Preface to the First Edition

There is a school that holds that biographies of the living should not be written, because they cannot be honest. Indeed, the problems confronting the biographer of a living subject are daunting, especially if—as in the case of R. J. Hawke—the writer knows that much of what she reveals about her subject may be used and misused against him, in his lifetime, perhaps to the detriment of a career that is in mid-term. Such considerations have also concerned Hawke. It is a mark of his candour and integrity that he has permitted me, as an authorised biographer, to write about him critically and often unflatteringly and that, in the tradition of his spiritual ancestor, Cromwell, he is willing to be presented ‘warts and all’. The only area I have avoided is a discussion of the Hawke children, whose privacy has already been invaded over many years. I have omitted information about the children at the request of Hazel Hawke. Her desire to protect them, and not to have republished matters that have already appeared in the press, has been a price worth paying for her help and unflinching frankness, both in giving information and in reading the manuscript for accuracy of detail. I have been guided by her perceptions a great deal, while exercising the responsibility to reach my own conclusions.

It is, surely, one of the most unnerving experiences in any life to have the past loom up, made solid in words. When Sir Richard Kirby first read the manuscript of the biography I had written about him, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, God. I feel like a full frontal nude!’ Hawke made a similar remark in the same situation: ‘This is traumatic—like seeing your face in a mirror with a thousand facets. Some of the images seem to me grotesque.’

I have taken the view that there is no single truth to be told about something as complex and shifting as a fifty-year life span, but rather many truths, from various perspectives that, when viewed together, reveal the dimensions of personality. To do this I have had to rely on people who have known Hawke at different stages of his life. Throughout the book I have allowed them to speak for themselves about him, offering opinions that, sometimes, are contradictory but out of which, I think, a coherent pattern emerges.

While the great drawback to biographies of the living or recently dead is the problem of candour—and, under Australian law, libel—an advantage lies in the wealth of information that may be collected, either from the subject or from those people who have known him or her. Importantly, too, friends, enemies and relations can provide a heavy counterweight to the subject’s self-view. In Hawke’s case their assistance to me has been crucial, for he is a man of dominating personality and persuasiveness and one, moreover, whose legal training has enabled him to confound critics with dextrous, logical argument. I make no claim to have been able, at all times, to withstand the force of Hawke’s self-perceptions, but I have tried to present them as his own, by giving them as transcripts of his descriptions of situations, and where possible, presenting different views. The book is full of voices, for it is largely an oral history.

The use of oral history—in plain language, interviews—overcomes to some extent a major difficulty in writing about twentieth-century lives: lack of documentation. Telephones, radio, television, the whole world of audiovisual technology, has altered us so much: people have abandoned, for example, the custom of committing their intimate thoughts to letters and diaries, the documents that were once the primary source of a biographer. But oral history is only a partial solution—for what the middle-aged man recalls, let us say, about his parents is, generally, different from what the child, writing a diary, may have thought of them and may have later, unconsciously, built in to his behaviour in reaction to those thoughts. Again, the recollections of people who knew the subject in childhood are an important counterweight.

A particular problem created by the telephone is that much historically relevant communication is given over to it in the adult’s career, where once the same transactions would have been made in writing. Oral history helps bridge the gaps—sometimes inadequately, sometimes much better than any written record: the Nixon White House tapes are, so far, the most celebrated example of the superiority of an oral record to a formal, written one. Wherever possible I have tape-recorded interviews.

I did some early work on this book in mid-1979 but did not turn my full attention to it until the beginning of 1980. At the time Hawke was still, as he described it later, ‘climbing the mountain’—that is, struggling with his drinking problem. By the time I began writing, in mid-1981, he seemed to have conquered the mountain. By now he has been a teetotaller for two years. Much of this book is the story of Hawke’s battle with alcohol. Much of it also is the story of a life contending with what I have called ‘a dream’—that is, Hawke’s ambition to be the political leader of his country. I have labelled it a dream not to suggest unreality but because it is an aspect of something that is larger and vaguer than the specific goal of political leadership, and is, rather, a yearning towards unity. The vision has come and gone throughout his life, like a recurrent dream that is part of a broader field of emotion. Interwined with it are other ‘dreams’—International House, the ACTU enterprises, peace in the Middle East—whatever their focus, all of them flowing out from the same powerful source.

One of the Hawke family dreams was so like gossamer that I felt I could not include it in the text, but record it now: Hawke’s father told me that his favourite chapter of the Bible concerned the Building of the Temple, explaining, ‘David planned it, but it was his son, Solomon, who executed it’. It was only when this biography was almost complete the Hawke learned that his father had been an office holder of the ALP and in youth had wanted a political career himself.

At the time I began research Hawke had decided to try to live out his ambitious vision of political leadership. That, and his recent struggle with drink, have given a shape and motifs to the book that may well, from the longer view, seem artificial. A life of Hawke written posthumously would perhaps give a very different emphasis to the themes of alcohol and ambition—or what may be termed hedonism and social integration. This is, therefore, a partial life and will be to some people an example of the wrong-headedness of not only attempting the biography of a living subject but of one in mid-career.

I think it has been worth writing, for a number of reasons: one, obviously, is the intrinsic interest of the subject. Another is that it has provided an opportunity to trap information that otherwise will vanish as its living sources die, information about a social institution for which I feel profound respect (and often irritation): the Australian trade union movement. Frustrating and foolish as it sometimes is, I believe the freedoms of our society are carried on its shoulders.

Blanche d’ Alpuget

May 1982, Canberra

Postscript: In less than a year our political landscape has been transformed: in May 1982 the Australian mainland had only one Labor government and Malcolm Fraser bestrode the continent with such authority that it seemed the Faustian pact his party had made to gain power in 1975 could stretch forward, without horizon. Today there are five Labor governments in Australia, and Hawke is prime minister. His personality, as delineated in the following pages, has changed in emphasis in the past three years: the process of struggle and suffering that leads to wisdom and that began in Hawke in the late 1970s has produced a man at peace with himself, prepared, finally, for the task to which he was trained. Or, as it may appear now, was destined.

B. d’A.

March 1983, Jerusalem