Reading Wednesdays with Bob, the latest biography of former prime minister of Australia and Labor party heavyweight Bob Hawke, written with Derek Rielly, is a total joy, but it is also an exercise in mourning.
When it comes to politics, they just don’t make them like him anymore. These days, politicians seem to be scripted within an inch of their lives, repeating the same old boring soundbites, but in Derek Rielly’s affectionate look-back at the Hawke government, Hawke is the diametrical opposite of the modern politician.
Rielly meets me in a North Bondi cafe, overlooking the ocean. He may as well be carrying a surfboard under his arm. In truth, he looks part amphibious. Better known in the surfing world for founding Stab magazine, he also has a deep and abiding love of Australian politics. Growing up in Western Australia, Rielly was the child of a politics lecturer and current affairs were discussed around the dinner table. It was the years of Australia’s America’s Cup win, the deregulation of the economy, debates about uranium mining and the conservation of Antarctica, promises to eradicate child poverty and talk of a treaty with Indigenous Australians. It was a time when members of Hawke’s cabinet were all household names.
Part of Hawke’s appeal was personal charisma, accompanied by an honesty that Rielly reckons we don’t see too much of anymore. Now 88, he is just as vivid, profane, honest, hilarious and profoundly himself.
“Bob was a unique personality and people actually trusted him,” Rielly says. “He’d go, ‘Listen, we’re going to have to all pull together.’ And they’d go ‘Yeah, yeah Bob, we’ll do it for you’.”
This biography of Hawke was originally pitched as a roadtrip narrative, with Rielly accompanying Hawke back to WA as he campaigned for Bill Shorten in the 2016 federal election. It became more modest due to Hawke’s uncertain health. Each Wednesday for a year, Rielly would bring Hawke a cigar (only one – they were too expensive for Rielly to buy one for himself) and a topic to be discussed: love, the economy, the Middle East, the environment, Keating, family, the trade union movement. The book is comprised of these conversations at Hawke’s house in Northbridge, Sydney, interspersed with reflections from Australian public figures such as Richard Woolcott, John Howard, Kim Beazley, Gareth Evans, Ross Garnaut and John Singleton.
The title riffs off the hugely successful self-help book Tuesdays with Morrie, in which a younger man spends time with his dying professor, soaking up the wisdom of a life well-lived. Here though, Hawke’s wisdom is a little less saccharine.
On the issue of euthanasia, for example, he says: “If I was to lose my marbles … I don’t expect it to be a pillow pressed exuberantly over my nose, but I’m sure she [his wife, Blanche d’Alpuget] could organise something with a family doctor.”
And on the right way to die: “On a golf course. Blanche’s stepfather did it that way. He completed a round of golf and he was sitting in the cart, filling in the card. Fell over dead. I reckon that was pretty cute.”
Today’s politicians, Hawke says, “are frightened by people” and Trump is particularly on the nose: “This bloke’s insane … he’s just a passing aberration.”
The quips from Hawke’s contemporaries are possibly even more amusing, peppered with curses and hilariously caustic observations of their friend and colleague.
Yes, Wednesday’s with Bob is undoubtedly a fan book. Even the cover has a strong element of myth-making to it. There’s Hawke, silver quiff under a cloud of cigar smoke, looking raffish, like a slightly younger, happier Samuel Beckett.
Rielly, who had no personal connection to Hawke, had to get past a series of gatekeepers – not the least Hawke’s wife, the highly accomplished writer and biographer Blanche d’Alpuget – to secure the interviews.
“The first time I interviewed Bob, I was pretty nervous. I had three recording devices in my bag. I just didn’t want to fuck it up. I was dressed in a suit and everything,” says Rielly, who looks very much to be a T-shirt kind of guy.
“I get to the house, all the doors were open, then I see Bob and, honestly, it was like an old friend. So approachable and friendly. And he was like, ‘You got a cigar?’”
The cigar acted like an egg timer on the interviews. “I would go to his balcony at three in the arvo and the sun would get a bit lower. It was winter and he’d have a cigar, and by the end of cigar the sun would get quite low and he’d be finished and [the interview] was done for the day.”
In one chapter, Rielly’s interview is momentarily interrupted so Hawke can urinate down a drainhole on the balcony into the garden below.
As well as telling the story of the Hawke government, Rielly “really wanted to tell the love story of Blanche and Bob, because it feels like a very mature love story that has played out very cartoonishly in the press”.
So what about the infamous bathrobes on the cover of Woman’s Day?
“The story behind that is that they were at the Hyatt in the Rocks [in Sydney], and the photographer said, ‘Can you just put this on? Just one shot.’ And that’s followed them around.”
Blanche appears throughout Rielly’s book, often ducking in and out of the house with her personal trainer and offering wordly asides.
“Her book, [1982’s] Robert J Hawke, convinced many that he was the right leader for the party,” says Rielly. “In many ways she is more responsible for his success than [Hawke’s former wife] Hazel. They’ve been married for 22 years, lovers for 40, friends for 50. It’s not just a flash-in-the-pan affair – and it’s incredible to see people that age so in love.”
And also so in lust.
“She’d go to the shops or the optometrists, and he would come up behind her and nuzzle his head in her boosies and say, ‘Who is this vision of loveliness?’
“They are very physical people – still very hot for each other. They are both deeply intelligent. There’s this incredible sexual attraction but intellectual attraction too. It was the first woman he’d ever met who he could talk trade unionism with.”
Hawke’s was a big life: a Rhodes scholarship mixed with a love of the racetrack, drunken nights with embassy staff in Jakarta in the 1970s, insults, feuds and bloodletting, and wild behaviour such as receiving diplomats in the nude at poolside meetings and banishing the Singaporean prime minister to a frigid Canberra courtyard because he objected to Hawke smoking a cigar.
Stories of Hawke’s boozing run right through the book but they run alongside tales of discipline as well, when Hawke gave up the booze for 13 years while in politics.
“The drinking thing was so important to him,” says Rielly. “He didn’t want to do a shitty job as PM or embarrass his country so he gave up his great love, drinking. He didn’t drink until 1992 – it was Hazel’s birthday. Then he rediscovered how great it is.”
And now? “He’s so old now, you just go off drinking naturally as you get older. He used to only have one drink a night but that drink was a massive bucket of wine.”
The big life continued after he left office. At his 70th birthday party in 1999, wine was served from the genitals of nude sculptures. At the same party, Hawke’s great mate, advertising mogul John Singleton, gave him a quarter share in what looked to be an unpromising racehorse. The horse, Belle de Jour, went on to win millions for its owners in the 2000 Golden Slipper.
“I wouldn’t have given it to him if I knew how much he was going to fucking make,” says Singleton now.
Singleton – who doesn’t share Hawke’s politics but created many memorable Labor advertising campaigns – has some of the best lines in the book.
On how Hawke coped with being deposed as Labor leader by Paul Keating, Singleton says: “No quivering lip like that wuss Fraser. No self-important speeches like with Gough and these other cunts. Fucking cop it on the chin and move on.”
Afterwards, aged 68, Hawke moved into Singleton’s Birchgrove mansion and learned how to live without all the prime ministerial trappings. “He learned how to buy milk and everything. You give them money, they give you milk,” says Singleton.
Hawke too had a withering side.
“It would have been scary in 1980s to be on the receiving end,” says Rielly. For example, there was his description of party rival Bill Hayden as “a lying cunt with a limited future”.
“People were a bit stronger in the 80s than they are now. Back then they would say, ‘mate, you’ve been a total dickhead’. It’s just strong leadership – if you don’t like it, get out.”
For all that though, Rielly believes Hawke most loved talking about his mother and father.
“When he talks about his dad, his parents, you forget he is a man of 88,” Rielly says. “His eyes open so wide, it’s almost like he shrinks into this gorgeous loving child, a bright boy. He just talks about how he loved him so much and how he felt very loved and how he couldn’t wait for him to get home and he’d bounce down the street. Couldn’t wait to feel his dad’s arms around him.”
• Wednesdays with Bob by Derek Rielly and Bob Hawke is available now through Macmillan Australia
