Wednesdays with Bob

by Derek Rielly

  Have you spoken to him about it?

  ‘I didn’t speak to him directly. I spoke at length to his secretary. She took lots of notes and called me back and said, “Paul said, thank you very much.” I think he’s tried everything and has given up. And it’s basically ruined his life. You can’t enjoy life in a normal way. He can’t leave the house without little earbuds because outside noise is so abhorrent.’

  In the same book that angered Paul, you write about him being beautiful. Now, if someone emphasised my beauty in a book I’d forgive a multitude of sins.

  ‘He was beautiful. And he had the most beautiful eyes. And elegant. And a knife fighter.’

  Tell me about killing Bob if he were ever to ‘lose his marbles’. What’s your arrangement?

  ‘None,’ says Blanche flatly. ‘I said to him, “Listen, unless euthanasia is legalised I’m not going to jail as a murderess.’”

  Do you talk to him, coach him, in any spiritual training for the day of death?

  ‘We talk about it from time to time, and I remember years ago he said to me, “I’m going to be no trouble. I’ll be like my dad. I’ll go easily.” I hope that’s true. And the great thing is, since you started interviewing him, the nerves in his feet are growing back. It’s a slow process but he’s walking so much better than he was before. He’s standing up straighter, his whole body is… returning.’

  Do you ever imagine life without him?

  ‘I’d be stupid if I didn’t. I’d be unrealistic if I didn’t.’

  Allow me a final question, perhaps the most important question of all. What’s the secret to taming a great and prolific lover like Hawke?

  ‘Love.’

  Long pause.

  ‘Truly, it’s love.’

  — CHAPTER 21 —

  TAPPING A KEG

  THE TWO THIRTY-SOMETHING AD AGENCY MEN, AUSTRALIANS who’d flown to Sydney from New York, where they now worked, arrived at Hawke’s house in April 2016 with a business proposal.

  Being ad guys, when they recall the meeting they say things like, ‘We were really buttoned-up,’ which means they were prepared, and they’d already sent a ‘snapshot’ of the idea to Hawke and his various people.

  The men, David Gibson and Nathan Lennon, had decided to leave the ad business and start their own brewing company, and they wanted to name it Hawke’s Brewing Co.

  They’d landed on the name fifteen months earlier. It was Australia Day back home and Nathan, who’s from Bondi Beach and suffers terrible homesickness, was looking through the glass wall of his office and across the gloomy East River to Brooklyn. Weather forecasters were predicting New York’s worst-ever blizzard. ‘Snowmageddon 2015’, they called it.

  Nathan and Dave knew that back home all their buddies would be on the beach, playing cricket, draining their eskies of delicious cold beers, the sun drying the saltwater on their backs.

  Nathan looked at Dave and said, ‘Mate, if you could have a beer with anyone right now, who would it be?’

  Nathan calls himself a ‘fan-boy’ of Hawke but kept his dream drinking buddy to himself. He expected Dave would name one of their mates.

  Instead, Dave turns around says, ‘Hawkey! Mate. Who else?’

  The pair started talking about how much they adored the former prime minister, how he defined their early lives and how he ‘transcended politics to connect with everyone’. As commercial ad men, they marvelled at the terrific ‘reach’ he still has.

  The conversation stretched into the idea of launching the little brewing company they’d been thinking about under the banner ‘Hawke’s Brewing Co’. The pair had just worked on the repositioning of a Nabisco subsidiary, the cracker brand Honey Maid. The two creative directors had helped reshape the brand as the cracker for the diverse family – the interracial, gay, tattooed rock family. It didn’t matter how you got your kicks, Honey Maid was ready to sell you a box of wholesome crackers. What if they could give Hawke’s Brewing Co. a similar socially conscious and feel-good backstory, this time with Australia’s most popular prime minister?

  They prepared their ‘snapshot’. Sent it away. Hawke read it. Liked it.

  So Hawke knew what was coming. A brewery. His name on it. But he wanted to feel them out. See if they were the kind of men he could do business with or have his name associated with.

  Hawke received Nathan, Dave and a third partner from Australia, Luke Langton, at the dining table that adjoins the kitchen. It was 11 am, which is early for Hawke, who’s done enough to warrant the pleasures of sleeping in until whenever the hell he wants, at least until the sun climbs over Seaforth and is soaking his north-facing bed in sunlight. Ever since his chest was sliced open and a pacemaker plugged in a few years ago, Hawke will sleep for at least ten hours, sometimes fifteen, a night.

  As he takes his breakfast of black cherries, blueberries, pine nuts and milk, Hawke examines four newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, the Australian Financial Review and the Daily Telegraph (or Terrorgraf, as Blanche calls it). The AFR is his favourite, but there’s no point in being blind to alternative perspectives.

  When the men arrive Hawke sweeps the table clear. Asks them what the deal is.

  The trio – making the ‘biggest pitch of our lives’ – went into their spiel: brand positioning, brand pillars and so on.

  Hawke already had his answer. If they could shovel his fee into Landcare, the volunteer organisation that had brought farmers and conservationists together a quarter of a century earlier and which he’d helped create, why not?

  His suitors presented their master with a gift-wrapped box to celebrate.

  ‘Cigars?’ asked Hawke.

  ‘Cubans.’

  ‘You bloody beauty!’ he whooped.

  Hawke then told them to check out the house, stuffing all three into the tiny travelator that rattles down the side of the house and removes the need to negotiate the winding path through tropical jungle and down to Louis’ boatshed.

  They visited the games room with the full-sized snooker table and framed photos on the walls. There is Neil Armstrong saluting the camera on the moon (‘To Prime Minister Bob Hawke, A memorable moment in history to be shared by all’). Hawke, dressed in Quiksilver and holding a surfboard, caught in an embrace with the world champion surfer Tom Carroll at Bondi Beach. Hawke and Alan Bond post-America’s Cup victory under a relief model of the famous Australia II hull and winged keel. Hawke belted in the face by a bouncer in 1984. An athletic Hawke playing tennis. Team photos of Hawke and various Prime Minister’s XI cricket teams.

  By the time they’d finished their tour, they found Hawke sunning himself on the terrace, one of the new cigars cracked.

  He told them to grab a seat, and then he hit them with an hour-and-a-half of golf and cricket jokes and ribald stories. It was Hawke at his finest, raked in sunlight, a plume of cigar smoke, an adoring audience.

  One year and two days later, the beer launches at a pub called The Clock in Sydney’s Surry Hills. It is one of eleven hotels that will have Hawke’s Brewing Co. on tap. (The Clock will sell out of its weekly, ten-keg allotment in twenty-four hours. Nathan and Dave deliver six more kegs, which run dry by the next day.)

  It is also sixty-eight years since Hawke, aged nineteen, had his first beer. He was so riven by guilt at the time, but also so thrilled by the elevating effect of beer, he told his mother that he had started to drink and that he wasn’t stopping. The conversation, he recalls, ‘wasn’t pleasant’. Ellie would pray every day that Bobby would eventually turn off the spigot.

  And it wasn’t as if he was born to drink. As one fellow student recalled, ‘After two glasses of beer he would be whacked or throwing up in a way I’ve never seen before – it was an incredible cacophony, you’d think the whole world, including his feet, was coming up. But Bob was determined to improve as a drinker, as he was determined to improve at everything he did.’

  But now, on 6 April 2017, at precisely 3.15 pm as per the press release, the veteran drinker
Bob Hawke suddenly appears from around a corner. He is led to a tap and expertly draws the first Hawke’s Brewing Co. schooner.

  ‘How’s that for a pour! A lovely beer,’ he says.

  Someone yells for Hawke to neck the beer in one go. He declines.

  Hawke only drinks red wine these days, unless he’s at the cricket or a golf club and the legend needs reinforcement. He wets his beak and points the schooner at the cameras, to a blizzard of flashes.

  Hawke places the beer down on the drip tray and is handed a microphone. The old master, nearly ninety, plays to the crowd.

  ‘One of the great challenges facing us is global warming,’ he begins, voice an ominous dark bass. ‘I’ll do whatever I can through Landcare and other means to meet that challenge. But this is particularly exciting because it combines a couple of loves…’

  The crowd loosens. A few pre-emptive laughs. They know what’s coming.

  ‘I’ve been known to enjoy the odd beer.’

  The rooms laughs in unison.

  ‘And a quick one!’

  Now he’s hitting form.

  ‘The quickest ever!’

  Howls! Whoops!

  With the pack under his spell, he hands them the quandary of modern life.

  ‘But I also love this country and I love the opportunity that is very much in our hands,’ he says, mounting the pulpit. ‘We live at an absolutely unique point in human history. For the first time in recorded history, because of the flowering of the technological and scientific genius of mankind, we are at a point where we can do one of two things. One: we can lift the standard and quality of life of every human being on this planet. Or, two: we can destroy life on this planet as we know it. Those are the two awesome paths before us. And in our small way, our enterprise is concerned with helping us make the right choice… ’

  The journalists, the photographers and the friends – including Hawke’s stepson Louis, the Herculean trainer Ryan and his secretary, all of whom have seen the still-electric charisma before – are as captivated as a gang of twenty-something girls who’ve stumbled onto the event.

  ‘Now,’ says Hawke. ‘We’re going to be doing our best to ensure Australia and the world goes down that first path. And you can have a feeling of wellbeing as you sip your Hawke’s Lager, knowing that as you sip that Hawke’s Lager you’ll be making a contribution to the environment and to your country. Help your country and have a beer at the same time!’

  Another eruption of flashes. Cheers. Finger whistles. Drinking as a virtue!

  The following morning, Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph will front-page the event with the headline: FROM SILVER BODGIE TO SILVER TINNY.

  The Times in London leads with: HAWKE PULLS A PINT AND IT’S GOT HIS NAME ALL OVER IT.

  Landcare will estimate a reach of five million people through the PR surrounding the event, five times more than their next-most-successful launch with a corporate partner.

  The old master walks off the stage. Job nailed.

  — CHAPTER 22 —

  HAWKE ROARS AT DEATH …

  FOUR DAYS AFTER THE BEER LAUNCH, I’LL GIFT HAWKE a final cigar, a $39 Davidoff that the proprietor helpfully cut for me with a gold blade and secured in a clear plastic bag.

  ‘Went alright, didn’t it,’ says Hawke of an event splashed across every major newspaper in Australia, and enough abroad to confirm his universal appeal.

  I haven’t seen the old man look this pert or in this buoyant a mood since our interviews began ten months earlier. The virus that nearly took him out is long vanquished. The cold that had him in bed for a month has evaporated. Even the feet are threatening to kick back into life.

  It’s a good day. Windless. Late autumn. No clouds. The light bounces into Hawke’s brown face from the white table and the white chairs.

  It’s a sublime setting for our final interview – which, I announce theatrically, is centred around his relationship with Paul Keating and, if we have time (unlikely given the dazzling material I’ve mined from a recent bio of Keating), Hawke’s musings on dying, death and the hereafter.

  In November 2016, Paul Keating: The Big-Picture Leader, by political journalist Troy Bramston, was published. It’s the first time Keating has cooperated with a journalist on a biography. The book is a 786-page forensic examination of a political animal whom Bill Hayden described as ‘chilling’ in his ambition. The Australian, for whom Bramston works, describes it as a ‘hymn of praise to Keating’. I eat it up in a few days, so compelling, so cutting, are the references to Hawke.

  A few months earlier, we’d talked briefly about Keating when I threw Hawke the question about the prime minister receiving guests, including his cabinet, in the nude.

  ‘Absolutely untrue,’ he said. ‘It’s bullshit.’ He’d chortled and said, ‘I think it’s Paul trying to get one in.’

  Then he grew reflective. ‘I’ve told you many times, I genuinely feel sorry for Paul. You know, I genuinely do. It’s not just a confected statement. In the history of federal politics he was outstanding. He did so many good things that it’s a real pity he… Two things. One, that he’s such a hater. He just hates! And he just wants to claim a bit more than he’s entitled to.’

  This time, Hawke’s face drops when I mention the topic. I’ve been here enough to recognise a change in mood, however slight. A dark curtain rattles across the stage.

  ‘Hmmmmmm. Right.’

  I tell him I’ve read Paul Keating: The Big-Picture Leader. I found its references to you and your government compelling, I say.

  Hawke is silent.

  I have three pages of typed questions in front of me. The pages rustle awkwardly. The first question – about Keating leaning on journalist, and later premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr in 1978 to write damning stories about Hawke in the political weekly The Bulletin (‘Is Hawke Finished?’ and ‘Hawke Loses Ground Inside the Labor Party’) – isn’t going to fly while the door is closed. Instead, I start with breeze.

  When was the last time you spoke to Paul?

  ‘Aw… aw… a couple of months ago. He suffers very badly from tinnitus. It was really terrible for him. And Blanche has got it in recent time and we spoke to Paul and he was very, very helpful. I spoke to him then.’

  Would you describe your current relationship as cordial?

  ‘Yeah, he was very kind to me at the launch of the [2016 Labor election] campaign,’ says Hawke. ‘We obviously had our well-known differences, but I respect Paul greatly. He is without a doubt one of Australia’s greatest treasurers and what I really did admire about him was that he had no formal education in economics and he applied himself and learned quickly.’

  What were your primary differences?

  ‘The difference between Paul and myself was he loved parliament. I didn’t. I disliked parliament. I was used to appearing in the tribunal and the result of the hearing depended upon the quality of the argument. I won or lost the case on the basis of the argument. In the parliament, everything was decided in advance. Whoever was in government, they had the majority and they won. I could never get excited about parliament.’

  It feels like Hawke is warming a little. I ask about the Carr stories and Keating’s influence and ambition.

  ‘Ah, well, the New South Wales blokes told me. They made the decision to support me and that upset Paul,’ says Hawke. ‘But the important thing when talking about the Hawke–Keating relationship is not to emphasise the differences we had but that we were a magnificent team and we did great things for this country.’

  In 1982, Graham Richardson said, ‘[Keating] didn’t like Hawke and he didn’t like Hayden. He didn’t think anyone should be leader except for him.’ Keating also said, ‘Bill is not a narcissist; Bob is a narcissist.’ He felt with Hayden as leader there’d be a more orderly eventual transition to power after a 1983 ALP victory. What were your feelings towards Paul in the late seventies and early eighties? Did you regard him as a serious challenger? Was he prime ministerial material back then?
/>
  ‘Oh yes, I thought he had it. I had a leaning towards Kim [Beazley] because I thought he had a broader background. There’s no doubt Paul was better equipped in the economics side. Kim was very good in foreign affairs and defence and competent in economics. But I think it’s one of the greatest tragedies that after Paul had had his turn that Kim didn’t get that 1998 election where he won the majority of votes. The subsequent history of Australia could’ve been quite different.’

  Do you wish you had retired and pushed Beazley as your successor at the end of 1990? Hewson was beating you in the polls, you’d been in the job almost eight years, would it –

  ‘Oh, no, no, no. I did what was the right thing to do.’

  I remind Hawke that Beazley’s popularity rating was vastly superior to Keating’s in 1990:51 to 28 per cent.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  To a Beazley contest, Keating had said, ‘There would only be one hit in it!’ He was that sure he would have knocked Kim out. How would that challenge have played out, do you think?

  No response.

  Oh, I’m dying. I remember what Paul Kelly had told me about interviewing Hawke.

  ‘The key to interviewing Hawke is to trigger a spontaneous reaction on an important issue that has emotional resonance. Hawke is a very emotional person. And, particularly, you can see this on TV. If you can engage his emotions then it becomes utterly compelling. Utterly so.’

  Cough. Rustle. I push a little more.

  In 1991, the newspapers turned against you as leader en masse. No major metro paper editorialised in favour of your remaining as prime minister. Voters, meanwhile, couldn’t have been more pro-Hawke. The Age published a poll that found 66 per cent of voters said you’d be a better PM than Keating, who polled 18 per cent. Newspoll had Keating at 14, you at 61. Among Labor supporters, it was you 77 per cent to 17. How did the contradiction of opinion stack with you?