Hawke was a highly strung child. Before the upheaval of moving to Maitland he had been robust but in the new environment, with a humid climate, he stopped growing at a normal rate and was often ill with respiratory tract infections.
He was sent to school in Maitland, where he was known as Little Bobbie, and was regularly bashed up—according to fellow pupils—because he started most of the fights himself. It seems he disliked school at first. ‘I’d see him going off in the morning with his satchel on his back, bawling his head off all the way down the street’, a townswoman said. His friends, after a time, were boys several years his senior, who acted as elder brothers, and his closest friend was one who was considered socially inappropriate for the minister’s son. This was Reo Allen, one of the nine red-blooded offspring of the local truck-driver. The Allen boys were handy with their fists. Reo, who later worked in a factory in Adelaide, said, ‘I was a kind of protector for Little Bobbie—anybody who punched him had to fight me. He was a real small kid, but a brainy bugger—if you’ll excuse the expression.’ Teasing girls, including a young woman teacher at whom they would shout insults in the street, was a favourite pastime.
Hawke was consistently top or next to top of his class, his rival being the headmaster’s daughter. ‘The fact was’, he said, ‘I had a head-start, because my parents read to me’.
What they read was significant. For both Clem and Ellie the Bible was the foundation of education. While Hawke was still too young to be introduced to the complex beauty of the King James translation, he was raised on a bowdlerised work, Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible: ‘The Complete Bible Story, running from Genesis to Revelations, Told in the Simple Language of To-day for Young and Old, Profusely Illustrated with Colour Plates and Half-tone Engravings’. In the charmed circle of family love, Clem, reading to Hawke at bedtime, introduced to his son’s mind images of heroes that were to stay with him for life.
Hurlbut’s is a handsome volume. The colourful frontispiece shows David, small and barefoot, barely more than a child, alone, facing a huge bearded man who has the advantage of standing on higher ground. Goliath is magnificently armoured in brass shining like gold: breast-plate, helmet, leggings. Behind him on a hill, registering amused disdain for David, lounge the bejewelled princes of the Philistines. The caption reads, ‘David’s plan to fight the giant did not need any armour, but did need a quick eye, a clear head, a sure aim and a bold heart’. David was one of the many saviours who entered Hawke’s imagination in childhood. Years later, describing his career as an industrial advocate, he said,
I’d look up at the other end of the Bar table, crowded with silks and their juniors, able to buy the best economic advice in the country—they were black with money for research—and there I’d be, just me, and I used to think, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s David against Goliath!’
But the favourite character of Hawke’s childhood was Samson, whose story is told in Hurlbut’s as ‘The Strong Man: How He Lived and How He Died’, accompanied by black-and-white engravings of the young Samson slaying a lion; Samson beguiled by Delilah; Samson, aged and terrible, destroying the Philistines and himself in the temple of their fish-god, Dagon. Hawke knew the Samson story word for word and shared with him one circumstance: both were Nazarites. Like Samson, Hawke had been pledged by his mother to God as one who would never drink alcohol. In Bordertown Ellie had adopted as her consuming interest the work of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and had enrolled Hawke in its children’s branch, the Band of Hope.
The WCTU is a women’s movement with a proud history. It was the cause around which nineteenth-century feminists gathered in the USA, the UK and the British colonies. Suffragettes wanted the vote so as to be able to bring in prohibition, for alcohol then, as now, was the single greatest catalyst for wife murder and assault, child bashing and other domestic brutality. The WCTU’s motto is ‘Agitate, Educate, Legislate’—a motto Hawke was to apply himself throughout his career.
Ellie had shouldered the cause of abstinence with indignation. A parishioner recalled that one afternoon he was taking tea in the manse when she gave him a lecture about the dangers of cigarettes (also disapproved of by the WCTU). After some time Clem, who was listening attentively, unbuttoned his jacket and discreetly held it open for the parishioner to see, in an inside pocket, a packet of Capstans. Clem gave the faintest smile, rebuttoned his jacket and returned his attention to Ellie’s remarks. Twenty years later members of the Lee family at Christmas lunch found that Ellie had placed beneath each festive bonbon a WCTU pamphlet about the dire effects of drink.
She was an effective lay preacher—‘Ellie would always pluck at your heartstrings’, a relation said—but whatever success she had in reforming outsiders, the response from those closest to her was rebelliousness. A niece upon whom she doted (the one she had wanted to adopt) put brandy in the Christmas trifle. A woman who lodged with the Hawkes and who, as a Methodist, disapproved of smoking herself, once smoked a cigarette in Ellie’s presence, to defy her. Hawke became a heavy drinker.
In Maitland, parishioners who had heard that Hawke was ‘a terrible kid’ did not alter their opinion so much as expand it. He was terrible, but he was also lovable. Mothers, in particular, found him endearing—very friendly, full of wit, fun and daring. On Saturday night he would go off to the pictures by himself, while Ellie fretted, ‘What’s the use? I can’t stop him.’
An honorary member of the household in Maitland, Gwen Geater, said:
Bobbie was one of those kids that you had to make up your mind with, or he’d dominate you. I put him over my knee more times than I can count. It was the only way . . . Clem had taught him to play cricket and on Sundays, when Clem was busy, if you wouldn’t play cricket with Bobbie there was no peace. He’d drive you mad until you gave in. But he was so lovable—full of fun, and affectionate. I loved my Robert.
Miss Geater was fourteen years Ellie’s junior, her closest friend and co-worker in the WCTU. She was a woman of feminine, dark-eyed good looks and was the dearest of Ellie’s ‘daughters’. Clem’s predecessor in Maitland had been a bachelor; the manse was rundown and the church activities that fall to a minister’s wife had not been performed. Ellie set out to revolutionise the parish—in short order she had organised the women into building a civic garden to celebrate South Australia’s sesquicentenary, for example—but this extra work left her with less time than usual for running her household. Within a couple of weeks of arriving in Maitland she had said to Miss Geater’s mother, ‘You’ve got three daughters and I’ve got none. Give me one of yours’, and Gwen had been given over to Ellie as a helpmate.
While many female parishioners, like Miss Geater, recalled Hawke with affection and often looked after him—Ellie worked a healthy 60- to 80-hour week—his mother was the single important female presence he remembered. He had no grandmother or aunt whom he saw often and doted upon; he could not recall a woman teacher influencing him.
Ellie filled the manse with women and girls; she was forever busy with them on parish or civic activities: women, it seems, entered Hawke’s life as rivals for his mother’s attention, probably compounding whatever hostility he already felt towards females, on account of ‘Elizabeth’. For many years during adulthood there was a certain undertow of ruthlessness in Hawke’s treatment of women, in marked contrast to his tolerance and affection for men.
His attachment to his father was still intense. Once, when Clem was called from Maitland to Melbourne to discuss the possibility of becoming a minister there, Hawke announced, ‘I can’t live without him. Send a telegram for him to come home. I’m going to die.’ When Clem was not around and Hawke’s contact with the world—even, as he experienced it, with life itself—was broken, the child retreated into nervous, almost hysterical demands and isolation. ‘As a child I had few friends’, he said. ‘Dad was enough for me. I didn’t want anyone else.’
Already one of the paradoxes of Hawke’s life was beginning to reveal itself: he had an acute need to belong (to his parents, especially Clem) and an equally strong desire to avoid control (by Ellie and others). The shape of his later political career was beginning to show its outline: the man of the Left who refused to observe the Left’s ideology, the labour leader who rejected the authority of the Labor leader. Speaking of his childhood friendships, Hawke observed: ‘I was a loner. I wasn’t interested in anyone else. I didn’t depend on anyone else—I had no need for anyone else. I had my own views about life, I knew what was in my head.’ Hawke’s identity as a nonconformist was coming to life.
Meanwhile—perhaps because of the telegram episode—Ellie had begun to caution Clem about the pitch of emotion between him and Bobbie. Hawke recalled, ‘My mother said Dad and I loved each other too much, in the sense that I expected too much of him, and he of me’.
When the family had moved to Maitland in 1935 it had been into a large manse set in a wilderness. Ellie was famous for her gardening and, without reticulated water, she transformed what Hawke called ‘that desert of a manse’ into an oasis of flowering shrubs, fruit trees and vegetables. There was a tennis court attached to the grounds, adding to the sense of spaciousness Ellie had created. They might have stayed in that town or others in South Australia for years, with Hawke in due course being sent to boarding school in Adelaide. But the summer of 1938–39 shattered the Hawkes’ beneficent small world of weekdays spent in good works and Sundays in praise of God and the Holy Land.
That summer was a terrible one for the whole nation. There was the longest heatwave in living memory and bushfires consumed the countryside from Queensland to Tasmania. From Europe there rumbled rumours of war.
Seventy people died during the fires in Victoria; as well, babies died from dehydration and old people from heat prostration. The Adelaide Hills exploded in flames on Black Friday in January; factories had to close; the city ran out of soft drinks and ice, and food was scarce.
Neil Hawke—who had been dux of King’s College and had recently landed a job in the state Treasury (at a time when unemployment for young people was running at 20 per cent) was one of those who tried to cool off at an Adelaide novelty, the indoor Unley Crystal Pool. He, like Hawke, loved swimming; he was a fine, manly lad, used to fending for himself and was already living up to the ‘champion’ of his name. Neil was swimming in competitions and had won prizes in bicycle racing.
The heatwave continued into February. On the 18th Ellie’s mother, Matilda, died, aged seventy-seven. At her funeral in Adelaide Ellie and Clem noticed that Neil was pale and quiet. Two days after they had returned to Maitland a telephone call from Neil’s landlady told Clem and Ellie that he had been taken to hospital with fever, headache and convulsions. Clem returned immediately to Adelaide. From there he rang Ellie to tell her to come urgently: Neil had meningitis. He had almost certainly contracted it from the Unley pool.
The progress of meningitis is horrific to witness. Headache and convulsions are followed by loss of normal motor functions, destruction of personality, and distortion of the face as purulent liquid from the meninges overflows the cranium and forces its way into the tissues of the face. The body wastes to bone as the head enlarges.
For forty-eight hours Clem and Ellie prayed by Neil’s bedside. Next morning the drought broke in South Australia with one of the heaviest rains in living memory; it was also the coldest February day in Adelaide for more than thirty years. In the early hours of the following day hospital staff telephoned the Hawkes to come quickly. They set out into the cold, wet night, but by the time they arrived Neil had died.