The living representative of Hawke’s enemy was the chief judge in industry, Richard (later Sir Richard) Kirby, president of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Kirby was the only judge sitting in 1959 who had sat on the notorious Bench of 1953. He had chosen for this year’s basic wage case himself, Alf Foster and Frank Gallagher, the latter a judge who had never before sat on a basic wage case, and who did not share Foster’s radical social views. Gallagher, therefore, could be relied upon to side with Kirby. It followed that Hawke’s main task was to persuade Kirby to see the wrong-headedness of the 1953 judgment and of his decisions to uphold it in 1956, 1957 and 1958. But instead of persuasion Hawke mounted an assault of unparalleled aggressiveness upon the chief judge’s actions.
‘He is a man’, Kirby said, ‘of religious fervour’.
If the ranks of Gideon have to be slaughtered he will up and into ’em, boots and all. He has a great religious strength inside: there’s something in Bob that makes him give everything he’s got, and he’s just not a practical bloke . . . He would not try to persuade. He characterised me as a villain and a fool for the 1953 decision and for refusing to go back on it since then, and he wanted confession and repentance. He hectored me. He knew his case inside out—Gar Barwick is the only other cove I’ve known who speaks from knowledge the way Bob Hawke does. But Barwick was a great persuader. Bob just couldn’t bring himself to think, ‘How can I persuade these judges to go my way?’ It was an underlying streak of puritanism in him: I had to change my mind and into the bargain admit I had been a bloody fool and a crook as well. He could have said, ‘You can be pardoned for suspending the automatic adjustment system in 1953, but you should restore it as soon as you can, and it doesn’t matter, Your Honour, about the subtle philosophy, just do the practical thing now, be pragmatic’. That’s what a good advocate at the Bar would have come out with. Eggleston aside, I’d rank Bob Hawke above any of the silks who appeared before us, but he employed bad tactics. It’s part of the honesty of the man, of course—he would not tell a lie, he would not pretend he thought I was a decent chap and those decisions of mine had been an aberration. He was determined to rub my nose in the dirt. If only he’d shown me a way that we could get out of that ’53 decision, how we could rationalise it.
The Commission in those days was housed on the rising slope of Little Bourke Street, directly across the road from the High Court. It was a modern informal court: the building was new, the courtrooms appointed with nondescript pale timber furnishings, the judges and barristers wore neither wigs nor robes. Hawke made his first appearance, highly strung, restless in his gestures, continually pacing as he addressed the Bench above him, rolling on the sides of his shoes, gesticulating, swivelling his eyeballs to show impatience and flicking his eyebrows up and down as if they were attached to strings. ‘He danced on his brief’, a barrister said. Hawke was in the continuous motion of high nervous energy, his body language intensifying the message of his speech, all delivered in a rat-a-tat-tat of sentences bursting at up to 220 words a minute—too fast for all but the best shorthand writers—and in a very loud voice. It was said that union officials several blocks away in the Trades Hall could hear his submissions. But while there was an appearance of informality in the court, traditions died hard. The judges were used to, and expected, deference from advocates. Even Foster, the radical, had complained bitterly when the system was split in two in 1956 and powers of punishment were removed to the Industrial Court: ‘They can throw inkwells at us and we’ll be powerless to stop them!’ Hawke’s attacks upon Kirby and other judges of the cases from 1953 to 1958 would have, a few years earlier, had him put out of court, at the least; Kelly would have jailed him for contempt. Kirby and Gallagher were scandalised by Hawke; Foster, fighting with Kirby, abhorring the 1953 decision and regarding himself ‘as the godfather of any union man who appeared before us’, was delighted. Foster had a mane of white hair and eyebrows described as better than Menzies’; beneath them his dark eyes flashed with pleasure as he listened to Hawke attacking the chief judge.
On the first day of the case Foster had begun the morning by sniping at Hawke; before four o’clock that afternoon he was actively barracking for him from the Bench. The hostility between Foster and Kirby was obvious to all those in court and increased the pain that Hawke’s arguments were causing the president of the Commission, but Hawke did not soften. He showed in that case a pattern of behaviour that was consistent throughout his career as an advocate and as a politician: he fought without mercy until he had won; as soon as defeat was conceded he became magnanimous; he would not humiliate a conquered enemy.
Throughout the 1950s the employers had used as a witness a businessman and company secretary, R. P. Truman, whose evidence had been the bane of the unions. Early in the case Hawke claimed he would in due course discredit Truman’s evidence, to which Kirby remarked, ‘Mr Truman . . . can always very ruggedly defend himself’, to which Hawke replied, ‘We’ll see about that’. His attack on Truman was devastating, demonstrating that what he said now, and had said for years, was wrong. Truman’s word was left supported by only one shred of evidence—figures that he said he had checked with the Commonwealth Bank. During a lunch adjournment Hawke rang the bank and discovered that Truman’s claim was inaccurate. Kirby, now embarrassed, said the bank’s statement ought to be authenticated. Hawke offered to do this by calling the bank official to whom he had spoken. At this, the employers’ advocate, Drew (later Mr Justice) Aird announced that Hawke’s word was sufficient. Aird had realised that his witness’s evidence was fallacious, as Hawke said it was, and was admitting defeat. Truman would never again be used as a witness. But Foster wanted the employers—and by extension, Kirby—publicly humiliated and demanded that Hawke go ahead and call the bank official. To Foster’s anger, Hawke refused.
At the ANU Hawke had become friendly with the economist Horrie Brown, who had helped the ACTU for a decade and had spent a week in the witness box during the 1953 case under such strain that he had later suffered a heart attack. It was Brown who had recommended to Souter that the ACTU employ Hawke. Brown was an extremely gentle, softly spoken man, loved by all who knew him. ‘He was my mentor’, Hawke said. Before the case began Hawke spent hours with him, mastering the concepts of productivity measurements. Brown was not well enough to be a witness himself but he put Hawke in contact with another academic economist, Eric (later Professor) Russell of Adelaide University, who was. A third economic adviser for Hawke was Wilf Salter, an old friend from the University of Western Australia. Together the three men spent hundreds of hours with Hawke, teaching him economics. ‘It was like having a university degree course in a matter of weeks. It is impossible to state adequately the assistance those blokes gave me—I just could not have done what I did without them’, Hawke said.
Hawke probably knew no more economics than Eggleston, but Eggleston was a full member of the legal fraternity and a sort of mental huff had overtaken the arbitration judges at the idea that a legal brother could speak with authority on something that they did not understand. The Bench had consistently refused to allow Eggleston to put economic arguments to it. Suddenly, with Hawke—a legal outsider who, since he was not a barrister, was not entitled to and was never accorded the polite address of ‘Learned Friend’—the reasons for objecting to economic arguments from the Bar table vanished. There was no discussion: Hawke simply stood in court and addressed the judges as both a legal and economic expert. And from him, they accepted it. It was an extraordinary change, and the first step to winning his case and to bringing logic to bear on wage fixation.
Besides demanding that automatic quarterly adjustments be reinstated, Hawke’s brief also demanded that the basic wage be increased for gains in productivity. He hammered at the judges that productivity was a substitute for the nebulous term ‘capacity to pay’; he produced evidence that since 1953 productivity had increased by 10 per cent and that therefore real wages ought to have increased 10 per cent. Instead, real wages had fallen by 5 per cent. Foster, who had little idea of what productivity was at the beginning of the case, was intrigued and continually interjected with questions. Kirby, for the first time understanding the enormity of the effect upon unionists of the 1953 decision, was appalled. He said,
Bob did something that Eggleston was never able to do. He belted economic understanding into our heads. He stood there and lectured us for hours, like a schoolmaster, which I must say I did not like. Until then I’d shared the general view that productivity was a combination of efficiency and co-operation—an untidy sort of thing. He galvanised my interest in economics; I became determined to learn as much about it as I could. While I was seething with resentment against him, and spurred into hostility with Alf Foster at the time, Hawke had made me realise with his economic arguments that we had not only allowed wages to fall behind prices, but also that we had allowed them to fall behind capacity, which was the very basis of our decision.
Kirby could not bring himself to overturn the 1953 decision, but Hawke had persuaded him to take a critical step towards reform: he decided that the basic wage must be increased to at least the level it would have been had automatic adjustments not been cancelled. Foster wanted the reintroduction of automatic adjustments and an increase in the basic wage of £1 (20 shillings). Gallagher, as expected, sided with Kirby in refusing automatic adjustments, and wanted to increase the basic wage by only 10 shillings. Kirby struck a deal: the judges increased the basic wage by 15 shillings, bringing it to 2 shillings more than if the old system had not been ruined.
It was a magnificent victory for Hawke, and instantly established him with the trade union rank and file as a brilliant advocate. He had arrived in the wage-fixing arena at the luckiest of moments: the Arbitration Commission was not yet three years old; the conceptual underpinnings of wage fixation were in need of reform; he had a chief judge open to rational argument and vulnerable to the plight of ‘the underdog’; and, most importantly, the economy was surging ahead in the great wave that had swelled up at the end of the war and was rolling forward—to crash, in 1974.
Hawke had only a few weeks’ respite before his next case began. This was the first margins case to be heard for five years. It was particularly challenging, because for the first time Hawke was ‘getting right up to the work face’, as he put it: learning what actually happened in shops. His brief had two strands: that the economy had ‘capacity to pay’ and that because the arbitration system had kept margin awards artificially low for several years (Kelly’s influence, again), a parallel system of over-award payments had sprung up and spread, and that therefore the Commission ought to be realistic and award to unionists ‘the going rate’.
For evidence about ‘the going rate’ Hawke produced more than a dozen union officials as witnesses; among them were John Ducker, then a lowly organiser for the Iron Workers, and Cliff Dolan, from the Electrical Trades Union. ‘The long-haired intellectual’, as Hawke was still characterised, impressed Dolan with his confidence in dealing with senior opposing counsel and his trade union witnesses. They became friendly. No friendship sprang up between Hawke and Ducker, although Ducker was one of Hawke’s most effective witnesses. He said,
If there was an option open to John between drawing a long bow or a short one, he went for the long bow every time. He was a dedicated winner—tough and hard and aggressive, and he obviously had a future, though at the time he was a very minor figure.
Ducker, who was born in Yorkshire and spoke with a strong, expressive accent, had in due course the power to do more than most to nobble Hawke. If Ducker had had his way Hawke would not have become president of the ACTU. Later, Ducker helped to save Hawke’s political life.
The employers’ advocate in the 1959 margins case was Cliff (later Mr Justice) Menhennitt, a Queen’s Counsel and an aggressive barrister. He and Hawke quickly established a dislike for each other and their submissions and cross-examinations became punctuated with snarling and snapping. Hawke won another major victory in the margins case, securing an increase in awards of 28 per cent.
His success in the two cases made him in the eyes of the trade union movement a phenomenon. Another employers’ barrister, Jim (later Mr Justice) Robinson, said, ‘He had the reputation of being a giant killer. The results he had put on the board in the two cases of ’59 were unbelievable in terms of what had gone on since 1952–53.’
Hawke was treated as a celebrity in trade union circles. Officials now referred to ‘the brilliant advocate’; his Rhodes scholarship became a matter of communal union pride, and Hawke tactfully stopped revealing his scorn for Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes scholars; his string of degrees was remarked upon with a certain puzzled favour instead of derision. Suddenly, employing ‘an intellectual’, as the trade union movement and industrial journalists insisted on describing Hawke, seemed an interesting idea. Jim Baird, the industrial officer of the Amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrights Union, who at the time was a research officer for the militant Boilermakers’ Society, recalled,
Bob was the only person I knew in the trade unions at a national level who had any tertiary education at all. He set out to introduce into the trade union movement arguments about economics. Looking back, it was economics of a modest level, but I can understand why: few people knew what economics was in those days. We [the Left] saw him as a good thing . . . There was a tradition in the trade union movement of making assertions and allegations, but we’d run into people who had tertiary education, who required us to prove our claims. And that was where the change in trade union thinking started to take place. It was one of the things Bob was able to do for the trade union movement: he made union arguments logical, reasonable and provable. He didn’t always win, but he set in train that process. The days of wild assertions have gone.
Thanks to Hawke’s successes, within a few years individual trade unions began to employ their own ‘intellectuals’—either men and women with university training or tradesmen who were taken ‘off the tools’ and given time to read and think. This trend would probably have occurred anyway; it is certain that Hawke’s example encouraged it, and that as advocate he gave to the Australian trade union movement something of as much value as money: a bold reinterpretation of ideas.
The employers were aghast at Hawke’s success. He had persuaded the Commission to increase the national wages bill by £130 million—or £150 million, as the Sydney Morning Herald editorial writers said, or perhaps £165 million, as Peter Coleman claimed in the Observer—and was quickly dubbed Mr Inflation. The Commonwealth Treasury was known to be furious with the Commission. In the basic wage case of 1960, the Commonwealth, represented by Eggleston, departed from its practice of presenting neutral economic evidence and openly opposed the unions’ case, saying that a wage increase would cause curtailment of plans for industrial expansion, weaken the confidence of overseas investors and cause a rapid spiralling of costs and prices. Hawke, who was asking for a 22-shilling increase in the basic wage, was so stunned by Eggleston’s submission that he momentarily thought he had misunderstood it. When his former teacher replied that indeed the government stood against him, with the employers, Hawke snapped, ‘This has never been done before’.
The Commission awarded an increase of only 5 shillings; it refused quarterly adjustments.
Hawke took the decision as a bitter defeat. He said,
In 1959 the judges had been malleable. Suddenly the dead hand of Menzies’ conservatism descended. I was very crooked on the Commission for the 1960 decision, crooked on the system … I’d been in the centre of Labor politics. I think the 1960 decision was a factor in drawing me to the Left.
Left and Right, applied to the trade union movement, are terms which came into use from the late 1950s, to replace the earlier categories of Grouper and anti-Grouper. It is impossible to give a watertight definition of Right—people, and unions, could be Right on most issues but Left on others—but, in the broad, the Right was the child of the Groupers plus all those who so disapproved of the Communist Party (although they may have been anti-Grouper) that they supported the Menzies Government’s strident anti-Communism. The Right of the trade union movement stretched from the NCC and the DLP to the centre of the ALP. The Left was everyone else. But in Victoria the Left was Lefter: radical and militant. Hawke’s style fitted the Left (although the further Left disliked not only the workings of the Arbitration Commission, but also its very existence, and logically should have disapproved of Hawke as part of ‘the system’). From the time he joined the ACTU, the Left treated him with interested curiosity, then support, then wild enthusiasm. He was for the Left a positive, progressive force. The Right, natural xenophobes—their political ancestors had invented the White Australia policy—thought of him as an outsider and therefore dangerous. After 1959 the Right treated Hawke with grudging admiration. His defeat of 1960 brought them schadenfreude. On a personal level the Right found Hawke’s lack of deference to the Bench improper and destabilising of a system that they supported though often disagreed with, but again on a personal level many Right-wing union leaders were vulnerable to Hawke’s charm. However, once Hawke had been marked by the Left as their man he was fair game for the Right, for the two power blocs battled for territory continually. Hawke, always anxious to belong to a social group, was drawn into the embrace of the Left.
By the early 1960s there were widespread rumours that he was a Communist. Even Ellie got to hear of them and, on a trip to Melbourne, took her son aside to ask if he had become a Communist. Hawke was so irritated that he replied only, ‘I’m not a card-carrying member’. In some of the employers’ ranks a canard circulated that Hawke, a crypto-Communist, had as his real aim the shattering of the capitalist system—which he would accomplish by bankrupting it with wage increases. David McBride, who became a member of the Industries Assistance Commission after many years as industrial advocate for the Electrical Trades Union, recalled that an employers’ representative said to him, ‘When I saw you and Bob Hawke kicking a football at lunchtime I realised he was just a human being. I’d thought he was a Com.’ The man went on to make it clear he had considered Hawke a manifestation of evil. Throughout Hawke’s career this theme of evil was to recur as people projected their fears on to him.
They were able to do this, in part, because of the intensity, ‘the religious fervour’, of Hawke’s nature. When he had moved to the ACTU he had finally broken the psychological bonds of theism and Congregationalism; the spiritual struggle that had begun in adolescence was over. ‘It was soon after I moved to Melbourne’, he recalled, ‘that I realised: “I am an agnostic”.’
The trade union world has always been for the most committed of its members ‘a religion’; Hawke entered it with the fervour of a convert. It was a slight change in emphasis only for the excessively combative Christian scholar to become the excessively combative rescuer of the workers—fired up, in 1960, by the indignation of defeat.
Increasingly, Hawke espoused the causes of the Left. In trade union circles he supported unity tickets—that is, Labor candidates and Communists standing together for election to union office. In ALP circles, which for historical reasons were more venomous and personal in Victoria than in other states, Hawke associated himself with the Left’s position of anti-Americanism and a belief in a whole range of demons: the CIA, Santamaria, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (which he believed, as did others, had opened a file on him), class enemies, and, of course, Archbishop Mannix, who during the 1958 election campaign had achieved new heights for the rhetoric of guilt-by-association with his declaration: ‘every Communist and every Communist sympathiser in Australia wants a victory for the Evatt Party’. Hieser recalled, ‘When we drove past Raheen, Mannix’s residence, Bob shook his fist and roared at it’.
Kirby, who already greatly admired Hawke’s mind, recalled that he was acutely embarrassed by him around this period when, one night at a dinner party given by the United States consul general, Hawke and some trade unionists were openly contemptuous of their surroundings. The consul general’s residence had a splendidly appointed dining room, with Aubusson carpets and other sumptuous fittings. Kirby said,
The present Bob Hawke would be interested in them as civilised appurtenances, but then he and the other union fellows were contemptuous, almost swaggeringly rude, making snide remarks to each other in voices that were easily overheard. I’d been to numerous functions of that rather grand nature with trade union teams and they had always behaved properly. The next day the consul general rang me and in the course of conversation said, ‘I hope I did not offend your young companions’. I apologised for them.
At another dinner Hawke shouted at Kirby’s wife when she could not, momentarily, recall Hazel’s name. He saw Kirby at the time, he said, ‘as the big chief judge, the member of the Establishment’, and once, when drunk, bailed up Lady Kirby to demand, ‘Why does your husband hate me?’
Ralph Willis, who in late 1959 joined the ACTU as research assistant, recalled that Hawke was brusque and initially intimidating and that nothing in his behaviour suggested that he was the darling son of a devout household. But, as usual, older men knew intuitively that Hawke’s gentle side could be evoked by a fatherly approach. In the trade union movement one such man was Jock Innes, who met Hawke in the Lygon Hotel just after he had begun work at the ACTU and ‘took me under his wing’. Innes used to refer to Hawke as ‘my other son’. His real son was Ted, one of Hawke’s boon companions, then an official of the Electrical Trades Union, later a federal parliamentarian. In the Arbitration Commission Hawke attracted another father figure: Mr Justice Foster.
During the 1959 basic wage case Foster sent a note to Hawke asking for a meeting when the case was over. Foster lived three minutes walk away from Hawke, in Sandringham, and a regular Sunday morning visit from the advocate to the judge was established. While Innes, Terry Winter and other senior trade union men had taken it upon themselves to educate Hawke in union lore, explaining to him the complexity of alliances and rivalries, Foster performed the same function for Hawke about the arbitration system. Hawke said,
Alf had a very considerable affection towards me, and an enormous sense of gratitude. The first thing he said when I went to his house was how thrilled he was that I had understood the disastrousness of the 1953 judgment and had been so astringent in my analysis of it. He regarded it as his mission to change that judgment, and he had thought it was going to be a pretty lonely mission. Then I turned up.
When Foster learned from Hawke that Dr Colin Clark had rejected his thesis subject, the old man was gleeful. He told Hawke something of which he had been unaware during the 1959 case: ‘That Clark was the economic guru to Santamaria. And that Santamaria had worn the carpet thin—Alf’s exact phrase—going in and out of Sir Raymond Kelly’s office before the 1953 case!’
When in 1961 Hawke returned to his assault upon the 1953 judgment he did so with the fire of avenging a personal injury. It was one of his greatest performances, in Australia, as an advocate.
Hawke’s instant success in his career and his need to become one with the trade union brotherhood was achieved, predictably, at the expense of his family life.
He and Hazel, because of their small-town backgrounds, had felt nervous about living in a city as large as Melbourne. They decided it would be more enjoyable if they lived near the water, and if they had their own house. Hawke made it a condition of joining the ACTU that he be lent the deposit for buying a house. Harold Souter, the ACTU secretary, recalled, ‘Bob was amazing for a lawyer. He just looked at the contract and said, OK. It was Hazel who did all the bargaining.’ It was Hazel who did everything—she was the foundation of Hawke’s support system. She said, ‘He had a very difficult job ahead of him and I was determined there would be no chink in his armour’.
Within a few days they had bought a cottage in Keats Street, Sandringham, a pleasant but then unfashionable bayside suburb, half an hour’s drive from the city. They were too much in debt to afford a refrigerator or furniture, even a bed, and slept on a mattress on the floor. Hazel made cupboards, bookshelves and a wardrobe out of appleboxes; she bought a second-hand stove for £7 from which she was still scrubbing grease in February 1959 when their second child, Stephen, was born. Ted Innes, an electrician by trade, rewired the house; Wally Curran, of the Meat Employees Union, laid concrete—an ironic fact, for by 1971 Hawke and Curran detested each other.
School aside, Hawke’s childhood had been devoted to a life of games and religion and he never developed the practical skills of boyhood—carpentry, mechanical understanding, a basic knowledge of physics and management of finance. His only domestic skill was gardening and, when he was older, some cooking. Unless a piece of machinery fed the imagination—like an aeroplane, or a yacht (Hawke learned to sail)—it bored him, so much so that at the age of fifty he would stand squinting and puzzled at the printed instructions on the lid of an automatic washing-machine or some other electrical appliance, as if at a script written in Greek. He never paid household bills, or concerned himself about his overdraft or tried to administrate—even to getting his newspapers delivered—as long as there was someone around to do it for him. Jean Sinclair, his personal assistant in later years at the ACTU, became so used to Hawke’s complaints that filing cabinets were stuck or electric kettles did not work or addresses were lost that she would wonder aloud sometimes how he managed to dial a telephone.
Hawke’s major foray into the handyman field while at Keats Street was to build a carport: he cubed instead of squared the quantities of sand and cement he would need and for weeks afterwards the pavement was blocked by a sand dune. ‘If he built a hen-house it would fall down!’ Hieser exclaimed, not quite accurately for Hawke went on to assemble a splendid aviary for Susan (after Hazel had shown him how). But that was a labour of love, and for living things. Hieser’s brother-in-law, Bill Mansfield, the CSIRO chemist famous for discovering a way to prevent evaporation from dams, built Hawke a fence.
From the day Hawke began work at the ACTU his family life became, he said, ‘unusual’. He had to work extremely long hours; to overcome the prejudice against him and to make himself as effective as possible as an advocate he needed to rub shoulders with unionists. This meant spending hours yarning and joking in the smokey, smelly, red-linoed and cream-walled ‘Trades Hall office’—the Lygon Hotel. He was rarely home. The running of the household and raising of the children fell almost entirely to Hazel. She was a skilful manager and liked the traditional role of mother and chatelaine, although as she said later, ‘No one will ever know how difficult it was’. It was to become more difficult. By the time his children were teenagers Hawke was so overcommitted to work and to his vast network of relationships that his family had to arrange appointments to be able to discuss problems with him. But in his early years at the ACTU part of Sunday, at least, was a family day and throughout the summer months Hawke, Innes, Mansfield, and David White (another research scientist) together with their spouses and children, played tennis and had barbecues.
White, later a professor at Melbourne University, recalled, ‘Bob was out to win at tennis. You’d be walking back from the net towards the base line when his next ball would come whizzing past your head.’
At the time Hawke joined the ACTU its public image was at best sketchy. There were two full-time officials, Monk and Souter, and an executive that was elected at biennial congresses and made up of trade union leaders drawn from the state trades and labour councils and various industry groups. The trades and labour councils, which mesh with state Labor Party machines and are in some states the real centres of ALP power and patronage, operate as the state branches of the ACTU. Monk and Souter aside, the members of the executive owed allegiance first to their unions or trades and labour councils. The ACTU was a body for residual loyalty.
Against the bitter opposition of the huge, sprawling Australian Workers’ Union, the trade union movement had created the ACTU in 1927 as a co-ordinating instrument; a negotiator during major strikes; and as a national representative of the movement to government, to overseas union groups, to the International Labour Organization, and so forth. Its single constitutional objective is: ‘The socialisation of industry, i.e. production, distribution and exchange’, an aim to which it has merely paid lip service. The union movement in Australia is highly fragmented; constantly distracted and enervated by Left–Right power struggles and intra-bloc rivalries; jealous; underfinanced; and used to an easy life—in the sense that in the twentieth century it was protected by the arbitration system from the protracted wars with employers that are waged in a collective bargaining system. Under collective bargaining a union must have the funds to pay its members to strike for three months at a stretch;1 in Australia the majority of strikes last only a day. The ACTU was then and still is only of sporadic use to unions. They kept it broke by paying tiny fees for its upkeep, and in non-congress years often not paying at all. The ACTU is an inherently weak organisation, with no machinery for enforcing its decisions upon its affiliated unions. Its authority springs from the moral force of solidarity—with the occasional trip or plum job, arranged through a trades and labour council or the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, to reward an especially helpful union official or to get rid of a mischievous one. But in the main it is powerless to give patronage or to punish, except with public shaming and isolation from the rest of the trade union movement.
Albert Monk, a great and very astute man in Australian industrial life, kept the organisation going and prevented an outright split in the movement in the 1950s—when the ALP split—by a combination of diplomacy, cunning and stubbornness. The Grouper unions, like the ironworkers, clerks and shop assistants, were not expelled nor encouraged to leave the ACTU voluntarily, because of Monk’s determination to keep the movement whole.
He had the short rotund figure and round pudding face of a music-hall grocer; he wore pebble-lens spectacles, had a wall eye, and mumbled. Monk’s manners were old fashioned and rather courtly, particularly with women whom, as a breed, he found intimidating. He disliked publicity and hated appearing on television.
Monk was committed body and soul to the trade union movement, to getting a fair deal for the working class. He had come to Australia from England at the age of eight, in 1908; at his roughneck school he had been abused and beaten up for his appearance and his accent. The unemployment of the 1930s burned an ineradicable fear into his mind—‘For Albert the Depression ended the day he died’2—and from then on he did all in his power to prevent its recurrence; this meant increasing the productive capacity of the Australian economy and, from 1949, co-operating with anti-Labor governments to achieve their economic goals. In 1956 the wharfies publicly denounced him as ‘a scab’ and ‘Holt’s Holiday Home Boarder’ (Harold Holt being the Minister for Labour). Monk was highly strung, although this rarely showed in his enigmatically bland appearance. Before congresses his hands would tremble and his whole body seemed to shake with nervousness until the moment when he took the platform to give his presidential address, which he delivered in an inaudible mumble, to awed silence. Monk ran the congresses dictatorially: any motion of which his executive disapproved he ruled lost on the voices, and left it up to the floor to demand a division. By the 1960s he was an alcoholic and would make ten or more quick forays each day out of the back door of the ACTU and into the Lygon for a nip of whisky. He had a thousand acquaintances but few intimates, although many men who worked closely with him held Monk in loving admiration, and all respected him.
Monk left the administration of the ACTU entirely to Souter. The secretary, unlike Monk who had never been a blue-collar worker but had started his career as a shorthand writer, had been a fitter by trade and had risen through the ranks to become in the 1940s the industrial advocate of the militant Amalgamated Engineering Union, sire of the Amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrights Union. Souter came from a South Australian Seventh Day Adventist background and remained a teetotaller and non-smoker; he drank neither tea nor coffee. His wholesome regime showed in his appearance: he was small, lithe and energetic. Even in his sixties he had a bright-eyed, boyish air that went well with his salty, though decorous, turn of phrase. Souter’s integrity was a byword in industrial life, as was his commitment to the movement. In the 1960s when the giant Australian Workers’ Union was negotiating affiliation with the ACTU Souter drank two whiskies with the AWU bossman, Tom Dougherty—who regarded other liquids as fit only for bathwater or for babies—and the next day was blinded with headache. He had a thankless task in running an organisation that was always under-financed and understaffed, and that he had taken on without training in administration when the previous secretary, Reg Broadby, was dying. In the twenty years Souter was secretary of the ACTU employees and executive members complained frequently that he was secretive and refused to delegate. He was an administrator who finely constricted his own life and sought to constrict the lives of others. Being teetotal was an immense social disadvantage to him in the trade union world, with its obsession with the idea of ‘a man’s man’, defined and revealed in the boozy, tactile fraternity of the pub. ‘A sarsparilla drinker’, (Sir) Jack Egerton said of Souter, his voice thick with disdain. Souter was all fastidiousness: alert, clear-eyed, clean and lean—an alien. His relationship with Hawke was, from the outset, uncomfortable.
Until 1952 the ACTU had been housed in a nook in the Melbourne Trades Hall, a Victorian elephant of a building with Doric columns, four-and-a-half-metre ceilings and a wholly impractical internal distribution of space. In 1952 it moved across the road into a two-storeyed red brick box of its own, with a flat roof and floors so badly laid that in the upper storey they rose and fell in waves. There was no furniture upstairs and Hawke at first had a cubby hole with a desk and telephone on the ground floor. His arrival brought the staff to six—Monk and Souter, their secretaries, and a junior, Jennie McAlpine—and upset their tiny, cosy nest. McAlpine recalled,
The whole atmosphere changed when Bob arrived, and even before he arrived. We all worked at ordinary desks, but Harold said now that The Young Man was coming the women would have to have modesty boards on the fronts of their desks, so that The Young Man wouldn’t look at our legs.
McAlpine was to work for Hawke, but when he moved upstairs, through lack of space on the ground floor, Souter ‘would not allow me to move up, too, because we would be alone together’. McAlpine was a teenager and a devout Baptist; from the outset Hawke treated her like a kid sister and renamed her Susie, after his daughter. ‘Susie’ McAlpine had never tasted alcohol and when, towards Christmas in 1958, the other secretaries planned to introduce her to drink, Hawke wrote her an Ode to a Plot, which ran in part
But even worse now comes to light
They plan to get young Susie tight
Who is to blame for this foul plot
To turn young Sue into a sot?
The temptress holder of the evil apple
None other than our Tessy Chapple . . .
[who worked for Souter]
But Susie now has been forewarned
Before the evil day has dawned
Now these females cannot harm her,
Saved by her knight in shining armour.
He signed it, The Knight.3
Despite Hawke’s chivalrous attitude to ‘Susie’, Souter remained suspicious, for Hawke’s reputation for wenching was already known. A few months later Souter threatened them both with the sack for working alone together (on preparation of the 1959 basic wage case) on a Sunday. Bad feeling between Hawke and Souter was now firmly established, and was to grow. The atmosphere in the ACTU office, which had been good-natured, turned sour; by the time Ralph Willis joined the staff a year later there was ‘a very unpleasant atmosphere in the place’.
‘Susie’ left the ACTU in 1962 to get married, but she continued to visit the office, to chat and show off her children. In the late 1960s she went to tell Hawke some terrible news. She said,
We’d been talking for a while when Bob said, ‘What have you really come to tell me, Susie?’ and I broke down and told him that I had been diagnosed as suffering multiple sclerosis. He came round to me and put his arms around me, then he got very angry. He said, ‘Why you? You’ve done nothing wrong in your life! You’ve been a churchgoer, you don’t smoke, you don’t drink . . . !’ I thought he was angry with God. That night he rang me to say he had arranged with a Professor of Medicine to do new tests on me. Two weeks later I got the results: they were negative. I went in to tell Bob and he saw the smile I was wearing as I came through the door, and he began to cry with relief. We both sat there blubbering.4
There was no properly organised library in the ACTU and throughout 1959 Hawke was without a research assistant. Because the basic wage cases began in February he was working most intensively during the humid Melbourne summer. He said,
The conditions were frightful. Because of the flat roof the temperature in my office used to reach about 120°F [47°C]. The way I had to discipline myself for work and sleep was remarkable. I’d leave home at four or four-thirty in the morning and work for five hours before going into court. I taught myself to lie on the floor and sleep during the lunch adjournment, then could return fresh to court. I’d have a nap again in the late afternoon, and work into the night. The pressure was unbelievable. In the peak periods it was seven days a week, eighteen hours a day, for several weeks. But that ability to catnap was a tremendous advantage. Ever since I’ve been able to sleep anywhere . . . Eggleston had taught me that as long as I was prepared I need not be nervous in court. But I had to be right on top of it, because once I got on my feet I was totally vulnerable. I had to be on top of all the statistics, all the theories, and prepared to answer questions that were flung at me from the Bench, or that came from the Bar table—from employers or the Commonwealth—and they had all the resources in the world. The work had the beauty for me of a very concrete relevance to society. I think the joy of that carried me through.
It was obvious by the end of the year that Hawke had to have help. Ralph Willis (later the member for Gellibrand) was employed, and ‘Susie’ was allowed to move upstairs now there was a chaperon. Willis was another ‘intellectual’: he had an economics degree and had been working in the Department of Labour, but he had the advantage of being the son of a Boilermakers’ Society official who was universally respected in the trade union movement. Willis recalled,
I had nicked out of work to a phone box in Bourke Street to ring Bob and ask him how I should apply for the job. He was brusque. He said, ‘Do what you’re doing now—organise a time to come and see us’. He gave the impression that he didn’t give a damn whether I came or not. At the interview he made it clear that I would have to work bloody hard, and that was fully borne out. When cases were on they consumed our lives: we’d have a few beers in the evening, then return to the office for more hours of work. Bob used to write out his own notes, but he didn’t read from them. His method was to prepare notes in a way which allowed him to expound upon them at great length. Once, in the 1964 case, he spoke for a whole day on only three lines of notes … It used to amaze me that he would walk out of the Arbitration Commision, having talked on one plane all day, step into the Lygon and swap yarns with blokes from the wharf, as easily as with barristers. His key attribute as a union official and a politician is probably that ability he has to relate to all levels. He really enjoyed mixing with unionists: he could spend hours listening to their stories. During his years as advocate he established a huge network of friendships through those pub contacts, and became known as ‘a good guy’ . . . Bob used to get drunk, but in those days he was a good drunk—he’d get into spirited arguments, and could always argue logically no matter how much he’d had to drink and he could still drive a car relatively safely.
An oddity of Hawke’s drinking was that he did not have ‘normal’ hangovers: in his whole life he has never had a headache. Hieser, who stayed overnight with Hawke often, complained, ‘He’d get up, after maybe an hour’s sleep, bright eyed and bushy tailed and asking for his breakfast, when the rest of us were barely able to speak’.
After his defeat in the 1960 basic wage case Hawke partly recouped his dignity with a South Australian basic wage case later that year. The employers were presenting an ingenious and apparently logical argument that wages in the state should be reduced because of a lower cost of living there. Hawke had a flash of insight about the fault in his opponent’s logic, which concerned ‘the going rate’, confirmed his guess, and won the case. The next national hearing was set for early 1961 before Kirby, Ashburner and Moore, the latter a new judge who had appeared as advocate for the Commonwealth during 1959. Ashburner was regarded by all sides as the most conservative member of the Bench. He had been an advocate for the meat industry employers and had held some briefs for shipping companies and BHP. He was a former Rhodes scholar. The employers, who had panicked after Hawke’s successes in 1959 and dropped their usual counsel, Drew Aird, had hopes of sympathy from Ashburner. Moore was an unknown quantity. For the 1961 case the employers engaged a highly regarded common law Queen’s Counsel from the Melbourne Bar, Dr E. G. Coppel. As they went into court photographs were taken: Coppel, white haired, wearing rimless half-moon spectacles and with a dignified demeanour, looked like a headmaster standing beside a bright senior boy. Hawke was grinning, as slim as a whippet, his pompadour of dark hair gleaming, and his eyes too—for he was about to eat Dr Coppel.
Hawke’s brief was the same as before: that the cost-of-living adjustments should be restored so that real wages could keep pace with prices, and that gains in productivity be substituted for ‘capacity to pay’ and distributed to the community as an increase in the basic wage. This year he had extra psychological strength on his side: anger about the 1960 decision, and knowledge of Santamaria’s role in the 1953 decision which, for the third time, he would be attempting to have overturned. He also had a trump card, a witness, Sir Douglas Copland, an economist who had been prominent in Australian public affairs in the 1930s and 1940s. During the war Copland had been adviser to Curtin and was known as the economic ruler of the nation. He had been ambassador to China and high commissioner in Ottawa; he was the first vice-chancellor of the Australian National University; he had nine doctorates; he had assisted the Victorian Employers’ Federation in establishing an economic research project and was a director of it; he had coined the phrase ‘milk-bar economy’ for postwar Australia. He was a big, vigorous man with a large voice that in economic matters carried as if ringing down from Mount Olympus.
Under questioning from Hawke in the witness box Copland gave evidence that since 1953 productivity had risen by 19.5 per cent and wages by 18 per cent; he agreed with Hawke’s suggestion that the lack of cost-of-living adjustments was an injustice to the lower level of wage earners; he also agreed that he could not see how the economy would be injured if automatic adjustments were resumed.
Dr Coppel had called as a witness a senior lecturer in economics at Melbourne University, Dr J. O. N. Perkins. In the economic fraternity, news had already spread that Hawke, because he understood economics, was much harsher than the ordinary barrister in cross-examination, and that his technique of taking a statement and tearing it into small, verbal shreds, and the sheer violence of the aura around him when he was battling with a witness caused embarrassment and intimidation. When Coppel announced his witness, Perkins, Hawke immediately requested the right of cross-examination on broad economic issues. Earlier in the case Hawke had cross-examined a leading agricultural economist, Keith Campbell, on broad economic issues and had overwhelmed him. Perkins considered for a few minutes outside the courtroom then announced that he would not be questioned on matters outside his field of expertise, and therefore would not appear. The practice of calling economic experts was over: Hawke had created a situation where his opposition would have, like him, to speak with authority.
Coppel knew little about wage fixing or economics. For the employers the case was, in the words of his junior, ‘disastrous’.
Unexpectedly, Hawke had turned up a second trump card. His opening address lasted three days and was directed at the Bench in highly personal terms, a characteristic of his debating that, in later years, won him hundreds of arguments—and no friends. He told the Bench: ‘You have perpetrated this situation . . . You have inflicted hardship upon thousands of people . . . Do not delude yourselves . . .’ Ashburner, a traditionalist, was offended by Hawke’s hectoring and abusive tone and asked Kirby, as chief judge, to rebuke him publicly. Kirby refused. On the first day of the hearing a group of railway workers had marched on the Commission, made a row, then ranged themselves along the back of the court in such a way that letters pinned to their lapels had spelt out the message WE WANT MORE DOUGH. The chief judge’s salary was almost ten times the basic wage. When Kirby announced, ‘I am afraid we will have to adjourn’ (because of the railway men) Hawke snapped at him, ‘It’s not something you’d know about’. Kirby was fearful that if he rebuked Hawke he would be so pugnacious in his response that the only option would be to put him out of court. That would inevitably lead to demonstrations, questions in parliament and so forth. With the chief judge sitting in furious silence, Ashburner decided to act. On his third day of non-stop talking Hawke burst out: ‘It is indisputable that in real terms the output of goods and services has increased, but this Commission, particularly in that nonsense in the Annual Leave—’ Ashburner interjected, ‘I wish you would not distract me by using those adjectives, such as “absurd”, words like “nonsense” and so on’.
hawke: I am using it in the strictly literal sense of ‘non sense’.
ashburner, j: It does distract my attention from the substance of your argument.
hawke: If it has that effect, Your Honour, there is certainly not much use in pursuing it because I do not want to distract Your Honour from what I was saying. I will contain my feelings.5
Hawke had abruptly realised his error, and an area for advantage: he had engaged Ashburner in personal debate—the judge had come forward and Hawke could now wrestle with him, one-to-one. Ashburner was the only member of the Bench unfamiliar with the arguments already enunciated in 1959 (Moore had heard them as counsel for the Commonwealth that year) and Hawke, having flushed him out, concentrated upon pursuing him. George Polites, who had recently been appointed as secretary of the Australian Council of Employers’ Federation, said with a giggle, ‘It was sick-making. Hawke talked to Ashburner like a Dutch uncle.’ Hawke also wore his Oxford tie, an accessory that Ashburner, who liked to wear his Oxford tie, noted with approval.
The transcript of the case is full of questions from Hawke such as ‘Does Your Honour appreciate my argument?’ and ‘Does Your Honour have any further reservations about this, because I can see that it is obviously a fundamental matter?’ and ‘I do not know whether Your Honour, Mr Justice Ashburner, has any reservations still to which you might like me to address myself?’ Ashburner knew so little of economics that at one stage the whole Bar table had to suppress a convulsion of laughter when His Honour asked about ‘the London funds’, at that time a term synonymous for Australia’s international reserves. The employers argued that the success of Australia’s export earnings, reflected in the London funds, was fuelling inflation in Australia. ‘How’, asked the judge, ‘can the money be in London and be used in Australia at the same time?’ It took counsel almost an hour to explain the significance of high reserves. To his credit and to the credit of the system, Ashburner was prepared to reveal his ignorance.
Hawke’s address in reply lasted twelve days. Sir John Moore recalled,
He’d reached a stage where he physically couldn’t stand, except by hanging on to the lectern. He was leaning over it, supporting his weight on it, and still talking to us. We were adjourning at regular intervals because his voice was giving out. I could see from where I was sitting on the Bench that he had kicked his shoes off and was standing there in his socks, just barely able to go on, but still arguing very forcefully. He was an extraordinarily strong debater.
Sheer will power and belief in his cause carried Hawke through and evoked his habitual lapses of tact—he referred to some of Kirby’s judgments as ‘pathetic’, ‘completely fallacious’, ‘objectionable’, and accused the Commission of being cowardly. But it had been a magnificent performance: he had finally convinced the chief judge he must confess and repent for the 1953 decision, and he had won the minds of Ashburner and Moore. The reform of the system that Hawke had demanded so precociously, in Oxford, was about to take place.
The decision, which was unanimous, increased the basic wage by 12 shillings and decreed that in future it would be adjusted annually in line with the cost-of-living index, and triennially for increases in productivity. The onus would be on the employers to prove that this should not happen.
In the trade union movement, Hawke was a hero. The employers ground their teeth.
He spent some of his next year abroad, as a delegate to the Duke of Edinburgh’s study conference in Canada, and later studying the effects of Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community. In early 1963 he argued another margins case against yet another advocate the employers were trying out, and achieved a pleasing result. But while his career had reached a peak, Hawke was now in trouble with Monk and Souter and at home his family life was under strain. Both problems were due, in part, to his success.
From his first heady achievements in 1959 he had been in demand as a speaker at public functions. By May 1960 Monk, Souter and some Right-wing members of the ACTU executive were alarmed at the tendency for Hawke to be presented as a spokesman for the ACTU, and the question of the public statements of the ACTU’s research officer became a matter for executive debate. Its discussion split, as ever, on Left–Right lines. Souter had forbidden Hawke to speak publicly about ACTU policy; there had been a row over an airfare; the ACTU junior vice-president, Bill Evans, of the Left, had asked Hawke for material to use in a speech but Souter had instructed Hawke not to supply it. Evans required Souter to defend himself, which he did, with the support of the Right-wing boss of the New South Wales Labour Council, Jim Kenny. The issue was settled, with bad tempers all round, to burst forth again a year later. In June 1961 Hawke attended the annual state Labor Party conference and in intemperate language attacked Sir Raymond Kelly (whom he once described, according to the Financial Review, as ‘that Irish pig farmer’), the Democratic Labor Party and B. A. Santamaria for combining to defeat quarterly adjustments. Santamaria issued a denial of his involvement with Kelly; Senator McManus, the leader of the DLP, issued a demand for an apology. Monk was so angry with Hawke he issued a statement saying that Hawke had been attending the ALP conference as a representative of the Theatrical Employees’ Association, not the ACTU. In ALP and Left-wing trade union circles the row increased Hawke’s celebrity status and his opportunities for more agitating. He was asked to appear on television, a medium he was learning to master; newspapers pestered for interviews—and met him in different moods: the Melbourne Sun in 1963 described Hawke as, ‘softly spoken, quiet’.
Life as a minor celebrity had an electric edge of excitement. There were more hours of jubilant exchange in the pub, more late nights with boon companions, more boon companions—for Hawke could be ‘best mates’ with thirty people at once—and his days see-sawed with the thrill of new friendships, new exquisite moments of fun and rapport. Repeatedly, when people attempt to describe why hours passed with Hawke seem magically charged with humour and play, they fall back to saying, ‘He’s just such fun’. But he was drinking too much and at home arguments were frequent.
Hazel had given birth to a third child, Rosslyn, in November 1960 and by July 1963 was 28 weeks pregnant with a fourth. Hawke used often to tell ‘Susie’, ‘I’m going to have seven children—the Biblical number’. On 1 August Hazel was out shopping when she felt the pangs of premature labour. She was taken to the closest hospital where an emergency caesarian section was performed. The new baby was a fine-looking black-haired boy, but he had to be kept in a humidicrib while Hazel, who was very ill after losing blood, was too weak to see him. Hawke told her, ‘He’s a really strong baby—wait until you see his beautiful little chest!’ To Hawke’s delight she suggested that the new boy should be named Robert James. As events turned out, Hazel never saw her fourth child.
Within hours delight turned to anxiety, then despair. The baby, seven weeks premature, was dying. Hawke sat for twenty-four hours beside his crib watching him sink away from life. Hazel was too ill to leave hospital and Hawke, with one companion for support, saw Robert James buried, then arranged for Hazel to recover at the house of their tennis friends, David and Marjorie White. In the first days of shock he wept frequently and began to drink himself into oblivion. As always when deeply distressed, he became speechless and immobilised—he could not talk out his feelings, he would not return to the grave. Indeed, it was almost twenty years and Hawke was a different man before he could say, one day in 1981, ‘I think I’ll go and visit Robert’. On a Saturday afternoon about a fortnight after Hazel returned home he was to go to the football and insisted that she accompany him. They set out by taxi but had not gone far when Hawke had what Hazel described as ‘a frightening attack: he was disoriented, felt paralysed and thought he was dying’. She took him straight to hospital. He was suffering alcoholic poisoning.
He was still ill from his self-punishment and Hazel was in the early stages of a long period of grief when, a few weeks later Hawke was pressed to begin his political career in earnest. He was attending an ALP dinner in a Melbourne hotel when Albert McNolty, secretary of the Victorian Labor Party, made a point of sitting next to him.
The prime minister, Robert Menzies, had won the 1961 election by only one seat and since then had been on the alert for an issue that would excuse him holding another, premature election. Since 1961 the economy had recovered; unemployment, which had been 2.8 per cent, was once again negligible; and, most importantly, the ALP had recently committed one of its breathtaking public gaffes. Arthur Calwell, the leader, and Gough Whitlam, the deputy leader, had been photographed late at night standing in the street under a lamppost, hunched in overcoats against the cold, waiting to be informed of a decision of the party’s 36-member federal conference of which they, although the party’s foremost public representatives, were not members. The photograph had been published under the heading ‘36 Faceless Men’, a popular term for the conference delegates, and had done the ALP immense damage, with its suggestion of sinister, unknown forces manipulating Labor’s parliamentary politicians like puppets. Since 1951 when Menzies’ legislation to ban the Communist Party had been defeated, due largely to the efforts of the former Labor leader, H. V. Evatt, Menzies had claimed that the ALP was ruled by ‘outside forces’. Had he taken the photograph himself he could not have had a more dramatic illustration for his claims. Then, in early October 1963 the ALP, or rather the leader, Calwell, compounded the gaffe by asking the federal executive to give a ruling on state aid for non-government schools. State aid is Australia’s most ancient and bitter political issue. Obligingly—for the prime minister—the ALP federal executive ruled against state aid.
Menzies called a snap election for 30 November 1963.
In addition to a domestic issue he had an external one: President Sukarno of Indonesia, the Great Leader of the Revolution, the Father of the Nation, the Champion of Islam, Field Marshal and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, President for Life, etc., had just launched Confrontation of Malaysia. A year earlier Sukarno’s denouncement of Britain’s manipulation of Asian affairs had been so enthusiastically received that the Jakarta mob had razed the British embassy. Effigies were burnt, cars thrown into canals. Sukarno was depicted in Australia as a dangerous lunatic, Joe Stalin in a black velvet fez. The electorate was encouraged to believe that at any moment a multitude of Indonesian soldiers would turn their attention to the south. The Australian government, having played a part in stimulating fear, promptly offered to assuage it. Menzies announced that Australia was buying a fleet of long-range, low-altitude bomber aircraft of the most contemporary design, then called the TFX, later famous as the F-111. With these, Australia could bomb Jakarta. The Defence Minister, Athol Townley, was despatched to Washington to lay a deposit on the table for these dashing war machines. It was not explained to the public that it would be at least eight years before they would be built and airworthy. Malaysia and Indonesia would be friends and Sukarno would be an invalid prisoner-of-state long before the first F-111 had a chance to crash. But meanwhile, Menzies had a cause.
Hawke said, ‘I remember as though it were yesterday: Albert McNolty sat beside me and began to heavy me about standing’. McNolty had already done Hawke a favour: he was an official of the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union, of which Hawke was a member of convenience, for as ACTU advocate he formally appeared for the metal trades unions. Hawke had asked McNolty to get him a ‘good deal’ on a refrigerator and one day a brand new refrigerator had been delivered to the house as a gift. Hawke continued:
His argument was simple. He said, ‘Look, we can win government this election, we need only to hold the seats we’ve got and win a couple more. Corio is one we should win. You are a national figure now. You could win Corio. You’ve got a duty and an obligation to the whole Labor movement. You’re a marvellous advocate, no one can do what you’ve been doing. But, winning government is more important. You can do it.’ I was not very thrilled about the idea. Hazel and I talked it over. Next day I talked to Harold [Souter] and Albert [Monk] about it and said I felt I had an obligation to run, that it was a matter of duty. They were understanding, and gave me leave.
Within days Hawke had been formally selected as the candidate for Corio, a mixed rural and industrial seat south-west of Melbourne with its centre the city of Geelong. It was held by the Minister for Shipping, Hubert Opperman, an Olympic champion cyclist who was called Oppy by his constituents. Hawke would need a 3.4 per cent swing to unseat him.
Hazel said, ‘We were both still very sick and sorry people. The election campaign was a necessary and practical commitment. It helped us, in some degree, to cope with the grieving.’
Once Hawke had overcome his reluctance he mentally changed gears; he shut the baby’s death out of his mind and set out to become a parliamentarian.