Hawke’s youthful fantasy about becoming prime minister seemed, he said, when he cast a condescending backward glance at it in the summer of 1956, to be no more than that: a fantasy of youth. Examining the same idea again, with his Uncle Bert, he believed it could be realised: ‘I talked to him in terms of a political career and obviously, if I had a political career, I would want to go to the top’. No seat was immediately available and anyway Hawke’s formal education was incomplete: he had won a research scholarship to the Australian National University, which he was committed to take up in the early part of 1956. At the ANU he was to write a doctoral thesis on the basic wage; he would be the first PhD student in the Faculty of Law there. But before he began a new stretch as a student he had a different commitment: now that the enforced bachelorhood of the Rhodes scholarship was behind him he was free to marry Hazel.
Their wedding was in Trinity Church, Perth, on the afternoon of 3 March, a day with temperatures higher than 38°C and the air heavy with an approaching thunderstorm. A guest recalled:
We were all dressed up and perspiring. Hawke’s Uncle Bert gave the toast to the bride and groom and it felt like eight hours, though it probably only went on for forty minutes. It was a hot and long reception and there was only lemon cordial to drink.1
Hazel, whom the family described on ordinary days as ‘bubbly’, was laughing as she came out of the church on Hawke’s arm; in their wedding photographs he is looking at her with a grin of rapt smugness. After a honeymoon on the coast at Yallingup they set out, broke and still owing the money borrowed for Oxford, for University House, Canberra.
In 1956 the national capital was an expanse of paddocks, bush and mountains surrounding a cluster of suburbs and government buildings. Kangaroos did not hop in the main street but they were a common sight on the edges of town; magnificent parrots—black and sulphur-crested cockatoos, galahs, rosellas and lorikeets—visited domestic and public gardens in noisy flocks. There was no lake then and few restaurants outside the modest hotels and clubs. For entertainment at night there were the pubs, a couple of cinemas and the Blue Moon Cafe in Civic, specialising in fried things. The Australian National University, almost at the centre of town, was a dozen buildings, some fibro huts, playing fields, lawns and bushland. ‘We were used to small towns. We enjoyed Canberra’, Hazel said.
University House was, by the standards of the city and the times, de luxe accommodation. It was new, attractively designed and centrally heated. Few of those who lived there liked it. There were no cooking facilities in its apartments and meals were taken in a communal dining room; its rules were strict and quirky: pregnant women were not allowed to be residents, for example. The Master of University House, Professor A. D. Trendall, was a man of extremely tidy habits who, on entering a scholar’s apartment, would immediately begin to straighten up piles of books or other articles lying out of place. There were no undergraduates in residence but amorous liaisons on the premises were against the rules. ‘It was run like a girls’ boarding school’, complained a senior academic. ‘The rules made people break out.’ In due course Hawke broke out in spectacular fashion.
The Hawkes’ next-door neighbours were Peter Coleman and his wife, Verna. Coleman, who later had a distinguished career in journalism and a less distinguished one in New South Wales Liberal politics, was at the time uncertain of his future. He had attended the London School of Economics, had been a teacher in the Sudan, and had come to the ANU to read social philosophy. On his first day there he felt uneasy with the university’s atmosphere, which he described as ‘flab Lib-Lab’, and with University House, and was already doubting his decision to live there when, after a few hours, he met Hawke.
Bob was pleasantly atypical—he had an intense vitality. He was obviously a man from a wider world and was a most interesting and lively person. I thought, ‘Oh, here’s somebody to be friends with!’ We chatted for a bit, then he turned round and shouted, ‘Hizel’ in that nasal, West Australian voice, and she came over. She seemed like a jolly, country girl—good humoured, with a very flat voice . . . I envied Bob’s sense of direction. His academic work had been of a piece, it all fitted together. He was a man following his star.
They had not long been residents in University House when, in the same week, Hazel and Verna Coleman discovered they were pregnant. Both couples had to move: from University House to the university-owned flats in Masson Street, Turner, where again, they were neighbours.
Hawke was delighted by the prospect of fatherhood and wanted his first child to be a son. ‘He was so insistent about having a son that he gave the impression that Hazel’s destiny in life was to be his wife and to have his son—something which I, then a bachelor, found extremely odd’, a fellow scholar recalled. In January 1957 Hazel gave birth to a daughter, whom they christened Susan Edith, and called Susie. ‘When we saw her we were overboard!’ Hawke said. He was an extravagantly affectionate father and treated friends to descriptions of the undreamed of wonders of Susie—her first smile, the eruption of teeth, crawling. When she was about a year old he was in Melbourne and telephoned Hazel in Canberra; the person who overheard his conversation was astonished: ‘He didn’t even say hello to Hazel, but as soon as she answered the phone demanded, “Is Susie walking yet?” ’
Hawke responded to the role of head of family with a burst of domesticity modelled on Ellie’s example as a gardener. He set out to grow the best vegetables in Canberra, where the months of frosts and dry summers make the going hard. ‘Supposedly it was to save money, but he treated it as a challenge and grew things that would have won prizes in a horticultural show’, Coleman said.
He used fish and vegetable compost and would go around the local fish and fruit shops collecting their detritus. It was like farming—squalid and hard work. We were fascinated to watch him spending days digging in fishheads and fishguts, out in the sun.
The Colemans were also intrigued by the periodic appearance of a local Congregational minister, who came to mow Hawke’s lawn. Hazel remarked later, having observed for years the phenomenon of people eagerly offering themselves to Hawke’s service, ‘Bob’s supporters do everything for him—except blow his nose’.
Coleman continued,
Bob had charm, even charisma: the word was just coming into common use then. There was always a group of people around him, at the ANU usually younger students, who would do what he wanted. While I was very attracted to him I was also repelled—that is too strong a word—uneasy, about being with him when he was in his ‘public figure’ role, performing, being the hail-fellow-well-met centre of a fan club.
Hawke had been at the ANU only a few weeks when the position of scholar’s representative, with a seat on the university council, came up for election. Coleman encouraged him to stand and ‘he walked in’. Hawke was also involved in a political discussion club and played first-grade cricket. He had been a lusty, wild-hitting batsman before he left Australia; at Oxford he was described as overly confident and impatient, hooking too soon. He said, ‘I had natural talent as a cricketer, but it was undeveloped until I had coaching at Oxford’. The ANU had only two first-grade cricketers playing for the Australian Capital Territory, one of them Hawke. Some observers thought that the effect of coaching had inhibited him so that now, in place of his full-blooded swipes at the ball, he was ‘a bit of a prod and poke man’, determined to avoid getting out but not yet master of the Zen-like cricket of England. ‘In those days Australians played effective cricket; the English achieved grace’, the ANU historian (and cricket buff), Manning Clark, said.
One day, however, playing for the ACT in Newcastle, Hawke had a second experience of what seemed supernatural grace:
Something happened—I felt as if I were out of my body. I was hitting the ball and I suddenly knew that I couldn’t miss it—every ball was coming straight to the bat. They changed bowlers and went through contortions to try to get me out but I just hit them and hit them—fours and sixes—until I was 78 not out. There was a New South Wales talent spotter there and he rushed over and talked about selection trials for me, said I should try out for a non-metropolitan team. I told him that wasn’t me out there, it was somebody else playing. Next game I was out for a duck.
Within months of arrival in Canberra Hawke’s ascendancy was established; he was, in the words of Ross Martin (later Professor of Political Science at La Trobe), ‘the student star’. But in January the following year his high standing with the university establishment was swiftly and vigorously lowered.
A gathering of bishops was staying at University House on the night of a party there, at which Hawke was a guest. A professor who was host to the bishops got out of bed to complain that the noise was preventing his guests from sleeping; he ran into Hawke. There is an ornamental lily pond at University House that was known then, because of the pride Trendall took in it, as the Master’s Pond. Hawke offered to throw the professor into the Master’s Pond. Later that night, accompanied by a group of admirers, Hawke went swimming in it. Next day the professor lodged a complaint against Hawke with the vice-chancellor; Hawke resigned from the university council. Had he not done so he would have been dismissed.
This was only one of many escapades. ‘We used to see Hazel crying’, Coleman said.
She was very supportive of Bob, you always knew that she felt he was a special person, that he had a great career ahead of him, and she would become upset when he was getting into scrapes that could damage his future. She used to say, ‘It’s Oxford all over again’. I often saw her take him to task, in a good-humoured way, about his behaviour. In those days Bob talked freely about the rows with the police he’d had at Oxford, and his great beer-drinking competition. Later he preferred not to mention those things and got angry with me for writing about them.
In Canberra Hawke became friends with two of the town’s great characters: Max Newton and Dr Ron Hieser. Newton had been Hawke’s verbal sparring partner at Perth Modern School and was considered along with another pupil, John Stone (who became secretary of the Treasury), to be an intellectual phenomenon. Newton had been to Cambridge and taken a First in economics and in Canberra was working as a journalist for the John Fairfax group. Hawke had not liked him at school, where Newton was known as ‘a swot’; their friendship in Canberra was unstable and electric with challenge. Together with Ron Hieser, Hawke’s closer friend, they drank in the back bar of the Canberra Hotel. Both Hieser and Newton had a touch of genius: Newton had a brilliant career as an economic journalist then became the publisher of a newspaper of vulgar titillation for several years before getting a new lease of life in his fifties, as one of the outstanding economic writers in the USA. Hieser worked on the development of econometrics in Australia, but became an alcoholic invalid in his fifties, and died before he turned sixty. Hieser had left school at fifteen, had various jobs, joined the Communist Party, spent five years in the AIF and was, by the late 1950s, a Left-wing member of the ALP. He already had a gargantuan appetite for liquor of all types and for argument; he was broken-hearted over the disarray within the ALP and had embraced the politics of despair—a subject over which he and Hawke constantly disagreed. He found Hawke ‘completely uninterested in theory—he knew as much about Marx as the average journalist: Bob was a practical politician’. Hawke considered Hieser’s despair useless and self-indulgent. Manning Clark recalled, ‘They were an inseparable trio for a while. They came to play ping-pong at my house one day, rushing in together—it was like a huge snowball flying through the door—then rushed out together in a sort of ballet.’ Hieser, who was eight years Hawke’s senior and capable of bettering him in argument, was in the opinion of many a bad influence on Hawke.
John Knight, Hawke’s old friend from Perth who had helped him win presidency of the Guild by bringing in Liberal Club votes, had also moved to Canberra and was working in the Treasury. He recalled:
I earned £28 a fortnight clear—we were all broke in those days and who ever had money spent it. One Friday in a non-pay week Bob rang me at two o’clock in the afternoon and invited me to join him and Ron Hieser in the pub. I told him I couldn’t leave work. Hieser then came on the line and demanded that I come to the pub. Ron was much more aggressive than Bob—he was aggressive drunk or sober. When I told Ron I was broke he slammed the phone down. About an hour later I looked up to see Bob and Ron standing beside me, both of them in jolly spirits. ‘Give us five quid’, Bob said. I told him I was skint. Ron bellowed, ‘Whaddya mean, you’ve got no money? They don’t pay you enough! Where’s Lennie?’ Lennie was Lenox Hewitt [later Sir Lenox], a first assistant secretary of the Treasury. At that stage, as a base-grade clerk, I regarded class elevens as gods. My boss, Laurie Burgess [later president of the Superannuation Board] was an eleven. Burgess called me over and told me to make my friends leave the office. I pleaded with them, and after a while they disappeared. Then a bit later there was a commotion from the direction of the sanctum sanctorum, the first assistant secretary’s office. Bob and Ron had gone to the men’s lavatory, removed all the paper towels and rolls of lavatory paper and made a carpet with it, stretching from the lavatory, along the corridor and into the office of Hewitt’s stenographer, up to Hewitt’s door. They had stationed themselves there and were refusing to leave until they had spoken to Hewitt about his economic management in general and my low wages in particular. We tried threatening, then pleading, with them. It was no good. They finally left when Burgess handed over £5. It took me weeks to repay him.
Hieser was close to the Labor leader, Dr H. V. Evatt, and introduced Hawke to him, mentioning that Hawke was doing research work for the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Hawke said,
Evatt asked me, ‘How can you work for the ACTU? They’re the Groupers—there are Clerks [Union officials] and Ironworkers on its executive.’ I replied, ‘You don’t avoid the ALP because there are some people in it with whom you disagree’, and went on to have a violent argument. I told him I thought he was bloody mad.
Already Evatt’s extraordinary memory was beginning to fail, but it was not realised then that a tragic mental decay was overtaking him. Hawke had been right: Evatt, always eccentric, was going mad.2
Some time after his first meeting with Evatt, Hawke and Hieser were in Melbourne together and attended a celebration in the Richmond Town Hall for the federal Member for Yarra, Jim Cairns, who had just been awarded his doctorate. Evatt was presiding. He, Hawke, Hieser and some others moved on to the Windsor, which at that time was the leading hotel in Melbourne. Evatt, who had been a High Court judge, had another argument with Hawke, on this occasion about constitutional law. At some stage he left and Hawke and Hieser continued drinking until about 2 a.m. On the way out they came across a corridor of rooms outside the doors of which hotel guests had placed their shoes to be cleaned. ‘Look how these rich bastards demean the workers!’ Hawke said. He and Hieser rushed up and down the corridor rearranging all the pairs of shoes, placing brown ones with black ones, long ones with short ones, until there was not a matching pair in the corridor. When they discovered they had three odd shoes left over they threw them down the lift well.
Some months later Hawke and Hieser were again in Melbourne, drinking in a bar alongside some supporters of the National Civic Council, the body organised by B. A. Santamaria to maintain his anti-Communist campaign in the trade unions, and one closely associated with the Democratic Labor Party. The Split in the ALP was recent. Hieser and Hawke, ostensibly having a private conversation, talked loudly and provokingly about the NCC, until the other men wheeled around with their fists up. They ran out to a back lane, pursued by the NCC men, one of whom had marked down Hawke and was aiming to king-hit him. Hawke, who has never learned to box (and who abhors physical violence on principle, but when drink-taken would sometimes forget), leapt away, fell and crashed his forehead on the street, splitting open an eyebrow. The NCC men fled. Hieser took Hawke to Royal Melbourne Hospital, where the casualty doctor on duty was Chinese. Hieser said,
Bob’s presence of mind was beautiful. He was covered in blood and he looked up at the doctor and asked, ‘Are you from Taiwan? Or Formosa?’ The doctor murmured, ‘Taiwan’. Bob cocked his good eyebrow at me and said, ‘Hit by the NCC. Stitched by the Kuomintang!’ Basically, Bob was strait-laced, but he had an imp inside him which leavened the conventional lump . . . Oh, I envied his vitality.
Hawke’s persona took on its mature form at the ANU. To male contemporaries—and the university was largely a male world—he presented the image of an excessively virile, vigorously intelligent, part-larrikin Australian mate. He was febrile in his boisterousness: indeed, a sort of fever seems to surround Hawke often when he is in company—even badinage on the telephone with friends will make him sweat. He was humorous and aggressive, and hectoring in debate. The ANU was self-consciously an intellectual meritocracy and Hawke’s determination to be a winner further encouraged in him the style of an intellectual bully. Coleman said,
He was a formidable opponent in his area of specialisation and he was very well informed on political matters, but in social philosophy he was a lightweight, and always regarded as one. Argument with Bob was not an intellectual excitement, for his intellect was limited, as were his interests—he had, for example, no interest in literature, the theatre or music, except for pop music. Li’l Abner and Reedy River were two popular musicals in those days; Bob had the records. I watched him one day play Reedy River about twenty times . . . It was his personality that was impressive. A strong, attractive personality.
Hawke was given to outbursts of sarcasm, or worse, when thwarted in argument. One night at a party he became so irritated by a scholar who was refusing to accept the logic of his case that he shoved her backwards into a wall, roaring, ‘I’ll bang some sense into you!’ His friendship with Coleman was finally ruptured a few years after leaving the university when, during a night of political discussion, Hawke lost all patience with Coleman’s now solid Liberal views and, according to Coleman, ordered his German shepherd dog to drive Coleman from the house. Hawke has no memory of this incident. Whatever did happen, Coleman was not bitten nor threatened by the German shepherd, with whom he was on good terms. He said,
Hazel was almost in tears, and saying, ‘Oh, Bob!’ After that Bob put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Well, Coley, we had a good barney, eh?’ It was an attempt at the old winning mateyness. I don’t mind a man who loses his temper. It was not his sooling the dog on to me that did it, but I realised I no longer knew the private man . . . [On the other hand] even at the ANU Bob had that soothing, mediator’s ability that became famous later. Two of our neighbours at Masson Street, both of them academics, and one a philosopher, had a row over some domestic issue and by agreement they called Bob in to settle it for them.
Few people at the ANU glimpsed ‘the carefully hidden, private Hawke’ that Bob Rogers had discovered at the University of Western Australia. But older men sensed that beneath the public image there was a different personality. One such observer was a resident in University House, who often heard Hawke arriving late at night at the door of Emily Sadka, a Sephardic Jewess who had lived in Western Australia and had been to Oxford. She was about ten years Hawke’s senior and was a woman of rare strength of character, visually enforced by exaggeratedly Semitic features. Conventionally ugly, her face had often, too, a sudden beauty. She died young. A friend of Sadka’s recalled,
Emily had a great sense of Biblical morality: This is Just, this is Unjust. She talked not like an orthodox Jewess but like an emancipated Jewess stepping out of the Bible. She was reticent, but at critical moments she would speak and when she did she spoke the Law of Moses. She was a retributionist: she wanted people to be punished for their sins, she demanded that they walk in the lee of Mount Sinai. Emily had an appeal to people who had a serious interest in life; she herself had a particular feeling for robust Anglo-Saxon men of intellectual quality.
Nobody imagined that Hawke and Sadka were having an affair: they were not. Her neighbour said,
I would hear Bob whispering ‘Let me in, Emily’ late at night after he had spent the day boozing with his low-down friends—they could give you the low-down on anyone and were full of cynicism. Bob would come along, after that company, to Emily. It was touching how anxious he was to talk to her. I thought he was a soul in torment, looking for purification.
This observer had realised that beneath Hawke’s gregarious machismo there was what Rogers had seen: a sterner character who sat in judgment and loathed the sharp operator—who was, sometimes, himself. What Hawke shared with Sadka was a system of values built upon the teachings of the Hebrew prophets: they could talk to each other in a private grammar.
One of Hawke’s closest older friends—‘a bloke I loved’—was Sam Stoljar, then a Reader in Law at the ANU. Stoljar revelled in the excitement of ideas and had been on the lookout for Hawke from the time he arrived in Canberra because Professor Wheare had written from Oxford recommending Hawke to Stoljar as a man of great ability. Stoljar said,
The flighty playboy would make fifty thousand circles around Emily’s door before he would knock. Bob was not a playboy at heart. In spite of all his childishness, frivolities, pranks and drinking, and being a wild man—in spite of all these things he was sound at the core. There was a constancy to his convictions, he had a basic maturity. Along with the scandals he caused at the university—really, vastly innocent things—there was his concern for the public good. He was a man of energy, an improver of human life. To be a scholar in the ivory tower of your study required the kind of devotion that Bob does not have—all his interests led him away from the sleepier, less energetic, lazier if you like, academic’s devotion. Bob had to do things . . . People recognised that he was not destined for our quiet world. One evening in a philosophy talk this question was set by the lecturer: ‘On the day that Bob Hawke is Prime Minister of Australia can I say with certainty that I will still be a scholar?’
Uncertainty about the academic life had beset Hawke a few months after his arrival at the ANU, but he attacked his studies vigorously. His supervisor, Professor Geoffrey Sawer, said: ‘I was very satisfied with my first PhD student—Bob was hard-working and although he would go on benders they never interfered with his academic progress’. Hawke’s discontent was twofold: the unhurried pace of academic life frustrated him, and epistemologically his thesis topic was unattainable. Sawer explained:
When Bob started his research he was sure he had a picture in his mind as to how to delineate the basic wage concept, but his great problem was that his topic was beyond the reach of anyone attempting to make a conceptual, as against a psychological, analysis of why the learned judges decided this or that. Matters he had set out to analyse simply defied analysis. The intellectual tool Bob had cultivated up till then—logic—would not serve his purposes. He simply had to change his topic, but it took him a long time to realise this and admit that his original vision was faulty.
Many scholars, economists in particular, have gone quietly mad with frustration or performed acrobatic leaps of sophistry in trying to apply to wage arbitration the rules of their discipline. The arbitration system is a social institution, like marriage, and can be just as wayward in rational terms. At the time Hawke was attempting, from a distance, to develop theories about its workings, the wage-fixing system was undergoing a particularly stormy and irrational period. When he finally became a part of the drama he did more than any other man, except the founder of wage fixing, Mr Justice Higgins, to force logic upon it.
A third cause of discontent with life as a student presented itself to Hawke in early 1957: he attended his first basic wage case.
At the University of Western Australia he had been inspired, he said, by an account of the career of Clarence Darrow, the great American lawyer and civil rights fighter, who had shown him ‘what you could do, against the odds, if you were intelligent, articulate, and tough’. Rejecting the practice of law as personally offensive and morally indefensible yet moving towards a career as an academic lawyer, Hawke had suddenly, in the Arbitration Commission, come face to face with a branch of legal practice that roused his deep instincts to serve the community. Here was the real world, the practical forum where, for good or ill, human lives were affected. But he was held back on the sidelines, looking on, while barristers and Queen’s Counsel argued the cases.
A roundabout path had led Hawke to the Arbitration Commission in 1957.
In mid-1956 the Australian Council of Trade Unions had called a special congress with two items on the agenda: atomic testing at Monte Bello Island and union policy on the basic wage and federal arbitration system that, under the chief judgeship of Sir Raymond Kelly, had been through a revolution.
The arbitration system had exercised three functions: it protected unionists against breadline wages; it periodically adjusted the income of unionists; it prevented and settled industrial disputes.
The protective function was fulfilled by the basic wage—the minimum that an unskilled man could be paid—that had been established in 1907 and since 1921 had been indexed for inflation. Every three months cost-of-living adjustments were made to it, automatically. The adjustments were a small, continuous check on the redistribution of income away from unionists, via price rises.
The large adjustment of income occurred at long, irregular intervals when it was widely believed that a new plane of prosperity had been reached in the nation. The primary large adjustment came through a basic wage inquiry; a secondary large adjustment occurred through a margins inquiry, the margin being that money paid for skill and added to the (unskilled) basic wage to make a single pay packet. Basic wage inquiries were marathon affairs lasting usually a year or more and occurring on average once a decade. During them arguments were made about ‘the capacity of the economy to pay’ and the ‘needs’ of a family of man, woman and ‘about three children’. There was no precise way of measuring either capacity or needs; the unions on one side and the employers on the other argued for their measurements then the arbitration judges struck a compromise between them. During the Depression the arbitration system adjusted income by reducing unionists’ wages by 10 per cent.
Dispute settlement, the system’s third function and the only one required of it by the Constitution, took up most of its time. The prevention and settlement of industrial disputes formally occurred when ‘paper’ disputes over the basic wage and margins arose; very frequently real disputes arose, and these were settled by the judges and commissioners conciliating the parties or, if conciliation failed, arbitrating. If the disputants flouted arbitration they were punished. Depending upon the temperament of the federal government, arbitration judges were empowered by legislation to punish with fines, prison or banishment—that is, deregistration. Higher wage rates for a certain industry or group of workers nearly always resulted from the settlement of a dispute. Together, the system’s three functions made up a fourth that, it can be argued, was its most important: it damped down the tendency to envy in the community. As the Australian Communist Party recognised more quickly than others, this softening effect of arbitration diminished the vehemence of socialism. Put crudely, the arbitration system has helped to keep radical and reform parties out of office in Australia.
The system had jogged along since 1904, always under attack from one vested interest group or another, and being respected for its activities—until 1950.
By a fluke that year a radical judge, Alf Foster, raised the basic wage from £7 to £8, an increase that by its magnitude staggered the employers and the government, and gave joy to the unions. Foster had led a mutiny on the Bench against the new chief judge, Sir Raymond Kelly. Kelly, too, was a radical, but a conservative one. Like Foster, who had been described by the press as ‘the red judge’, Kelly was a social engineer. He was a member of the South Australian Roman Catholic establishment, a man of gentle though authoritarian nature, eccentric and wholly well meaning. He was emotionally attracted, like Dr Colin Clark and thousands of others, to an idea that came into vogue in the late 1940s in Australia—although it was as old as the existence of cities. It was a vision of paradise regained: on a small farm, in a life of simplicity, voluntary frugality and communion with God. The mills of industry were to Kelly as dark and satanic now as they had ever been; he saw them as sucking the souls out of men’s bodies.
Unlike other enthusiasts of the ideology of the National Catholic Rural Movement, however, Kelly was in a position to make changes to the lives of millions of workers. He believed that ‘Foster’s £1’, as it was known, was a national disaster; a cause of inflation; and an encouragement for the industrial workforce to grow and, therefore, soullessness to increase. He determined to undo the damage he saw.
In 1953, in dramatic and secret circumstances, Kelly presided over a Bench of judges that revolutionised the role of the arbitration system, openly institutionalising it as manipulator of the Australian economy.3 The coup was startlingly simple: like all coups, merely a matter of abolishing one set of rules, declaring another and establishing new managers. The Bench that year abolished automatic quarterly cost-of-living adjustments; it declared that henceforth wages—money wages not real wages, which were falling—would rise only when the economy had capacity to pay and that decision would be made by the managers of this new scheme for the distribution of cash, the judges in arbitration. This extraordinary power to decide upon the basic necessities of life for the workforce was vested in men who knew almost nothing about economics, not even how they could measure ‘capacity to pay’ in any sensible fashion or if, indeed, it was measurable. Nor were they familiar with poverty. Sociologically, the judgment was a stimulant to envy. One example: all the states except South Australia decided to maintain automatic adjustments; within three years workers under state awards were earning on average 19 shillings (just under £1) a week more than workers under federal awards, doing the same work, often in the same shop.
The 1953 decision convulsed the trade union movement. It had stripped workers of their protection against inflation—which had reached 22.5 per cent in 1951—and had given nothing in return, except the demand for legal fees. If the unions wanted wage rises awarded in future they would have to employ a Queen’s Counsel—Kelly did not care for mere barristers in his court—and hope that his arguments would persuade the judges that the economy had ‘capacity to pay’. The tables had been turned for Foster’s £1 and the employers gloated: they could not measure capacity to pay any more than the judges could, but the employers could scare the Bench by crying Bankrupt! And did.
As if all this were not unwelcome enough to the unions they then learned from their legal advisers that the 1953 judgment was written in such a way as to make it invulnerable to attrition. It was a monster of a document, knotted together with such ingenuity that the unions would have to persuade a future Bench to disown it in toto, for half measures were useless. After the unpredictable behaviour of the arbitration Bench in recent years another major swing of judicial minds would have raised the most serious questions; it was, therefore, most unlikely that the judges would have the nerve to disown the 1953 decision. The unions tried to persuade them to in 1956, and failed.
Meanwhile, the government had become alarmed by the bitterness in industrial life caused, in part, by the 1953 judgment, in part by the authoritarian and punitive atmosphere that the system breathed, under Sir Raymond Kelly. In early 1956 the government, using as its excuse the Boilermakers’ Case,4 split the Arbitration Court, removing the power to punish with fines and prison to a new body, the Industrial Court. It gave the economic functions and those for prevention and settlement of industrial disputes to another newly created institution, the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Mr Justice Foster, who was now seventy, believed that because of his seniority he should be made head of the Commission, but to his anger a younger judge, Richard Kirby, got the job. From the outset relations within the Arbitration Commission were strained.
Foster abhorred the 1953 judgment. Kirby, a man of more passive nature, had publicly associated himself with it, although privately the judgment embarrassed him. In 1956 Kirby presided on the Bench that refused the unions’ application to overturn the 1953 decision; he presided and refused again in 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1960. Foster believed that Kirby was naive and had been tricked by Sir Raymond Kelly in 1953; that Kirby’s continued support for Kelly’s handiwork was caused by embarrassment and timidity. Kirby was certainly a very different chief judge5 from his predecessor, Kelly; he described himself as ‘an underdog’s man’ and by temperament was a peacemaker. Hawke was making his first live contact with the arbitration system in a promising new era.
The ACTU special congress of 1956 was to discuss trade union tactics on award wages in the wake of the revolution that had taken place. Hawke asked if he might attend, was welcomed, given a seat on the platform and introduced to the president, Albert Monk, and the secretary, Harold Souter. He said, ‘It became clear to the executive of the ACTU that I knew more about the basic wage than anyone else in the country’. Souter, who had heard about Hawke through Horrie Brown, an ANU economist who had appeared for the ACTU in the 1950 basic wage case, invited him to assist by supplying historical and legal research for the first case to be argued, in early 1957, under the new annual system established by the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.
Souter’s invitation, however, was not the honour it might seem: then and later the stinginess of the trade union movement kept its peak council short of funds so that Souter was always on the alert for academics with a Labor movement bias who were willing to donate their expertise. He had been the ACTU research officer and advocate himself, but since moving into the secretary’s job there had been no replacement. Instead the ACTU briefed a Queen’s Counsel to present its cases, so that what was skimped on research was spent on fees for a silk, his junior and instructing solicitors. The ACTU advocate was Richard (later Sir Richard) Eggleston, a man whose arguments were faultless in logic and presented with exquisite lucidity of thought and whose knowledge of economics was unique in the legal profession. He was an acknowledged leader of the Melbourne Bar. For years he attempted to explain to the Bench that if ‘capacity to pay’ meant anything, it meant an increase in productivity. It seems strange now, when the concept is widely understood, but in the 1950s the legal profession in general greeted the terminology of economics with distrust and ridicule, inspired, one must suppose, largely by the intellectual snobbery that tends to attach to legal training. In 1950 and 1953 barristers had derided the work of Horrie Brown, who had developed an index for measuring productivity; in his 1950 judgment Kelly had dismissed Brown’s work as fanciful.
Eggleston’s instructing solicitor was Bob Brodney of Maurice Blackburn and Company, a firm that had advised the unions for more than thirty years and had its offices in the ACTU building, which was across the road from the Melbourne Trades Hall and next door to that other hub of trade union life, the Lygon (later the John Curtin) Hotel.
Eggleston opened the 1957 case but had to depart shortly afterwards for an employers’ brief in the Privy Council, ‘and that’, in the words of Sir John Moore (the second president of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission), ‘was the beginning of the end of Dick Eggleston as far as the ACTU was concerned’. Eggleston left carriage of the unions’ argument to his junior, who lacked Eggleston’s flair and authority. Hawke sat in court during the case and recalled, ‘My material was butchered by the junior! I suffered the tortures of the damned.’
Keith Hancock, another young academic whom Souter had asked to assist with economic research, said,
Bob took a particularly severe view of the way the case was handled. In comparison, the employers’ junior, Lindsay Williams, was continually feeding stuff to their silk, Drew Aird. Bob said the relationship between Eggleston and his instructing solicitor was irrelevant and totally inefficient.
In 1958 Hawke again assisted with legal and historical research for the unions’ wage case and again suffered a ferment of indignation. Hancock (later professor, and vice-chancellor of Flinders University) had found Hawke:
Well mannered and civilised. On one of his visits to Melbourne he stayed with my parents, who were most impressed by what a nice, quiet, refined boy he was. My mother was particularly charmed by him. He was obviously very intelligent and could grasp any type of argument quickly, including economic argument. I remember watching him do a very difficult crossword puzzle, full of historical and literary clues. Perhaps it’s a comment on how naive I was, but Hawke seemed to me sophisticated and cultured. I later began to think he was a Jekyll and Hyde character, when I heard some of the stories about him at the ANU.
Hawke similarly puzzled the Bench of the Arbitration Commission. Kirby recalled that in 1957 and 1958 the judges had watched him and had been impressed by his enthusiasm and vitality:
He was very fresh-faced and we thought he was only twenty-two or three. On occasions he was unable to sit still and we could see he was nearly going mad with frustration, wanting to jump up and have a say. We used to watch him with some curiosity and amusement, and wonder who this young cove was. One day he suddenly stepped into my chambers, introduced himself as a research scholar and started asking questions as if he were entitled to, ignoring the fact that I was of judicial rank and deciding a matter that he was involved in. He had that academic’s snobbery that he was entitled to badger anyone, and did so in a somewhat iconoclastic fashion, to knock you off your perch a bit. He asked what qualifications I thought each member of the Bench had for deciding very important questions of national economics. I told him we were chaps with trained minds, we picked up as much economics as we could, but I didn’t go into any detail because he didn’t make me feel I wanted to tell him. I went on to say that on a full Bench we did our best to work as a team, which amazed him and inclined him to ridicule. He said, ‘How can you be a team, when you’re talking about economics?’ It was something like a confessional. Finally I told him it was no good discussing the matter any more. I thought him brash and almost rude, but the overwhelming impression was that I couldn’t come to grips with him.
Besides ruffling the feathers of the chief judge, Hawke had unwittingly bumped into the internal politics of the Arbitration Commission: Kirby was trying to create a team, but he and Foster were not on speaking terms. The debacle of 1950 had arisen because Foster and Sir Raymond Kelly were not speaking. (A third silence between judges, in 1965, was to have the most far-reaching effect on Hawke’s career—and the Australian economy.)
Meanwhile, Hawke had also prodded Kirby on that other vulnerable area—the lack of economic expertise on the Bench. It was an inauspicious first encounter for both men.
By early 1958 Hawke had collected a mass of material for his thesis, he was already a part-time lecturer in law at the Canberra University College, and he had been offered a senior lectureship at the University College, to divide his time between teaching industrial law in the Law Faculty and industrial relations in the Economics Faculty. He said, ‘I had been going from one academic niche to another, it all had a logic about it, but I felt that somehow the academic life wasn’t dragging out of me all that it could’. Increasingly he had been spending his time at the ACTU. Peter Coleman wrote of Hawke in this period:
I met him in the Lygon Hotel, Melbourne, that unofficial Labor headquarters opposite Trades Hall and next to the ACTU. There, beneath faded framed pictures of old Labor leaders, present-day union officials and politicians gather to intrigue or get drunk. (The Groupers go to the Dover down the road.) Somehow we ended up at a party thrown, I think, by the Fuel and Fodder Workers’ Union in Trades Hall, and after a few speeches about the old days, some songs about the Bush, the Wild West, and the Deep South, and a good deal of beer, Bob Hawke drove me home.
As we shot along St Kilda Road, Hawke sat hunched grimly over the wheel peering through rimless glasses. At the Junction he swung, as it were, into orbit and without reducing speed spun around the circus about ten times looking for the right turn-off. Each time, as we sped past it, I called out, ‘There it is! There!’—each time too late.6 Then, apparently by a mixture of luck and intuition, he suddenly shot off at a tangent up the street leading to my flat. I last saw him disappearing . . . at the maximum speed.
Without straining things too much, the whole incident seems symbolic of Hawke at the time. Pugnacious, ambitious, full of confidence, in a hell of a hurry but not certain which way to turn and certainly not listening to anyone who wanted to advise him.7
One evening in mid-1958 Hawke was at an ACTU dinner in Usher’s Hotel, Sydney, when late in the evening the president, Albert Monk, came over to him and put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Albert was a man who erected big fences around himself. He didn’t want close friends, he didn’t want intimacy—he was frightened of it’, Hawke said.
But when he’d had a fair bit to drink he would relax. And when he did make an intimate gesture, because it was so unusual, it had a strong impact. So, he put his arm around me and what he said came out of the blue:
‘We’d like you to be our research officer. What about it?’ It seemed as if suddenly everything was falling into place, as if it were a culmination of all that had gone before, so that, in an inexorable way, everything had been leading up to that moment: I knew more about the basic wage system than anybody else. I was uniquely well equipped to do the job.
He was to work for about two years at the ACTU, preparing and arguing wage cases in the Arbitration Commission; Monk and Souter presumed that after that he would return to academic life. Their plan was that he should act as a bellwether for the unions among other academic lawyers and economists. Souter said,
We envisaged that we’d employ him for a couple of years, then replace him with someone else from the universities and in time would build up a group of academics who were interested in and sympathetic to us, and that they would spread knowledge of wages arbitration throughout the university system.
Capturing Hawke, domesticating him and setting him to work was to become the fierce obsession of many people; many of them have been disappointed, at least in their original hopes. Souter, who had persuaded Monk to hire Hawke, was soon to discover that he eluded control.
Although Hawke was certain that the ACTU job was his destiny, he did not accept immediately. Instead he began a process that, at other important times in his life, he was always to repeat: he lobbied, he built up a power base of supporters, so that when he left the ANU he did so on an indefinable but strength-giving cloud of others’ hopes and good wishes. He succeeded, too, in persuading Sawer that he should be re-awarded a fellowship to complete his doctorate when the ACTU sojourn was over. Sawer said:
He asked my advice about the ACTU job, saying it was the sort of work he would love doing and that, living in the atmosphere of unions, he could be even more effective than Eggleston. I believed that had Bob gone to the Bar he would have made a brilliant jury advocate, and in my opinion, the Arbitration Commission needed a jury advocate. I urged him to take it.
There were many other scholars whom Hawke infused with enthusiasm for the prospect of his new role; Sawer and they shared an opinion that working for the unions would be a ladder into politics for Hawke. ‘It was exciting’, Coleman said, ‘to know somebody who was spoken of as a future prime minister’. The university community believed it was watching a drama unfold towards a denouement that they, the select, knew in advance.
For their part Monk and Souter had successfully lobbied the rest of the ACTU executive to accept Hawke. Their efforts were necessary because at the time the great influx of manual workers’ children into universities—the ‘gentrification’, as it has been called, of the working class—had not begun and trade union circles were proudly anti-academic. Higher education was both frightening and cause for derision; the blue-collar ethos laid down that things working class and union were so unknown and unimaginable to an educated man from the middle class as to be beyond his comprehension or sympathy. The words ‘intellectual’ and ‘academic’ were often pejoratives for which ‘pooftah’ or ‘pansy’ could be synonyms. Hawke, aged twenty-eight, with education from three universities, never having earned his living—by union standards—in his life, was an astonishing employee for the ACTU. In his twenty-one years with that organisation he never completely overcame the class prejudice that first greeted him; initially, it was a prejudice of the Right.
When his appointment was announced the pubs buzzed with curiosity, scepticism and some loud ridicule about the outsider. Tom Dougherty, an old enemy of Monk and the mogul of the giant Australian Workers’ Union (which was still not affiliated with the ACTU and had attempted to murder it at birth), scoffed in his union’s journal ‘From Eggleston to Egghead’. Doubts about Hawke’s capacity to represent the tribe were such that the ACTU executive became nervous and established advisory panels of unionists to help him. Then Mr Justice Foster, who was to be one of the three judges Hawke would face in his first big case, sent word to Monk that he was much displeased about the change of advocates. Foster had not decided a basic wage case since 1950; he wanted, as he explained later, to overturn the 1953 decision but for that to happen he needed arguments to be presented to him with the utmost authority and persuasion. He wanted Eggleston, not some young man who was not even a barrister but had been plucked from a university course. Monk decided that, after all, Eggleston had better be the advocate. But Souter and some Left-wing members of the executive had become convinced that Hawke could and should present the case. After a couple of weeks of uncertainty, their view prevailed.
Hawke’s test was to attempt what Eggleston had failed to achieve in three years of trying: to slay the monster of 1953.
For a boy raised on David and Goliath it was the perfect start to a career.