On the day in November 1951 when Hawke learned he had not been chosen as the Western Australian Rhodes Scholar for 1952 he went to the cinema with Hazel. Later he could not remember what film they had seen but Hazel recalled the evening vividly. The movie, chosen at random, had turned out to be about a Rhodes scholar; their outing was acutely painful. But within days Hawke had shaken off his disappointment and decided to reapply the following year.
As events unfolded, he was to be glad that he had at first failed to win the Rhodes. With hindsight he was able to see in the one-year delay to his ambition the origin of his career as a labour leader: the delay gave him a chance to complete his Arts degree, majoring in economics; this in turn determined the nature of his study at Oxford, which linked to his further research at the Australian National University, which led him to the attention of officials of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
Rhodes had specified in his will the qualities he desired in scholars:
Literary and scholastic attainments; qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship; exhibition of moral force of character and of instincts to lead and to take an interest in his fellows, physical vigour, as shown by fondness for and success in manly outdoor sports.
They also had to be bachelors.
Hawke could not be credited with literary attainments but he possessed all the other attributes, plus another: a nose for pretension. Cecil Rhodes offended Hawke’s deepest social beliefs. He regarded Rhodes as a colonial exploiter who, having amassed a great fortune from cheap black labour, had found it convenient to distribute his wealth posthumously to children of the upper middle class. Hawke’s opinion of Rhodes scholars was not high, either. He wanted to win the Rhodes scholarship because it was there for the winning, and would enable him to study abroad. He had applied also for a scholarship to an American university and would have been equally happy with that, he said, but the Rhodes was decided first.
Hawke made no secret of his contempt for Rhodes (and Rhodes scholars in general) but did not explain his reasoning. He rarely does: for him, people are either trained to perceive social evil, as he is, in which case no explanation is necessary—or they are not, in which case explanation is futile. Furthermore, Hawke demands of his friends that they psychologically bond with him, spontaneously and without need for words—a demand that is often too great. Other students found his expressed disdain for Rhodes combined with his eagerness to win a Rhodes scholarship paradoxical and even improper. Repeatedly during his career Hawke’s ‘sort of terrific conceit, which won’t allow him to share his mental processes’ (as a close friend described it), was to cause misunderstandings and misjudgments.
The final interviews of the short-list candidates took place on Friday, 28 November 1952 at Government House. Six tense young men waited in an ante-room for the secretary, Josh Reynolds, to call them inside for the decisive meeting with the selection committee. It was made up of Sir Charles Gairdner; the acting vice-chancellor, Professor N. S. Bayliss; and five other men, most of them former Rhodes scholars. Hawke was friendly with the chairman (Gairdner) and the secretary. In the opinion of contemporaries he had cultivated the friendship of Reynolds, who was warden of St George’s College, by taking holiday jobs at the university. It was an accurate assessment but to picture it—as some contemporaries did—as self-interested deviousness is too cynical. From schooldays Hawke had worked at relating to others and had seen relating as work: the milkman, the corner-store shopkeeper and the dean of law were all subject to Hawke’s self-aware desire to be liked. Clem operated in exactly the same way.
Hawke recalled,
I was second or third to be called in and was asked one question—I’ve forgotten what. Then this bloke, a lawyer, said to me: ‘Mr Hawke, one of the important considerations in the mind of the Founder’—you were supposed to genuflect at the mention of the Founder—‘and one of our responsibilities, is to have a concern for what a Rhodes scholar will do. If we were to award you a scholarship, what would you do in later life?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t wish to practise law. The only answer I can give you is that it would be some sort of public service, by which I don’t mean that I would necessarily go into the Public Service.’ And he said, ‘Come, come, Mr Hawke. You must have an idea.’ And I said to him again, rather sharply, ‘I’m sorry, but that is all I can honestly say. I just don’t know. Perhaps within that definition of public service I would want to do some academic work, but I can’t help you more than that.’ And he then came back at me again and said that wasn’t good enough. So I turned to the governor and said to him, ‘I’ve answered the question honestly and to the best of my ability. And I resent the insinuation that I’m not being forthright about it. And I haven’t come here to have my honesty impugned!’ I really went off. I was then asked some other questions, by others, which I answered genially and then I was shown out, thinking, ‘Oh, well. I’ve blown it.’ The other blokes asked me how I’d done and I said, ‘Aw, a bit of fun’.
Then the fateful moment came. Old Josh came out again and said, ‘The committee would like to see Mr Hawke’. I went in and the governor walked round from behind his chair to greet me and said, ‘Bob, we read all the references before we interview the candidates. I must tell you that my inclination was that you were the person for it.’ Then he added quietly, ‘If I had any doubts about it, your replies to that character confirmed my previous opinion’. And that was it. I’d won.
In the months between winning and embarking for England, Hawke had another serious injury. He was run down by a cart-horse and had his thigh ripped open. Again he lost a lot of blood and when he was injected with penicillin in hospital suffered anaphylaxis, a violent allergic reaction that is often fatal. He had fallen off the motorbike a couple more times; he had been struck in the face by a cricket ball—a week after a young man, playing on the same pitch, had been killed by a ball—and brought home to Ellie covered in blood. Physical injuries were becoming a way of life. Pushing himself to his limits—even flinging away the idea of limits—Hawke suffered over the years broken wrists, sprained ankles, torn ligaments, smashed fingers, cuts, contusions and temporary paralysis from spinal injury.
There was, too, emotional hurt. He was deeply in love with Hazel but their marriage had been delayed and delayed and now he was leaving her. They wanted to have children. Their friends were already parents. A six-year engagement was cause for derision—as Hazel had accepted for some time and Hawke was accepting now, for the first time. In the days before his departure he was overcome with angry sadness, forced to realise that his career, his commitment to duty-and-destiny, would for years, or forever, override their private lives. Hazel welcomed her role as helpmate in Hawke’s life, and along with Ellie had become his abiding champion and protector. But he was struck dumb, as he always is when distressed, gripped by a sense of horror and dishonour at delay. He had seen, for a moment, his selfishness and what burdens he was imposing upon both of them.1
He had already what Hazel later called ‘a battery of defence mechanisms’, and only those close to him had a vague uneasiness that something was disturbing him, as Bob Rogers revealed in this description of a party. It was the biggest of a round of farewells, the guests including everyone from the university Young Liberals (the future Liberal leader, Billy Snedden, was a guest) to the Communists, and was held in Rogers’ house. He wrote:
The party was one of the merriest I have ever attended. We were disturbed by the police (who had received a complaint about noise) but that was the only jarring note in the saturnalia. Bob was gay, beaming: it seemed to be one of those moments in his life when he felt that jollity could go on forever. So I was surprised when, awakened by my bladder at about six in the morning, I found Bob on his knees in the kitchen scrubbing the floor. I told him to stop making a fool of himself and leave the floor as it was. He refused. I offered to help. He told me to get out. So I left him to enjoy his puritanical conscience in his own way. About ten, someone called in to take Hawkey for a swim. I checked the house. It had been meticulously tidied. About 2 o’clock there was a call from the pub. Remnants of the party were having lunch or breakfast there. Hawkey said he needed a shower and came back to my place.
He reappeared sometime later dressed in a very conservative fashion and complaining of hunger. He refused to drink. I should have smelt a rat. Bob said he needed to get across to Subiaco in a hurry, so I drove him over. On the way we discussed some of the intellectual foibles of our guests and I asked him casually, but somewhat to the point, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Just drop me off in Rokeby Road’, he said.
I said, ‘Yes, but where are you going?’
As we were nearly at Rokeby Road he had to come clean: the Congregational Youth were giving him a grand farewell starting at 6 o’clock. I was entranced! I made a quick check and knew I was shaved and moderately well dressed. I then expressed my pleasure at going to a Congregational Youth dinner. I had never been to one and I looked forward to the occasion very much. I looked forward to the opportunity of attempting to fathom . . . We had reached the Congregational Hall.
‘You are not coming in’, Bob said.
‘What!’
‘You smell of drink.’2
On Saturday, 15 August 1953, Hawke was to set sail for England. He had, as usual, neglected his preparations until it seemed he would miss the boat. As usual, too, friends and relations rallied round and Hawke himself had an eleventh-hour burst of intense activity and somehow, amid alarums and confusion, he got on board the Dominion Monarch in time, with his papers in order and some money borrowed from a parishioner to help with small luxuries while abroad.
He was so broke that when he had won the Rhodes scholarship he had been able to afford only the cheapest passage, and had booked on a rustbucket called the Mooltan, known jocularly as the smallpox ship. But during 1953 one of the windfalls that were to become normal for him occurred: the Shaw Savill line reverted to a prewar policy of giving free return first-class berths to Rhodes scholars. Instead of travelling in a six-bunk cabin below the waterline next to the engine room of the smallpox ship he sailed in a stateroom of the well-found Dominion Monarch. He enjoyed himself inordinately and, having stayed up until three in the morning at a party following a call at the Canary Islands, caught a chill, had to be carried ashore in England and was taken by ambulance to Southampton Hospital, with pneumonia.
The college he had chosen at Oxford was University, one of the cheaper, smaller colleges. He had picked it for its price and because he was attracted by the work of a don there. Hawke said,
There had been earnest discussions back at the University of Western Australia about which was the oldest of Oxford’s colleges—Merton or Univ. [An Oxford joke has it that King Arthur founded University.] When I first arrived and got shown to my rooms I was quite sure which was the oldest—University was, and I had the oldest rooms in it. In the bedroom there was a washstand with a bowl which my scout, Ernie, who was 180 years old, would fill each morning with warm water. The bathroom was downstairs. There was a coal fire, which Ernie used to light, and that left the room warm enough to freeze your balls. And there was some dreadful old furniture and a piece of bald carpet on the floor. My first impression was that it was all so bloody ancient and so unfunctional a place in which to live. But the sheer beauty of Oxford, the tradition as much as the beauty, hits you as soon as you arrive there—Magdalen and All Souls and Balliol.
On the whole, however, the mystique of Oxford, which in the 1950s was still considered the most significant university in the world, affected him little. ‘I thought there was a fair degree of bullshit about Oxford. There was a lot of pretension and genuflecting to the glories of tradition. People called the terms Trinity, Michaelmas and so on. I called them First, Second and Third.’
He was quickly nicknamed ‘Digger’. Graham Freudenberg wrote in A Certain Grandeur:
Robert James Lee Hawke may prove to be the first completely modern Australian politician. He was the only Australian to have left Oxford more convincedly Australian than before he went there. Oxford had much the effect on Hawke as Cambridge had on Lee Kuan Yew a decade before; both learnt that there was nobody better than them there, but that their destiny lay absolutely at home. Hawke, in his generation, was the most significant of those who learned in England to patronise the English, as the English had patronised the Australians for six generations.3
Because Hawke had failed to win the Rhodes on his first attempt he had completed all but one unit of a Bachelor of Arts degree while in Perth, and he took the examinations for this at the end of 1953 at Oxford. The normal course for Rhodes scholars with a background in Arts–Law is politics, philosophy and economics—PPE. But Hawke now had two undergraduate degrees and gaining a third seemed tiresome. He was bored by the work, older than other PPE students and homesick:
I had a feeling of pointlessness. It was winter, cold, intensely lonely. I used to go back to my grim little monk’s cell at night . . . Not having something to which I felt strongly attached—to compensate for the security I’d known for the whole of my life—made it worse. Nothing in my work was exciting and challenging.
Again he was fretting himself into a decline.
After a month or so he wrote to Hazel and asked her to throw in her job and join him as soon as she could. She replied that she had booked to arrive at Tilbury in December 1953, and sent him money to buy a van in which they could tour England and Europe the following spring. Hawke was so elated at the prospect of seeing Hazel again that on the morning he set off to meet her at Tilbury his concentration lapsed, the van went into a spin . . . Fortunately, there was no traffic.
With Hazel’s arrival Hawke was renewed and Oxford became ‘the happiest years of my life’. After a couple of weeks he had decided to cut his losses, abandon PPE and take up postgraduate work. He wanted to do a piece of original research but he had already lost too much time to write a doctoral thesis, so he opted for the lesser degree of Bachelor of Letters. He was mentally casting about for a topic that would marry his legal and economic work and that would be ‘relevant to Australia’, when one unusually bright winter morning he went to the library at Rhodes House and stood looking around at the shelves:
It was fantastic! There was a full set of Commonwealth Arbitration Reports, a complete set of Hansards, a complete set of the Convention debates and a complete set of the newspapers of the 1890s—the period of the Great Strike that had spawned arbitration. And there were all the relevant history books. It suddenly clicked! I’d study the Australian arbitration system—how wages were determined.
Afterwards he thought of that instant when something had pinched at him as another signpost of destiny.
Dr Colin Clark was then at Oxford directing the Institute of Agricultural Economics and agreed to become Hawke’s supervisor. Their first contact was cordial and Hawke was excited (as he wrote to his financial benefactor, the parishioner who had lent him money and was to lend more) about having as supervisor ‘certainly one of the foremost economists in the world today, and recently arrived from Australia, where during the past years he has been intimately acquainted with the economic situation and Government decisions at a high level’.4
With hindsight, Hawke’s enthusiasm was ironic: Clark had been the economic adviser to E. J. Hanlon’s Labor government in Queensland but in early 1952 his relationship with the premier had ruptured over the issue of a green revolution—a central concept of the National Catholic Rural Movement—in Queensland. Hawke was unaware that Clark had experienced the crisis of adult conversion to Roman Catholicism; that he had been deeply attracted by the spiritual qualities of the Rural Movement and, realising the impracticality of some of its program, had set about developing a workable economic scheme appropriate to its social concepts. Inflation in Australia was severe by 1952; Clark urged a brake on further industrialisation in favour of intensive settlement of the land; lower tariffs; and the abolition of automatic quarterly adjustments of the basic wage (to help combat inflation). He proposed that the adjustment-for-inflation system of wage fixation be replaced by productivity-geared wage increases. Clark was one of the few economists in the world who understood productivity gearing at the time. Unknown to Hawke, Clark’s concepts, transmitted through the network of Catholic intellectuals in Australia, and applied without deep understanding of economics, had just caused a revolution in wage fixation. In 1954 the name Santamaria meant nothing to Hawke. He was, however, a little uneasy about some facets of his supervisor’s personality: ‘He is an ardent R.C.’, Hawke wrote, ‘and in some respects this tends to colour his work. I am sure that during the course of my study under him there will be differences of opinion, but at all times I should be sure of stimulating supervision’.5
The stimulating supervision transmuted into an almighty row.
Clark believed he was to supervise an economics thesis that would be titled, as he recalled later, ‘The Economics of Wage Arbitration’.6 But Hawke wrote at the time, ‘the topic for research is Wage Determination in Australia’.7 Clark was expecting an economics thesis; Hawke was researching politics and history.
They continued to see each other for a couple of months until a day in second term when Clark, whose conversation is scintillating but whose manner can be cold and abrasive, lost patience with his student. Hawke said:
I had just discussed with him my ideas on the development of the arbitration system with special reference to the concept of the basic wage. And then, Clark staggered me. He said, ‘Mr Hawke, that is a matter that would be of no interest to me, but what is more important, it would be of no interest to the University of Oxford’. Me being me, I didn’t accept that. I said, ‘It may be of no interest to you, but there’s no reason to believe it would not be of interest to the University of Oxford’. And I left.
Hawke had now had two false starts. His confidence was shaken by Clark’s remark that his thesis would be of no interest to Oxford—for it suggested he would fail to get his degree—and he was indignant. ‘I find it difficult’, he wrote,
to be at all unbiased when speaking of the man . . . an individual who regards an interview with a student as an opportunity for a pedantic exercise in which he delivers himself of certain pronouncements with an air of papal infallibility, and you have the feeling that if you attempt to push your own ideas you run the threat of excommunication.8
Clark’s opinion of Hawke, as he expressed it to friends, was disdainful, particularly of Hawke’s ability with economics. The units of economics in Hawke’s Arts degree had not equipped him for the high-level economic research that Clark expected and he used later to refer to Hawke as ‘that economic drongo’.
The wardens of University College and Rhodes House found a new supervisor for Hawke, the Professor of Government and Public Administration at All Souls, K. C. Wheare, an Australian and former Rhodes scholar. Wheare’s field was constitutional law. He was considered one of the outstanding legal intellects of his time and was a kindly, diffident man, assuring Hawke he knew nothing of the development of the basic wage—perhaps Mr Hawke would teach him?
It was well into second term before this was all sorted out. I was tremendously excited about doing major research for the first time in my academic life, and I had the added edge now that I wanted to demonstrate that Clark was wrong. I had thought the man must be mad, bonkers. Later I discovered what it was all about. Clark was the economic adviser to Santamaria. He was the evil genius behind the 1952–53 basic wage case decision—had just, in fact, been involved in butchering the basic wage, and here was a young man wanting to come in and research it!
Hawke never forgave Clark. In Oxford the stage had been set for his passionate assault upon the wage decisions of the Australian arbitration system.
Meanwhile, his decision to become a researcher had altered the way he looked at Oxford itself. He began to appreciate it as a sanctuary of freedom and tolerance. To the east, Europe was struggling out of the rubble of war, and across the Atlantic the United States was deranged with McCarthyism. At home the ALP was boiling with sectarian hatreds, and Liberalism, in its ‘first, fine careless rapture’, was persecuting its political enemies. In the town of Oxford itself, in the tea shops, young men with crewcuts and sky-blue uniforms were a constant reminder that Europe and America now awaited nuclear war with the Soviet Union, for the airmen came from a base a few kilometres out of town, from which bombers armed with nuclear warheads flew on exercises twenty-four hours a day. But in the colleges Communists held professorships and walked the quadrangles with the springy step of free men. The University of Oxford seemed, Hawke said, ‘an island in a mad world’. In the safety of isolation he had, for the first time ever, the opportunity to please himself entirely.
I’d made a deliberate decision before I went there to put a moratorium on politics, student and party, because I knew that when I went back to Australia I’d be deeply involved in politics, probably for the rest of my working life. I decided to enjoy Oxford, but on my terms. I picked my friends in a way which had no care of the future. I had all kinds of relationships, just for relationship’s sake—a pleasure I’ve never been able to have in any other two years of my life since.
His companions ranged from Sir Howard Florey (who developed penicillin) to a Dorset policeman. For no cost he indulged in a pleasure that he could not afford in Australia: he joined the Royal Air Force Reserve and learned to fly.
Hawke’s friends (who had noted the way he piloted land transport) predicted that he would kill himself in an aeroplane. It was, however, his motor vehicle, the van known around Oxford as the fornicatorium, that led to trouble. In late 1954 he was at an Air Squadron dinner where one of the guests became paralytically drunk. With the help of another student, Jimmy Allan, Hawke drove the boy home and put him to bed. It was after midnight, pouring with rain, and Hawke himself had been drinking. A police car followed the van back to the squadron party then, as Hawke got out, the police seized him and accused him of stealing the van. The ancient, once murderous, town-versus-gown feeling in Oxford was still strong and police harassment of students was common. Hawke was loud in his indignation. The commandant of the squadron had to be called out to vouch that the van was not stolen, and that seemed the end of the matter. But a few days later the police called on Hawke with a summons for dangerous driving.
Already he was something of a hero, a Wild Colonial Boy, to sections of the student community, particularly those in the sporting club, Vincent’s. On the day his case was to be heard his friends packed the gallery of the magistrate’s court. Hawke had not expected that the police would lie under oath, but they did. He was convicted, fined £40 and had his licence suspended for six months. His supporters heckled the police and the magistrate, and a number of them were arrested and charged with contempt. The case was reported locally, and in the West Australian press, under the headline ‘Rhodes Scholar on Dangerous Driving Charge’. Hawke said, ‘I felt terribly ashamed. I was also very angry—it was a cook! I decided to appeal, and if I lost the appeal to throw it in and go home.’
At the University of Western Australia Hawke had never joined in student pranks, and had given the impression to contemporaries that ‘he thought such things were beneath him’. But at Oxford in November 1954 he was again caught by the police as he attempted to steal a street lamp. He was convicted and fined £5.
His second conviction complicated his appeal against the first. Hawke engaged a barrister, Oliver Popplewell, for the appeal. Popplewell wanted to bring up as evidence of Hawke’s driving experience his previously clean driving record, but if he were to do this the police would bring forward Hawke’s conviction for attempted theft. This had been such a footling matter that it had not attracted the attention of the press; Clem and Ellie were unaware of it. ‘Bob was very anxious that his parents shouldn’t get to hear about the street lamp’, Popplewell said, and took instructions from Hawke to present the case in a different way. The police had said that Hawke had put his arm out the rolled-down driver’s window and made a vulgar gesture at them. But the driver’s window could not be rolled down, for it was made up of one fixed and one sideways sliding glass panel. Hawke told Popplewell to ask the police: how far was the van’s window down when the defendant put his arm through it and made the gesture? As events turned out, the constable said the window was three-quarters to fully down; the sergeant that it was fully rolled down, and this time their perjury was revealed.
The appeal was heard in the Oxford Quarter Sessions in March 1955 before Mr A. C. Longford, the Deputy-Recorder. The main witness for Hawke was Jimmy Allan, a cricket Blue and also a member of the Worcester College rugby team, which on the day of the appeal was playing an intercollege final. To Popplewell’s and Hawke’s horror, when Allan was called he did not appear. The session was adjourned. Popplewell had not yet questioned the police.
A few minutes later Allan arrived breathless, covered in mud, and without a tie. An apocryphal story circulated later that he had come into court wearing a Hawk’s tie—the Hawk’s Club being the Cambridge rival of Vincent’s. Popplewell ‘washed him and brushed him up a bit and put a tie on him’, and Allan entered the box.
The Deputy-Recorder was testy about the adjournment and demanded why Allan was late. When Allan admitted he had been playing rugby Longford became even more irritated and upbraided the young man for wasting the court’s time. Allan had a Scots temper and replied it was important that he play, because it was the first time his college had been in Cupper’s final. The case seemed lost. Longford glared, then abruptly asked, ‘Which college?’
On hearing that it was Worcester, Longford’s manner changed: ‘That was my father’s college’, he said wistfully.
Popplewell recalled, ‘And from that moment on everything Jimmy Allan said was accepted by the judge. The police’s lie was exposed, their reliability was destroyed and we romped home, with costs, and had an enormous party that evening in Vincent’s.’
After this troublesome period Hawke settled once more to ‘enjoying my academic work beyond description and playing cricket to saturation point’. His working method was already established. It was a system of alternating intense pressure and détente. A don described it later:
In summer he drank excessively, wenched excessively, played cricket excessively. We thought he was going to the dogs. When winter came, he stopped drinking, stopped wenching, and studied excessively. We thought he’d do himself an injury from over-work. But when summer came he forgot the library, returned to his girls and his beer. That was Digger for you.9
Hawke said, ‘I had only three terms in which to prepare a 70 000 word thesis’. In fact, he had five, but his determination to play and his need for pressure made the other two a mental blank. As co-workers were to discover later, when Hawke has decided on a period of indolence it is impossible to cajole him out of it or to coax him into consideration of serious matters. Conversely, when he has marshalled his attention to a problem, he refuses to be distracted from it, and gives the impression that he has not only intellectually but physically entered into it.
Because it is a method that lacks administrative planning, to be effective it needs immense energy, a hit of inspiration and some luck. Many people agree with Hawke’s own assessment that he is lucky, but half his luck is boldness.
As a cricketer at Oxford Hawke was unlucky. He was twelfth man in the Oxford team, and although he toured the counties for months he was never called upon to bat and so failed to win a full Blue. But academically he had good fortune. In 1955 he won a six-week scholarship to the Institute of American Studies in the Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, for a residential course in American industrial law and relations. Leading American academics and bureaucrats in the field of industrial relations conducted the lectures. Among them were the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics and the Director of Community Affairs from the Jewish Labour Committee, Ben Seligman, who became later Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. Seligman was attracted to Hawke and ‘took me under his wing, another father-figure thing, I suppose’. Like other men who felt a desire to indulge Hawke, Seligman was tolerant of his protégé’s harum-scarum behaviour and took it in his stride when, as Hawke’s host at a performance of The Magic Flute, his guest fell asleep.
Hawke had his usual last-minute administrative chaos when his thesis was due to be handed in. As usual, friends rallied around and the work was finished in time. In December 1955 he presented himself in Schools for the viva voce on his topic, which was titled, ‘An appraisal of the role of the Australian Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration with special reference to the development of the concept of the basic wage’. It broke new ground and survived for a quarter of a century as an introductory text for students of the history of industrial law. The Salzburg work had enabled him to include a comparison between the Australian system of wages arbitration and the American system of collective bargaining. He had gained from Wheare an understanding of the Australian Constitution and its weaknesses, and a desire to see it reformed.
When I arrived for the viva the chairman said, ‘Mr Hawke, you’re in the fortunate position of knowing more about your subject than any of us’. They complimented me on the thesis. We had a genial yarn and that was it. I was a Bachelor of Letters.
Hawke’s thesis is not so much the work of an intellectual, in the sense of a theorist, as of a forceful intellect, a honed, logical mind concerned with practicalities. The last paragraph reads:
At the time when it was becoming a nation Australia made a bold experiment [by establishing the arbitration system]. If the experiment . . . has become an inadequate instrument of self-realisation, Australia should recognise the fact and, equally boldly, seek to improve the instrument.10
These written thoughts of a postgraduate student are, at heart, a politician’s speech. Aged twenty-six and unemployed, Hawke was addressing not his English examiners, but the Australian people.
His two insouciant years were over. When he arrived back in Perth in the summer of 1956 he discussed with Albert Hawke the possibility of a seat in parliament.