6

He fascinated me. He fascinated everyone.’ Jules Zanetti, a Sydney journalist, was talking about Hawke aged eighteen to twenty-four.

It was a foregone conclusion that Bob was going to be prime minister. I took it absolutely seriously—we had long conversations about it—he would be prime minister and I would be his press officer. There was magic in the way he could get you to believe in things. It was an ability to manipulate. He had it then.

Hawke had had it since early childhood; by his late teens the lovable devil-of-a-kid had the gift of creating in his friends an eagerness to please him while, tormentingly, he went his own way. There was a subtle imbalance in all his relationships: somehow, he was always the more important partner. Hawke’s life as a captain with lieutenants to do his bidding was under way. Zanetti continued, ‘With us, it was a love–hate relationship. Somehow, we’ve always kissed and made up . . . The bastard!’

Zanetti, a returned serviceman almost two years Hawke’s senior, met him at university. Other friends, who had known Hawke from schooldays, say they found no change in him after the motorbike accident, but what seems clear from his own testimony is that there had been an inner transformation. At school, when Hawke had talked of becoming prime minister, he was speaking a part created for him by Ellie. Now, he was writing the drama himself: he had taken over her dream for him as his own. He spent the next five years, after his escape from death, in pursuit of the prizes that he now believed it was his duty and destiny to win. His confidence was boundless: any defeat he treated as a temporary, quirkish setback to be cast, after a period of sharp dejection, away from him. Then and later ebullient—even reckless—confidence became the Hawke style: he projected an image of the young man questing for glory and adventure, guided by the courage of high endeavour. A university tutor said, referring to Hawke aged about twenty, ‘Bob had charisma at a time when most Australians didn’t know the word existed’.

Hawke had not developed steady scholastic habits at school but had allowed himself to be forced to learning by Ellie who, in the very act of urging him to work, was also reinforcing the family belief that he was especially gifted. Even when most intensely mentally engaged Hawke’s ‘streak of hedonism’ was present: he studied with his Persian cat draped around his neck. As he saw himself the gifted child, already an intellectual aristocrat, he had no need to apply himself to sensible, constant effort: he can succeed against the odds, with a burst of concentration. At Modern School Hawke had despised ‘swots’. He still did. At university he set out to invent a way of becoming a top law student—the top law student—without diminishing his cherished status as extraordinary. His solution, arrived at, it seems, unconsciously, was alarming. ‘He needed pressure’, a friend said.

He would let things slide until the examinations were upon him, then would study frantically. And he would almost always come down with sinusitis or tonsillitis just before exams, so that he would have to push himself even harder, to make up for the time lost while he was ill. Bob comes alive under pressure.

Many students study only at the last moment, but their aim is merely to pass. Hawke was different, in that his aim was, by daring failure, to leap to triumph. A certain air of ‘You, dark forces, do your damnedest—and I’ll beat you!’ has clung to him ever since. Daring has recurred throughout his career. ‘The mistake the Socialist Left made’, an ALP official said, reflecting on the downfall of the Stop Hawke campaign of the late 1970s, ‘was to triple-dare him, to threaten him with extinction. He took on the dare.’

Hawke had missed most of the third-term law lectures as a result of his accident but chose not to ask for posts. He sat for all but one of his examinations at the normal time, and passed. Although he would need to take honours in every subject in each successive year (to make up for the passes in first year) he believed he would graduate with first-class honours in law. John Toohey, later a distinguished judge, competed each year with him for top position and was, finally, the only student to graduate cum laude. Toohey said, ‘Bob was very disappointed when he missed the First. He expected to get it—he always anticipated winning, and he wanted to carry off all the prizes.’

While Hawke wanted to be a top law student, many of the practices of lawyers and many of the traditions of the law disgusted him. Soon after beginning the course he had told Clem he would not enter the profession:

I felt a lawyer was very much a hired hand who was prepared to argue the case whatever his view, and I found that offensive. I also thought there was a fair degree of pretension about the law, that it tried to invest itself with some intrinsically glorious majesty, as such, as The Law. And I could never be persuaded of that. I thought the law was an instrument of society and it could be and should be an instrument for a better society, but that it could be a very evil thing—it could be used to condone things that couldn’t and shouldn’t be condoned.

At twenty-one he had a second-class honours degree in law; he was a first-grade cricketer; a delegate to the ALP state conference (where Albert continued to coach him, and Hawke to show his independence of mind by referring loudly to the Labor Party state president as ‘that baldy old bastard’). He was an active member of the Student Christian Movement; president of the Congregational Youth Fellowship; and president of the students’ Societies Council. He had an urge to be involved, a rushing embrace of the world. A university friend said that Hawke, at twenty-one, showed ‘an impatience, an eagerness to get to the point, whether it were of observation, principle or joke’. And, alongside that, he had a patient determination to equip himself for his long-term goal of leading the country. He decided to do a second—arts—degree, majoring in economics, ‘because if one were interested in government a knowledge of economics was sensible’. He also decided to earn some money. He took a job in the Vacuum Oil Company as a trainee executive and studied part time for a year. He disliked his job, which he found ‘pointless’—that is, it had no social value—and he missed the expansiveness of university life. In 1951 he resigned from Vacuum Oil and returned to university full time, gathering his strength for a final effort to plant his flag at the summit of student life: he wanted to become president of the Guild of Undergraduates and to win the Rhodes scholarship for Western Australia. He said that, since his third year of law,

it had become obvious that I was within that small range of students who would be relevant candidates for the Rhodes. A number of people mentioned it to me—student colleagues, and Dr Rossiter [the warden of Wesley College and a member of the University Senate] very strongly suggested it to me.

Zanetti by now was editor of the university newspaper, Pelican, and became Hawke’s publicist in the campaign to make him president of the Guild:

Bob wanted to be president because he wanted to bring in reforms. It wasn’t a question of power for power’s sake—he was totally sincere in wanting to use power for the public good. He was also totally determined about getting it. Presidency of the Guild was a huge step towards the Rhodes. Bob sat down and drew up a blueprint for action. He had two power bases, the ALP Club and the Student Christian Movement. I used to tell him he was a hypocrite, that he couldn’t possibly still be a believer, that he was just using the SCM for votes.

Zanetti himself was known as ‘an operator’. His bargain with Hawke for ‘putting Bob’s smiling face on the front page of Pelican time after time’ was that, once Hawke was president he would get Zanetti a vote—as against just a seat—in the Guild.

In 1951 Hawke ran for president and won the position with the support of both the ALP and the Liberal clubs. His old friend Jack Knight was a Liberal activist and helped to carry Liberal support for Hawke, who became, in Zanetti’s view, ‘the best Guild president we ever had’. In the opinion of the vice-chancellor, (Sir) George Currie, Hawke was

absolutely top-notch. He was almost the perfect president so far as a vice-chancellor was concerned. He was gentlemanly, co-operative and charming, and among the presidents was outstanding for his sense of responsibility. He was a natural leader. By tradition all the presidents of the Council had to be of outstanding character, and all-rounders at the university. Hawke was innovative and an excellent chairman of meetings. He was well spoken in those days. He had a distinctly Australian voice, but it was not harsh . . . It was hard to make the connection between that man and the one we saw on television later, being rude and obviously having had too much to drink. I suppose those things were there in him then, but were never called forth.

As Guild president one of Hawke’s first official duties was to welcome the freshers of 1952. His speech (published by Zanetti in Pelican) shows how strong, still, was his manse conditioning, and his slight uneasiness about it:

You are coming from the somewhat restraining atmosphere of the secondary school into an environment which gives you every possible opportunity to develop your intellect, character and personality. You will find a comparative lack of discipline external to yourself—to a large extent you have become your own disciplinarians. This, of course, involves distinct responsibilities to yourself, to those by whose sacrifices it has been made possible for you to attend the uni., to your fellow students, and finally to the whole society of which we are all a part . . . I would ask that you keep an open mind on all things, rid yourself of bias or preconceived prejudices and accept the intellectual responsibility of thinking clearly. If you do this you will find that at the end of your university career its main purpose will have been achieved—you will be equipped for worthwhile citizenship and to give a lead to those who may be less fortunate than yourselves. I apologize for the fact that the above sounds most sermon-like . . . 1

Hawke had been elevated, as the university’s representative student, into an unfamiliar social milieu of dignitaries, local and foreign. The state governor, Sir Charles Gairdner, was guest of honour at many university social events and it was Hawke’s duty to help to entertain him, to sit at the top table, dance with Lady Gairdner, deliver speeches of welcome and of thanks. The governor liked him enough to invite him to Government House for weekend tennis. The vice-chancellor, ‘a bloke I loved’, and his wife invited Hawke to afternoon teas. These social contacts were important for Hawke’s most ambitious scheme as Guild president.

He had become friendly with some of the foreign students, in particular a Singhalese boy, a Buddhist who was lonely and missing his family, probably suffering what is now recognised as culture shock. Hawke invited him home and encouraged him to treat the Tate Street house as his own. In 1951 two Asian students had hanged themselves, and in early 1952 a third was taken to hospital with a nervous breakdown. The plight of foreign students stirred up Hawke’s compassion: for him the next logical step was to do something practical, to rescue them.

He first founded an Australian–Overseas Student Club, then on 9 April 1952 gave an afternoon tea for ‘overseas students to exchange ideas and impressions and discuss a few of the problems associated with entering our university’. Slowly, the idea of building an International House emerged, and in August 1952 Hawke launched the concept with characteristic ebullience. The building would cost, he announced, £150 000, and ‘the bulk of this sum will—we hope—come from Asian countries, grants from the Australian [federal and WA] governments and American foundations like the Rockefeller Institute’.2 He flung himself into publicising and fund-raising. Sir Charles Gairdner agreed to become patron of the appeal; there was an impressive ceremonial opening; Pelican ran front-page stories about it; Hawke badgered the Western Australian news media for publicity; there were sporting competitions, a gala ball, male and female beauty contests, a huge fete . . . all in vain.

International House was the first of his doomed enterprises, a forerunner to the failures he would experience as president of the ACTU. The inner pressure of his optimism preserved in Hawke a naivety about the goodwill of others that was later to cause astonishing misjudgments. Only £2200 of the £150 000 was raised for International House. He said,

I had the feeling that if I could have gone into it earlier and been able to stay there longer we could have got it off the ground. I was disappointed that my concept of it came to me too late for me to have a chance to really get it going. There was some opposition to it, some on racist grounds, some feelings that it was a threat to new or existing colleges, but I think the problem was one of apathy and non-appreciation of the idea, rather than of opposition. I thought that the idea was so obviously good and sensible and right that it would get a momentum of its own. Well, it didn’t.

Another student said, in the sour tone of envy that Hawke’s contemporaries were increasingly beginning to use when they spoke of him, ‘The trouble was, International House was all Bob’s idea. He hogged the limelight.’

It was during the International House appeal that Clem and Ellie first had real cause for alarm about their son’s behaviour. Hawke had been to the Guildford house of a businessman to ask for a donation; the man had offered him spirits and Hawke had arrived home drunk.

In 1949 he had been unable to withstand the pressure of his peers any longer and at a law faculty dinner had drunk a glass of beer. After about a week of illicit drinking he had come home one evening, told Ellie he wanted to talk seriously to her, and after the dishes were cleared away, sat at the table and confessed. He told her that not only had he begun to drink, but also that he was not going to stop. Their discussion was a long one and ‘not very pleasant’. It ended with Ellie saying, ‘I’m glad, at least, you had the honesty to tell me’.

It is a mark of the faith and strength of this extraordinary woman that she forced herself to endure her son’s drinking. She prayed daily that he would stop, but she did not make scenes with him about it. Reflecting years later, when Ellie was dead, Hawke said with intense sadness for the anguish he had caused her, ‘She learned to live with it. Better than I did.’

As a product of several generations of teetotallers it is possible that Hawke had no physiological resistance to alcohol and may even have been allergic to it at first. According to a student drinking companion,

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.

Hawke drank moderately for about two years but, as his tolerance improved, his intake increased: ‘Mum could see that I was still working extremely hard; I hadn’t become “a dissolute young man”. There was never any drink in the home and I never drank at home. There was never any flaunting in front of her.’ But he was beginning to get drunk often, and in 1952, in Melbourne for a National Union of Australian University Students meeting, went off for a boozy weekend, returned late and still drunk on Monday morning, and thereby missed the chance of the highest position for Australian university students, presidency of NUAUS. The right-wing lobby was able to convince the centre group, whose support Hawke needed, that he was too wild for the job. Twenty years later this opinion was to become a national refrain.

Jack Knight said:

Bob had a terrific fear of Ellie catching him drunk. I used often to get him into bed—he was sleeping on the back verandah—and we’d creep around the side of the house. There was a watertank there where he could have a wash. Then I’d get him up the steps, through a flywire door and into bed. I was scared about Ellie catching us, too. She would have blamed me for leading Bob astray.

Gradually Hawke was able to hold his liquor better and in 1952 he won a university speed-drinking competition, organised by Zanetti, by downing three schooners of beer in 9.3 seconds. Within a few years the world was to know of Hawke’s prowess with alcohol: at Oxford he drank 2.5 pints (1.42 litres) of beer in 12 seconds and was entered in the Guinness Book of Records. In competitions for long-distance drinking, however, he was a failure; Zanetti carried off the prizes. He, too, had come from a teetotal background and remarked wistfully in 1980, ‘We worshipped the grog’.

Ellie’s determination to endure and not to discuss Hawke’s drinking became a cause of sometimes unbearable tension for her. One day when he was late returning home to meet a friend she became increasingly jittery. At last she fled into another room, flung herself on the floor and wailed. Almost thirty years later the household tension about alcohol and the family taboo on speaking about emotional distress had not lessened. In 1977 Kate Baillieu, a television journalist, was waiting at the Tate Street house to interview Hawke en famille. Baillieu had made the gaffe of bringing as a present to Clem and Ellie a bottle of whisky. They had laughed and explained they did not drink. Hawke was late. Everyone there knew that he had been drinking heavily the night before but, although the subject had been raised by Baillieu’s inappropriate present, no mention was made of this. Ellie became more and more agitated, talking constantly, until she suddenly said to Baillieu, ‘You know, he has blackouts’.

In this highly charged atmosphere it was inevitable that Hawke should begin leading a double life. On one side there was the gregarious student leader, already sexually experienced, a beer-garden king who when indignant would throw punches. On the other there was the minister’s son who abhorred violence, who went to church on Sundays, was a deacon, taught Sunday school and helped to organise wholesome holiday camps and hymn-singing social evenings.

Because there was apartheid between the hymn-singers and the drinkers most people knew him only in one role. Because he could establish rapport so strongly with his companions of the hour, the whites, as it were, could not believe that he loved the blacks just as much. Those of his drinking contemporaries who did know about Hawke’s religious life were baffled by the paradox they saw, and believed that his Christianity was bogus.

It was an older man, a tutor in the English department at the University of Western Australia, Bob Rogers, who recognised that Hawke, in public, dressed in camouflage. Rogers, who influenced Hawke strongly, wrote:

It was the beer-garden Hawke only whom I knew, for a time—extrovert, bursting with boisterousness and vigour. For a time, but not for long. The passing show of Saturday afternoon football, of holding a charismatic court, was a sideline; his bar-room friends were just sidekicks. We began to indulge, even on licensed premises, in serious inquiries, albeit seeing the comic dimension of so many academic issues. So I was surprised one morning to be severely reprimanded by the management of the hotel in which we frequently drank, for I am, generally speaking, inoffensive, certainly so in my cups. But I was upbraided as the friend of the bloke who had offered to change the publican’s face. When I saw Hawke later I asked him why he had threatened to punch the publican. Bob replied that I ought to know.

The evasion intrigued me and in it lay, upon reflection, the key to an essential part of Bob. The publican represented an aspect of the Australian Way of Life which sends Hawkey up the wall. Wherever the type within a type occurs—used-car salesman, medical practitioner or PR consultant—Hawke senses someone on the take. And that he truly resents. Because Bob can so successfully perform as the voluble extrovert, the inner Hawke is underestimated and misunderstood. That is, the Hawke who sits and judges and loathes the operator—whatever his mask of bonhomie or of service—who is on the cheap grab.

Shortly, I was to graduate formally from knowing the bar-room to meeting the carefully hidden private Hawke. Bob was uneasy. ‘You are . . . you aren’t . . . of course, you don’t have to.’ It was an invitation to meet his parents, to spend an evening playing bridge at their house.

Mr Hawke welcomed me—he was tall, lean, clean, not flowery and not to be trifled with. I met his strong handshake with deep misgivings. Our bridge party was all male: I was to partner Jack Knight. The booze Jack and I had organised for later was in the boot of my old-fashioned bomb. We sat down for our game: the tang of austerity dominated the card table and I had the feeling that Mr Hawke was observing me, rather than I, him. Yet he was completely self-contained and when the conversation touched on personalities in student politics, he showed something of disdain for those in the scrabble for power. Somehow, Clem Hawke intruded as a presence, gently, persuasively, intelligently, as, I suggest, he pervaded his son’s life. Increasingly, I lost interest in the cards as they were dealt.

At supper, Mrs Hawke fussed over sandwiches, cakes and soft drinks. I was offered beer, presumably a concession to me as a practising Catholic. I felt as though I were accepting something unhygienic (and certainly unnecessary). I yielded, under pleasant, hospitable pressure and Bob, the unashamed hypocrite, condescended and accepted a small glass, too.

We had a bit of trouble starting my old bus and Bob was called out to give it a heave. He approached readily, suddenly remembered what was in the boot, then shunned my car as though it were a den of iniquity. I can still recall the look of distaste on his face as we left. Looking back, that perhaps was another key: the distaste of the party-goer who sees through the shallowness, the artificiality, the falsity, and despises those who take grog-ons seriously. Bob was tugged in two directions. He could see no reason for not joining the cultivated carefreeness of bonhomie and its amusing revelations and he had nothing but disgust for the emptiness behind it. He saw bonhomie as an aspect, a tool to be used.3

Already, apocryphal stories were circulating about Hawke on campus. One was that, when not selected for the first-grade cricket team, he had called a meeting, stacked it, had the selectors dismissed and installed new ones who promptly selected him. Within a few years the aura of success, the myths, the unspoken envy surrounding Hawke were so great that they combined to create an impenetrable disguise, and he became, increasingly, a puzzle. Rogers was the last man to see Hawke, as it were, alive.

In 1949 Hawke had defied a second major taboo of his background: he had lost his virginity. A university friend recalled, ‘He could always line up girls, for himself and his friends. It was a case of “You provide the beer and I’ll bring the girls”, and we’d be off to the sand dunes with a couple of blankets.’ Another friend said, ‘Bob was always on the lookout for love nests. He was a great key collector. If you found a door locked to which he had a key, you’d know Bob was in there with some girl.’

But while Hawke was, and continued to be, a womaniser, he had only one special love: his co-religionist, childhood acquaintance and fiancée, Hazel Masterson. Hazel was the girl Hawke trusted, the one who shared his dreams and would help him realise them. She was the younger daughter of a modestly well-to-do accountant, a man who was a staunch conservative and secret philanthropist. Unknown even to his family, Jim Masterson had for years made a habit of giving money to battlers. He had been a battler himself—his family was poor and he had come to the city and worked his way through night school. Hazel Masterson had grown up with the values of kindliness and social duty that had inspired the Lee household. She was five months older than Hawke, the same age difference between Ellie and Clem, and like them, she and Hawke met through the church. Hazel was a good musician and became a church organist at Subiaco and a focus for many of the Congregational youth activities, where she was always in demand as a pianist. In her later teenage years she was secretary of the Congregational Youth Fellowship while Hawke was its president. For both of them this was an ideal division of labour and one which became their settled modus operandi: Hawke the public figure; Hazel the administrator. In all their life together Hawke never paid household bills nor made a decision about its organisation.

Their courting began in the church community and continued in their parents’ homes: ‘The influence of home was very strong on us’, Hazel said. Hawke recalled, ‘Hazel was a vibrant person. She was interested in the church, music, tennis, and after a bit, me.’ She was as emotional as Hawke, had a lively wit and among friends was full of irrepressible laughter. One recalled,

I once travelled with Hazel in a small jet aeroplane and something would set her off—a remark, or a funny memory—and out would come this wonderful whoop of laughter. The other passengers would start grinning, and after a while the whole plane was in fits, everyone laughing because Hazel had.

She was very good looking, with light brown hair and pale eyes and a fine, strong bone-structure in which could be seen the bloodlines of a Czechoslovakian Jewish grandmother. Among strangers, however, she was often shy and Hawke’s university friends considered her ‘withdrawn’. Some noted, later, ‘sometimes a great sadness in her eyes’. Hazel was working as a stenographer and ‘in the student community she felt at a disadvantage’, Jules Zanetti said. He called her The Mouse, until he got to know her better when, like others, he realised she was ‘a great girl, a lovely girl’.

She and Hawke had started going out together (on the Panther) in 1948. In the early summer of 1949 Hawke had made a formal call upon Jim Masterson to ask his permission to marry Hazel. Masterson had reservations: Hawke was only nineteen, he was a political radical—in Masterson’s terms—and he had no apparent intention of settling down to earning a living and supporting a wife in the comfort that her father had provided. Masterson’s doubts were similar to Will Lee’s thirty years earlier, but greater, and in the end just as futile: ‘We were madly in love. We were off our beans about each other’, Hazel said. They were engaged. Ellie at last had a real daughter she could mother. A friend recalled,

Ellie would bring them a cup of tea in bed on Saturday mornings and cluck about how sweet it was that Bob and Hazel were having a brotherly-and-sisterly cuddle. A cuddle! Ellie knew her son and she was determined he was not going to run off the rails with some girl she’d never met. She was delighted to have Hazel staying at Tate Street weekend after weekend, as a magnet to keep Bob at home. They were a terrific couple. People would talk about Bob-and-Hazel—‘We’ve invited Bob-and-Hazel, Bob-and-Hazel were there’.

As events turned out their engagement was to be almost of Biblical length: it lasted six years.

In 1951 Hawke was a candidate for the Rhodes scholarship, and failed. He was a candidate again in 1952, and in November that year was awarded the prize. A few weeks later he set out by P&O ship from Fremantle to represent the Congregational church at a world conference of Christian youth in south India. Clem and Ellie, Hazel, friends and parishioners farewelled him with pride, for he was the most distinguished student of his day in Western Australia, honoured by the church, the state and his peers.

He went off blithely, unaware that the summer sapphire of the Indian Ocean was carrying him towards a spiritual storm.