4

They were optimistic people, trusting in God’s mercy, and their response to Neil’s death was a heroic manifestation of their faith.

Clem planted a wooden cross on the grave in the Mitcham cemetery, Adelaide, and placed a death notice in the Adelaide Advertiser:

HAWKE, on 27 February at a private hospital. John Neil, dearly beloved elder son of Rev. A. C. and Mrs Hawke, Congregational Manse, Maitland . . . ‘The golden bowl is broken’.

They returned to Maitland. A parishioner said, ‘We thought Clem was made of stone. He showed no emotion whatsoever but went on with his work as if nothing had happened.’ For Ellie, sadness was ‘too deep for tears . . . [In sixty years] I don’t think I ever saw the wife cry’, Clem said.

People were astonished then, and afterwards, by how the Hawke family habitually eschewed any discussion of emotional pain, of anything that might be considered ‘morbid’; how they and their surviving son denied the existence of personal distress. Hawke had been trained in contempt for wickedness. As the Hawkes rejected Satan, so they rejected the negative aspects of Neil’s death and waited for the Lord to reveal to them why He had gathered in a young soul. Hawke never inquired into the nature of his brother’s death, never visited his grave or even discovered where he was buried—although he had loved Neil who, Clem said, ‘hero-worshipped Bobbie and would rush to play ball with him as soon as he came home from school’.

For a man of emotional make-up, as Hawke is, the family taboo against dwelling on anything negative was a contradiction of nature. His later life was remarkable for moments when ‘negative’ emotions, kept at bay, would abruptly crowd upon him: Hawke would suddenly roar with anger, or begin to weep.

Hawke has no memory of his mother crying when she returned home, but he realised she was devastated:

Totally devastated. I don’t have a vision of wailing—she wasn’t behaving irrationally or anything like that—but I just knew that she was deeply hurt, that she’d lost something that was irreplaceable . . . I had these two problems in childhood: my mother wanted me to be a girl, and then her son died, and I had, somehow, to replace him.

The paradise of his early childhood had been broken: the life he had known as ‘Dad’s boy’ was finished; his father had changed—Clem urged the child to turn his affections towards his mother, who awaited him with open arms, and acute anxiety. But as Hawke himself recognised, he could not really replace Neil as Ellie’s son: he was a sort of impostor.

Relations said, ‘When Neil died, Ellie turned all her attention on to Bob. She overindulged him. She was terrified she would lose him, too.’ Indeed, within days of Neil’s death Hawke became ill with fever and it was feared that he, too, had meningitis. But it was only one of his stress-related viral attacks.

As for Clem, the grief he had suppressed wore him out, and when parishioners noticed that his natural diplomacy had turned to melancholy aloofness they feared that he was on the path of a nervous breakdown. A fellow Congregational minister who visited Maitland in mid-1939 urged Clem to get away, to start a new life, and offered to arrange a transfer to Western Australia. Hawke remembered the move as ‘Joy! As if it were yesterday, this enormous, enormous joy of going on a train across the centre of Australia.’

Clem’s new church was in West Leederville, a lower-middle-class suburb of Perth, and within a few weeks the family had found a cottage on the rise of Tate Street, Leederville. Their new home had a meagre front garden, a generous back garden, five rooms, a screened-in back verandah, stained glass kookaburras set in glass panels in the front door and a porthole window in the hall. When Hawke became a householder he showed his affection for the landscape of childhood by choosing a house that carried echoes of the Maitland manse and the Tate Street house: it had a tennis court and a porthole window.

There were no fringe benefits in the West Leederville parish—no rent-free manse, no motor car, no firewood or food from the farms of parishioners. Clem’s wage was the same as that for an unskilled labourer; suddenly life was frugal. For Hawke it was to become cut off from happiness as well, for in 1941 Clem enlisted in the AIF as a pastor. Within six months Hawke was in a second physical decline. He was still small for his age, with poor chest development and skinny limbs. He suffered repeatedly from attacks of sinusitis.

With Clem away, Ellie took in as boarders the wife of a Methodist minister who had also enlisted, and her son, but there was friction between the two women. The boarder recalled,

In the evening she’d bring home from the WCTU a lot of pamphlets and over the tea-table she would give the boys lectures on drinking and smoking. I used to think, ‘Oh, no. She’ll drive them to it!’ Ellie was still grieving over Neil—not openly, but there was an atmosphere in the house. She had kept some of his clothes and sometimes I’d see her open the wardrobe and bury her head in them.

To Hawke and others Ellie, who was a pacifist, remarked after the outbreak of war, ‘God took Neil to spare him from shedding blood. Neil would have enlisted, if he’d lived.’ The boarder felt that, ‘She would be looking for Neil for the rest of her life’.

Ellie had flung herself into WCTU work in Perth and at night was often out at meetings or overseeing a hostel for homeless girls. At home, the other woman complained,

She wouldn’t discipline Bob, who used to be quiet for long periods then have outbreaks of deliberate naughtiness. Ellie would say to me, ‘Oh, you speak to him’. She was out—it seemed sometimes every night of the week—and I’d have to put him to bed. He’d always want a bit of love at bedtime—he was a devil of a kid, he’d whinge and whinge until he got his own way, but he was very affectionate. The cat would be there in bed with him, hidden under the blankets. He wasn’t allowed to sleep with the cat but every night, sure enough, there it would be. When I’d find it he’d roar with laughter.

In this early period in Perth Hawke developed a resentment for the WCTU, ‘because I thought it took up too much of Mum’s time, almost to my detriment’. He also began to manipulate his parents by throwing tantrums. On the weekends when Clem was due home on leave Hawke would stand at the front gate, staring up Tate Street for the first sight of his father walking down from the trolley bus. He had, he recalled, ‘a tremendous tantrum, an unbelievable tantrum on my twelfth birthday, when Dad came home on leave and they wouldn’t take me to a pirate movie, but went off to see Pygmalion’. Where once there had been ‘overwhelming love’, anger was now intruding more and more into Hawke’s life. A sense of powerlessness had overtaken his existence, exaggerated by ill health.

During these years of severe upheaval for the family Hawke’s health became so poor as to seem chronically afflicted. He had won a scholarship to Perth Modern School in 1942, but did not excel there. ‘I was sickly in the first year at Mod. In my second year I seemed to be sick all the time.’ There was a lot of physical fighting at the school and Hawke, smaller and weaker than other boys, got the worst of it. A fellow pupil remembered him as ‘very thin, with a pinched look. He was sharp featured and had a hatchet face for a small boy.’ Finally in 1944 Ellie, having exhausted other remedies, took him to a naturopath. The man recommended fasting, then a high-fibre diet with few dairy products, eggs or meat. To this day Hawke has thanked him for

a total transformation. I became very strong. My body seemed to develop enormously quickly. I took great pride in my physical development—I could mix it with the other kids. I remember the feeling of joy in growing strong, of having a great feeling of confidence that no one physically worried me any more.

One unusual effect was that his hair, which had been straight, became thick and wavy. He had reached puberty, and was enveloped by an ecstatic sense of completeness, as if sexual definition as a male, as Bob, had brought a surge of power. Another pupil, Robin Morison, recalled Hawke after his ‘total transformation’:

Bob was one of those often involved in punch-ups. He was very pugnacious. He didn’t have a lot of girlfriends—he seemed more interested in sport and being tough than in chasing girls. Also, he did not suffer fools gladly, even then. He would abuse kids for asking silly questions and wasting the class time. He was a real tough-guy.

Hawke recalled,

Adolescence was a good time . . . The old masturbation syndrome hit me about the same age as everyone else. I felt guilty about it, I suppose—perhaps more than average guilt. But it didn’t detract from the enjoyment. I found it a startlingly interesting new dimension to life. In an embarrassed sort of way Dad pushed a couple of books about sex at me. I reckoned I knew as much about it as he did—and I was probably right! . . . I was seventeen or eighteen before I learned about menstruation, and then it came as a terrible shock. I had a mixed-up, unreal, funny reaction. It convinced me that kids should have proper sex education when they’re young.

With adolescence Hawke’s yearning for Clem’s physical presence abated: he no longer stood at the front gate waiting for his father. He said, ‘I was a little boy when he enlisted, and a young man when he was demobbed’.

It was Ellie who had got Hawke into Perth Modern School. She had wanted Hawke, like Neil, to attend a private school,

because that would make a better person of one. There was an element of snobbery in Mum, an elitist thing. A private school was a proposition I resisted very stoutly and Dad was my ally in that, so we won the argument.

When Ellie discovered that Perth Modern School was academically elite, accepting each year only the top primary students in Western Australia, she coached Hawke to win a place there.

She sat down beside me every afternoon and would say, ‘Come on. You’ve got to work and work and win that scholarship.’ She taught me to work hard and she planted in me the idea that if I did work, I could do it. I enjoyed the lessons well enough, but I found the keeping-at-it tedious . . . I have a hedonistic streak. To get things done I have to determine my priorities, or I spend too much time on things that aren’t relevant . . . After I won the scholarship, I didn’t study. I treated school as a sleigh-ride. I had fun.

Having fun is a serious business for Hawke. His parents were keen bridge players and approached the card table with a gleam of purposefulness in their eyes. Ellie especially always strove to do well whatever she undertook—when she went to a film she would mentally grapple with the plot and characters afterwards—and she played to win. Hawke played bridge, tennis, table tennis and billiards and loved crossword puzzles. Fun took its most sublime form, at school, in cricket. He said,

Somehow Dad had instilled in me, when I was about four, a love of cricket. When we’d gone on holidays back to his family home at Kapunda he had spent hours tossing me a ball to bat . . . God invented cricket.

Hawke strove to excel as a cricketer; whenever Clem could, he would attend his matches. Hawke was a batsman and wicketkeeper, and, when he was chosen for the First XI, he fantasised about becoming a Test cricketer.

There was a prize of a bat for anyone in the First XI who could make 100 runs in a final-year game. In the five years I’d been at Mod nobody had won the bat. The match came, and I’d made 93 runs and I thought, ‘This is it! I’m going to crack the record!’ I knew how proud Dad would be if I won it. Then Cyril Calcutt, who taught maths–science, bowled a ball that pitched outside the leg stump, and I went to hook the thing and was given lbw. There was no way in the world I was out! By God, I was so annoyed. I was enormously disappointed. It was, really, one of the biggest disappointments of my schooldays . . . One of my only real regrets is that I didn’t learn to bat well until I went to Oxford and had coaching. If only I could have learned when I was younger!

Perth Modern School has acquired a high reputation over the years because of its numbers of outstanding pupils, but while the school’s intellectual material was first class the education it offered in Hawke’s day was, in the opinion of an alumnus, ‘limited’. Its atmosphere was authoritarian, its subjects career oriented: it was a showcase for the intellectually competitive. ‘Mod was an exam factory’, in the view of John Wheeldon, one of its former pupils, later a Labor senator and a minister in the Whitlam government.

It was good for kids who were willing to knuckle down to the system, who were highly motivated. A lot of kids there were from very poor families. Doing well at Mod was their passport into the middle class. But for boys like Bob and me, who knew we would attend university and enter a profession, it was not an encouraging atmosphere in which to extend our minds.

The ornaments of education—drama, painting, music, literature —were not much regarded at the school. Wheeldon continued: ‘We had few extracurricular activities, compared with the better private schools. Passing exams was all that mattered to the headmaster—he even disapproved of our attending ABC Youth Concerts, because in his opinion they were a waste of time.’

Hawke’s cultural tastes remained undeveloped at high school; he acquired no interest in the arts, nor did he develop a love of reading for pleasure: reading was for self-improvement. The puritan attitude that fiction was basically a waste of time seems to have affected him. In adulthood Hawke’s middle-class friends were often surprised that a man of his intellect and education read so few novels, and that when he did read one it was to pass the time while travelling, and therefore usually some light, racy yarn.

At school Latin became symbolic of high culture for Hawke, and Latinate English became his style—so much so that the satirist Barry Humphries, in a skit in the 1970s, announced that all trade union officials now used the word ‘indicate’ instead of ‘said’ because Bob Hawke had taught them to. Hawke said, ‘If I were an educational dictator I would make Latin compulsory. It’s a great aid to the development of logic.’ He was already committed to ‘useful’ learning. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he did not feel the shortcomings of Mod keenly, as Wheeldon did. But like Wheeldon and many other pupils, he disliked, almost hated, the headmaster. With this man Hawke had his first major crisis with authority, and would have been expelled—for a prank during a chemistry lesson in third year—but for Clem’s intervention. Wheeldon recalled,

The headmaster was a Labor man. In my youth I was a dedicated Liberal, largely because of him. He left me with an abiding dislike of any sort of state control of anything, which I’ve found, even as a socialist, rather difficult to overcome.

Hawke was a Labor sympathiser at school and did not allow his dislike of the headmaster to influence his politics. He said,

The best lesson I had from school was the development of scepticism about authority as such. I realised there wasn’t such a thing as goodness in authority, that its goodness or badness depended upon the people who wielded it. That became very much part of my conscious belief and is still deeply ingrained in me.

Perth Modern School crystallised in Hawke’s mind ideas that had a long history in his behaviour—rejection of control, ‘the minister’s son showing he was independent’.

Despite Ellie’s protests he joined the school cadets but then found himself rejecting the commands of his senior officers and, after three years of training, was still a private. Only three boys, another being Wheeldon, managed to remain privates.

Wheeldon recalled that Hawke

already had that larrikin streak. Since then I’ve seen him be abrasive with people, but he has never been with me. I’ve always had the impression that he is a warm-hearted fellow. As a boy he was already very interested in politics, as I was—the whole school had a high awareness of current affairs. Debating was one of the few extracurricular activities that the headmaster encouraged. Hawke took a leading role in a debate on some current event, which was held before the assembled school. He was a good debater, even then . . . I remember us one afternoon, when we were fourteen, talking for at least an hour about the American trade unions. The Communists had tried to blow up the car of Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, and we talked about the problems of trade unions—how they had to deal with the employers and the Communists. He was always very interested in events of that type.

The stimulus to Hawke’s interest in politics was a change in family circumstances: a new member had joined the Hawke circle, with profound effect. Clem’s favourite brother, Albert, who at the age of sixteen had taken over Clem’s job as secretary of the Kapunda ALP, was reunited with him in Perth. Albert, also known as Bert, was already a minister in the Western Australian government and was being groomed for the premiership. He was a professional politician of high calibre, combining skill in administration with power and wit as an orator. He had a quick mind and a charmingly suave manner. Ellie, who had been tepid towards Labor, was converted. Clem, who had been obliged to keep quiet about his political sympathies in the conservative towns of South Australia, could now indulge his youthful enthusiasm. A Hawke household was once more Labor ‘from toenails to hair roots’.

Albert, who had no son of his own, came each week to dine and play bridge with Clem and Ellie who, under Clem’s influence, had years ago abandoned the idea that knitting on Sundays was a sin and that playing cards was another. Albert made Hawke his favourite nephew and became the boy’s political mentor. It was a piece of sweet fortune for Hawke: first, to have a mentor; second, to have such a good one. Uncle Albert became a critical figure in Hawke’s development and later success. A schoolboy friend of Hawke’s said, ‘His uncle showed Bob that there was a wider world, that life was not all about God, and he introduced Bob into that world’.

In 1945 when the prime minister, John Curtin, died Albert was asked to stand for Curtin’s seat of Fremantle. His backers were confident that he could, after the departure of Chifley, become the next leader of the ALP. But Albert rejected the opportunity in favour of the certainty of becoming premier of Western Australia and lived afterwards with a lingering regret, shared by Clem and Ellie. In 1979, when Hawke was agonising about entering federal parliament, Uncle Bert took hold of him and said, ‘Is another Hawke going to squib it?’

When Bert passed up his chance in 1945 he, Clem and Ellie turned their hopes on the boy. From the time the family had moved to Perth and Ellie had become a Labor enthusiast, she had begun to say she wished that Hawke would have a political career. She enrolled him when he was fourteen in classes for the Art of Speech, a subject not taught in state schools. It was the training ground for orators. The nineteenth-century canon that oratory was the political skill still prevailed—if not in the minds of politicians, certainly with large sections of the electorate, and particularly with Ellie Hawke. Her son was already showing the effects of a family background in which both parents were public speakers and where an insistence on fluency, in Clem’s case, and accuracy in Ellie’s, ruled daily life. (An exasperated niece once snapped at Ellie, ‘We don’t have to speak grammatically to get into the Kingdom of Heaven, Aunt!’) From the time Hawke was twelve Ellie had been saying, only half jokingly, to relations, ‘Bob will be prime minister one day—he has the gift of the gab’. Gradually the idea became family lore: Hawke would be prime minister. Robin Morison recalled that in his final years of high school,

Hawke would often tell people he was going to be prime minister. Max Newton, who along with Hawke was the other most flamboyant boy at school, was very irritated by Hawke’s saying this, and used to be sarcastic about it. He’d walk into class and say, ‘The prime minister is coming’ or ‘He’s just told me again that he’s going to be prime minister . . .’

Hazel Hawke said of the family in the 1940s, ‘The idea [that Bob would be prime minister] was always around’.

Clem had been demobbed in 1945. During his four years in the AIF he had been in daily contact with men of a type he had seldom before encountered. They were swearers, blasphemers, womanisers, heavy drinkers, agnostics, atheists. Hawke said, ‘The experience had a big effect on Dad. He was a liberated man.’ Clem had begun to read psychological works to help him with counselling these wild, tough men; he had begun to drink alcohol with them; he had more liberal attitudes to social behaviour; the benign sophistication that was so noticeable in his later years began to settle upon him. But his occasional glasses of beer were anathema to Ellie and for the first time there were sharp arguments at home. Money was scarce. In the AIF Clem’s pay had been better than it ever was in civilian life but now he was out of a job because his West Leederville church had gone to another minister, and it would be a year before a second church, at Subiaco, became available to him. In the meantime he worked in an insurance company. Ellie returned to teaching. Sometimes she upbraided Clem for ‘weakness’. As had happened in thousands of other families during the war, she had become accustomed to being the head of the household, and readjustment was difficult.

Hawke looked back on the period from Neil’s death to Clem’s placement in a second Perth church as one of ‘dislocation’. Contemporaries of his, who also had developed from children into young men under the guidance of their mothers, nevertheless found his family environment extraordinary. One said, referring to 1945 when he first met Hawke,

Ellie would talk of nothing but her marvellous son. It was always Bob Hawke, Bob Hawke—and God. And the necessary connection between them. Sometimes you would see a look of embarrassment on Clem’s face when Ellie was going on and on about Bob’s ability. When he came home from school he had to make an accounting to her of how he had done that day. She drove him. When there were exams there was a great discussion about why he had come sixth or seventh, not first. In Ellie’s mind Bob was not God simply because he was not old enough to be God. She instilled in him the Inevitability Syndrome—that inevitably he would be the best. He had no idea that his upbringing was unusual . . . For Ellie there was just Bob Hawke—the rest of the world was simply other people around him.

Hawke, however, did not respond to his mother’s urgings to shine academically and to begin to fulfil his destiny. He matriculated at the end of 1946 with a good pass but one that, for Perth Modern students, was only average, and enrolled in law at the University of Western Australia. There had never been any doubt at home that he would attend university. Living in Perth made the process easier, for the University of Western Australia was, then, the only free university in the country. Hawke had no special reason for choosing law. It just seemed ‘a useful sort of course’. He started at university with a vision of himself as a good–average student and a sportsman.

Six months later something happened that was to transform his life.