like Hawke.

  ‘It’ll be a lonely crusade,’ says Garnaut. ‘[South Australian premier] Jay Weatherill tried to put that forward and found it a heavy road to hoe.’

  This isn’t an exaggeration. Weatherill created a ‘citizens’ jury’ of 350 South Australians to consider opening their state to the storage of nuclear waste. An overwhelming two-thirds majority rejected the idea of receiving 138,000 tonnes of used fuel over seventy years, despite the vast employment opportunities and a $51 billion windfall for the state. Memories of Chernobyl might have started to fade, but then Fukushima had come along to keep alive the nightmarish scenario of a nuclear disaster.

  Longshots aside, and even if Hawke fails to get it across the line during his lifetime, Garnaut repeats what he told me at the beginning. Hawke was Australia’s greatest prime minister.

  ‘He showed us we could make our democracy in a way that worked for all Australians.’

  — CHAPTER 20 —

  BLANCHE

  IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1978, ACTU PRESIDENT BOB Hawke, who had just turned forty-nine years old and was married to Hazel Masterson, requested the hand in marriage of the award-winning writer Ms Blanche d’Alpuget, thirty-four and married to Tony Pratt.

  Inside an unlovely Canberra motel, the sort characteristic of the clandestine affair, Hawke leaned his head on the unplastered wall and said that he was unhappy at home, and had had a dream the night before that convinced him he should leave his wife.

  The dream involved another lover – a gorgeous, rich Swiss blonde nicknamed Paradiso. And although Blanche was prone to jealousy when it came to Hawke’s affairs (‘Jealousy is one of the most terrible corrosive emotions. It really is misery-causing,’ says Blanche), the pair could talk openly about Paradiso because she lived in Europe.

  ‘Theirs was a very romantic relationship because she was married to this really rich and much older guy and Bob had the hots for her but didn’t think he’d get anywhere. And he invited her back to his hotel and suddenly she just put her arms around him,’ says Blanche, who lunched with Paradiso two years later while in Europe researching Robert J. Hawke, the book that would help propel Hawke into the ALP leadership.

  ‘We got on very well. She had a huge seventeenth-century house and invited me to stay next time I came to Switzerland. There was a strong sisterly feeling between us. I loved that she read [German poet] Schiller to Bob.’

  In Hawke’s dream, the roulette wheel had spun and the ball landed on Blanche. It meant he had to marry her – whatever the cost.

  ‘He realised that for both of us it was a huge step,’ says Blanche. ‘Louis was six and his kids were teenagers and already very troubled. Their parents’ bad marriage had made life very difficult for those children. But more than anything, being the children of a rock star…’

  Was tough?

  ‘Terrible – terrible! You just can’t get away from being in the shadow of the giant.’

  What were your feeling towards Hazel, then Hawke’s wife of twenty years? Did she enter your thoughts at all?

  ‘I didn’t have any because he never talked about it, which I really appreciate. Neither of us ever talked about our spouses to each other. We would have both considered that dishonourable. I had no idea what she was like. She had no public profile.’

  Blanche, whose own eleven-year marriage was ‘cactus’ (‘Usual story, hanging in there for the kids’), told Hawke she’d think about the offer over the two-month Christmas break, when family commitments meant pressing pause on the affair.

  How did Hawke react when he offered Blanche the keys to his kingdom and everything within it and she said maybe?

  ‘Well,’ Blanche says – three decades older and still the most beautiful gal in most rooms – ‘Bob was so drunk that if it was put before a jury he would’ve got off. In the sober light of day he was probably relieved.’

  Blanche wallops the air with laughter then pauses to reapply her lipstick (the appropriately named ‘Pink Dragon’ by Estée Lauder).

  While Blanche gussies up, slide onto the leather banquette of this Japanese restaurant so we can inspect the old broad a little closer. How does she look in the autumn of 2017?

  Ageing is tedious and difficult, of course, but Blanche has trod an elegant middle road between carpet bombing her face and whatever else with surgery and toxins and allowing the years to pass relatively gracefully. Her own mother, she says, looked twenty years younger her whole life until she hit eighty when, suddenly, she looked eighty. Blanche presumes the same thing will happen to her. For the moment, though, in a tight-fi
tting blouse with detachable cravat and pale blue pants (part of a suit), with Bally heels, pearl earrings, wide blue eyes, pink lips and glossy yellow hair, she is a flamboyant locomotive billowing a teenage energy.

  When the final touches of paint have been applied, I ask a damn stupid question.

  ‘How many men have told you they loved you?’

  Blanche is startled. You might as well try and count the stars in the sky.

  She thinks about it, shakes her head, and answers with a starting point rather than a number.

  ‘Since I was twelve,’ she says, and tells me about her neighbour – a fifty-four-year-old district court judge notorious for the harsh sentences he gave sex offenders – who turned a stolen kiss into a two-year love affair.

  After an initial encounter at her front door one afternoon, the judge would walk Blanche home from school and kiss her madly behind the cover of trees. She’d follow him into his kitchen while his wife entertained guests with their new television set and fall into his arms. The pair would drive in his glamorous Rover to secluded parts of Sydney, where he’d negotiate her school uniform and stroke her.

  ‘I was in no danger of losing my virginity,’ says Blanche. ‘I was too young at the time to know what an erection was, but years later realised he was impotent. I’ve wondered since if “inappropriate touching” by older men is perhaps due to impotence, to their yearning to regain potency by contact with vital, young flesh.’

  Initially Blanche adored the thrill of these secret meetings, but the affair fizzled out when Blanche began to see her lover as a desperate old man. It reached its nadir when Blanche visited the judge in his chambers, long after the affair had ended. He fell to his knees and thrust his hands between her legs. Instead of feeling desire, she suddenly saw a ‘silly old goat in a white horsehair wig’.

  Despite the fact she was well below the age of consent during the affair, Blanche doesn’t consider herself a victim. But when she wrote about it in an essay called ‘Lust’, which appeared in Ross Fitzgerald’s 1993 compendium The Eleven Deadly Sins, she was ‘publicly caned for it. One man wrote a polite note saying he thought it an impossible piece of imagination: no member of the judiciary would do such a thing. Ha!’

  In 1961, aged seventeen, Blanche ran away to Melbourne with LS, an illegal Polish immigrant, ‘a wild man from Warsaw, a defector, escapee from Stalinism, writer, drinker of vodka, dancer of Cossack dances (when drunk), speaker of outlandishly-fractured English, an enchanted being.’ That affair ended when her parents called in the police and had her lover handcuffed and dragged away. Blanche’s father, the swashbuckling yachting journalist Louis d’Alpuget, told her the cops had shown LS a pistol that had been used in a recent armed robbery. ‘Go near the girl again and your fingerprints are on it,’ they said. LS fled to San Francisco. Blanche never saw him again.

  Nine years later, Bob Hawke walked into her life.

  The lovers met in 1970 at a party for expats in Jakarta, where Blanche was living with her first husband, Tony Pratt. The pair sat together in a swinging chair and spoke intently about trade unionism, geopolitics and the state of Indonesia while the party swirled around them.

  Blanche’s immediate impression was of a man who was ‘physically nothing special’ but ‘so clearly a man of very forceful courage and character. He made a great impression on me psychologically. He was interested in everything. I knew a lot and he was really interested in what I had to say.’ Afterwards, Blanche wrote a letter to her mother about a ‘fabulously exciting’ man she’d just met called ‘Robin’ Hawke, someone with this ‘great big energy field’.

  Blanche points out that at this point she was ‘really’ in love with her husband and that she wasn’t looking at other men.

  Still, this was the swinging seventies, when the pill promised absolute freedom long before the death sentence guaranteed by AIDS. Blanche writes, ‘I had had many lovers, had been in love often and had once cried over a man. I loved my husband, whom I’d met when I was seventeen, and felt fiercely loyal to him. In the decade that we journeyed together we had both taken side trips, but we were mindful of each other’s feelings, and discreet.’ But nothing happened with Hawke.

  The following year, again in Jakarta, as another boozy party of expats raged with debate over the Vietnam War, Hawke found Blanche and announced (perhaps too loudly given his fourteen-year-old daughter Sue was in earshot), ‘I’d like to make love to you.’

  ‘He was very drunk,’ says Blanche.

  Four years passed before Blanche saw Hawke again. She was researching Mediator, her biography of Sir Richard Kirby, the longest-serving president of the Australian Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Hawke, as advocate for the ACTU, had appeared innumerable times before Kirby, so she requested an interview.

  Was she nervous, was she excited, about seeing Hawke again?

  ‘I was very nervous and very excited.’

  The pair met in Melbourne, at Hawke’s ACTU office. At the conclusion of the first interview he invited Blanche to lunch at the pub next door where ‘with mutual, wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible – which happened to be in a different city the following night.’

  It wasn’t an all-nighter and Blanche, whose son Louis was four years old, regarded the liaison as one of her occasional side trips. Soon, though, the one-off turned into a semi-regular affair. They met every three weeks to a month, whenever they happened to be in the same city. In the interim, there were no phone calls, no contact.

  ‘I knew he had a lot of interests,’ says Blanche.

  How did you know?

  ‘Partly intuition, partly gossip. It built up bit by bit until, finally, the penny dropped. It’s not something that you particularly want to face about your lover. The evidence accumulated, so I had to accept it. I wasn’t going to let it carry me away until he got very serious, which was in ’78, so that was eighteen months into the relationship.’

  Were you consumed by thoughts of Hawke in bed with other gals?

  ‘I didn’t ever imagine what he would be doing with them. I always had the intuition that of all the women I was his favourite. I had nothing to base that on other than intuition. And maybe wishful thinking.’

  When did you tell your husband about Hawke?

  ‘By 1978 I’d told him, and he was terribly angered, very, very angered and jealous.’

  Well, I say, it is a damn hard thing for a man to take. His wife shacking up with the most popular man in Australia. A master swordsman whom even the prime minister’s wife, Tamie Fraser, admitted to finding sexy.

  ‘Even the Queen did!’ purrs Blanche.

  How do you know?

  ‘The way she treated him. She likes men…’

  When did you confess to each other that it was love?

  ‘He started telling me fairly early on…’

  How early?

  ‘Probably ’76.’

  Was it pillow talk? Dinner talk?

  ‘Both. In his case pillow talk. In my case dinner talk. In a Canberra restaurant one night, I told him I’d die for him.’

  I ask her to describe Hawke on the booze. Was it a gradual progression from life of the party and dazzling conversationalist to mean drunk?

  ‘You’ve got to remember,’ says Blanche, ‘our relationship was clandestine. I’d just see him when he had too much to drink. I’d see him drink too much and then become paranoid. That was the really difficult thing.’

  Was he paranoid of being caught?

  ‘No! Paranoid about everybody! Everything! Which comes out of guilt. He was even paranoid once, I remember, about me. That I might be some sort of spy or something.’

  One of Malcolm Fraser’s famous harem of spies?

  ‘Yeah, for the government. Had he not been a bad drunk, had he not been a nasty drunk, he could’ve gone on drinking. Except he wouldn’t have done his job very well. But he always maintains he wasn’t an alcoholic. I think he was an alcoholic. But he had that en
ormous and strong determination to go dry.’

  When you say bad drunk, do you refer to the sort who calls the ALP leader Bill Hayden a ‘lying cunt with a limited future’?

  ‘Well, that’s a good example. Some people get cute and cuddly and funny when they’re drunk. He used to get sour and bitter. And, really, he was self-hating when he got drunk.’

  Because of the weight of his affairs?

  ‘Because his mother, who was the most important person in his development, made him promise at the age of eight that he would never drink alcohol. And he’d been brought up with this thing, the demon drink. You must never drink! And so he had a very guilty conscience.’

  You’ve described Bob as being not the kind of man to leave by himself in a different city for long. The very nature of his work meant that he’d often be in different cities. How did that affect your relationship?

  ‘It didn’t. I was writing,’ says Blanche. ‘The thing that made me very nervous when he wanted to marry me was that I hadn’t had my first novel published. I thought, He’s just going to eat me up and this life that he leads is going to eat me up and I’ll never get my career going. When you’re writing fiction, or non-fiction for that matter, you are so obsessed, so terrifically obsessed with it, that virtually everything else is secondary. There has to be an absolute family crisis to take your mind off that. His being in different cities was a relief. I didn’t want to see him more often than I was.’

  But your world changed when Hawke proposed.

  ‘Yes, because it brought to the fore something that I’d been avoiding for a hell of a long time and that was the problems in my own marriage … And I took advice from this very old friend of mine, a shrink, and with him worked out that it wasn’t that I wanted to go with Bob; I didn’t. I wanted to leave Tony.’