Heaven lay around Hawke in his infancy. He was reared in a country manse in a quiet way of life deeply rooted in tradition, the seasons accentuated by church festivals, the year divided according to divine significance. It was a world rounded and harmonious.
The community in Bordertown was still snug, not yet touched by the financial crash of the previous April. The Tatiara district, of which Bordertown is the centre, is one of the richest agricultural areas in Australia. In the late 1920s the town was booming: people there only read about the disasters in the cities. Scullin, who had been prime minister for two months, had, in the second week of December, just offered the state premiers £1 million for road work to provide employment. In the New South Wales coalfields the nation’s greatest industrial dispute in the twentieth century, a lockout by employers, was dragging on and the miners and their dependants were half-starved. Police occupied the towns of the Hunter coalfields, scab labour was employed, a miner was shot dead, others were injured. But in Bordertown the only signs of depression were the scores of travel-soiled men jumping from trains then hanging around the railway yards, alert for a beckoning finger from one of the farmers loading his produce on the trains. ‘It was a good year for hay, 1929. You could get any amount of labour’, an old-timer remarked sardonically.
The Congregational parish was the largest in the district, exceeding the Methodists; Clem and Ellie were among the town’s elite. Ellie was considered a snob by some parishioners, ‘because she was educated—heddykated we used to say—and was a schoolteacher. It was something to be a schoolteacher in those days. I felt she looked down on people who weren’t heddykated.’ The ‘Congs’, as they called themselves, were in a mood as expansive as their district’s in the late 1920s. When the horse selected for Clem’s use on pastoral calls proved troublesome the laity decided, boldly, to buy him a motor car. It was a 1927 four-door, cloth-top Chevrolet and cost £150. With wheat selling at only a little less than its 1925 price and sheep still doing well, the parish could afford it. It could afford, too, to keep the minister’s table supplied with mutton, butter and milk and his hearth with firewood. Ellie grew the best vegetables in town—‘lettuces, even in winter!’ people remembered, fifty years later.
The manse was a four-roomed house of local limestone with high ceilings and a lean-to at the back for the kitchen, laundry and bathroom. A croquet green was across the road and a couple of minutes walk away was the church, also of limestone. Although it was built in the late nineteenth century it had the friendly, candid symmetry of Georgian architecture. It has been internally renovated in recent years but in those days its most striking feature was an arch painted on the wall at the head of the nave, lettered in blue, gold and black, with the motto ‘He Who Watches Over Israel Slumbers Not Nor Sleeps’. Israel—sung about, spoken of, yearned for—glowed as a portentous presence at the heart of spiritual life. Israel was a distant, shining land, enigmatic and ageless, a link between the living and the dead, the present and the past, God and man. ‘I vividly recall’, a woman wrote to Hawke years later,
watching your mother basking in pride when a piece of the Holy Land was named after her son for his great humanitarian efforts . . . she had tears in her eyes listening to the sermon and speech given by your father on that glorious day in Israel . . . one of the happiest that you could have provided for them in their lives.
Israel had entered Hawke’s life before he could speak, for Ellie took him to church from birth.
It was in church that parishioners first noticed how he was being reared. ‘The trouble was’, a Bordertown man complained,
his mother wouldn’t smack him. He’d be up there in the front, wriggling and throwing things on the floor, or yelling. He was completely undisciplined. It wasn’t fair to Clem, trying to give the sermon, when there was a baby disrupting things. I used to want to knock his block off.
In the twenty-five years Hawke lived with his parents he was never once struck by either of them. ‘I was’, he said, ‘dreadfully spoiled’. The spoiling came from both parents, especially from Hawke’s father.
Clem adored his second son. He said,
From early on I felt special affinity, a drawing towards Bobbie. It’s a mysterious thing—Ellie had it with Neil. It’s something that just happens sometimes in families—you remember Joseph and the coat of many colours? His father felt it. You can’t say it’s right or wrong to have a favourite child . . . Bobbie had an outflowing magic about him.
He bathed and dressed this baby, things he had not done for Neil, and Hawke’s earliest memories were all of ‘love—an overwhelming love. I can’t describe how passionately my father loved me; I was just Dad’s boy.’
The relationship between father and son, which was so intense that Ellie worried about their dependence upon each other, equipped Hawke for life with the capacity to feel and, without embarrassment, to express love for his own sex. It also seems to have cast the emotional die that patterned his later relationships with other men: Hawke is intensely loyal and uncritical of his friends and in return evokes from them an unusual fondness, a paternal indulgence. All his closest men friends have been older than Hawke, either in years or in worldliness; all have had Clem’s desire to give of themselves to him. Men have lent him their houses to entertain in, their motor cars to ride in, their yachts to holiday on; they have come to his kitchen to cook his meals; to sit at his bedside and amuse him when he was ill; they have taken him shopping and chosen his clothes. George Rockey, a co-builder of Australia’s largest transport company, TNT, was a type of father to Hawke in the late 1970s. When Rockey was dying in 1981 and too weak to walk much, he worried about Hawke’s health and his wardrobe: ‘I send Bob to my tailor now, so his suits are good. But I’m not satisfied about his socks—I must take him to the proper place for underwear’, he said. Sir Peter Abeles, Rockey’s senior business partner, is another very close friend. A journalist recalled going to dinner one evening with Hawke and Abeles:
Sir Peter gave Bob the keys to his Rolls Royce. Bob drove it, laughing his head off, like a kid with a fantastic toy . . . I was in business by myself at the time, and in financial difficulties. A couple of days later I got a phone call from Abeles, whom I barely knew. He chatted for a while, then said, ‘I think I could help you, if you would like’. I was staggered—he was offering me 25 grand at 5 per cent. Finally I asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He replied, ‘Oh well, we both have a very close friend’, and the penny dropped. He knew Bob and I had been mates for thirty years, so that made me somebody he would help, because of his affection for Bob.1
Throughout Hawke’s life men have been drawn by ‘the outflowing magic’ that Clem felt—and encouraged—and have responded to it by behaving like fathers or doting uncles. (Hawke called Rockey ‘Uncle George’, and Rockey signed himself by this name on letters to Hawke.)
It seems as if, in his earliest years, an emotional stage was set and roles allotted to actors, and that the play was performed again and again. While this welded psychological bonds of great strength between Hawke and his friends, the son–parent configuration of relationships became, with Hawke’s increasing age, inappropriate—even undesirable—for it was holding part of his personality in limbo. Men and women only a few years older than Hawke called him ‘The Boy’ when he was in his late forties; he was treated, by intimates, as a boy who needed adult care and guidance. The role began to exasperate Hawke, and his friends.
Clem’s special son, however, was also Ellie’s special baby, a gift to her from God. But the intensity of affection between father and son tended to challenge her status with the child, and later events in the family were to cause whatever incipient competition there may have been between the parents to develop into rivalry for the boy. A relation recalled, ‘Bob could play his family off against each other: he was the centre of attention and the adults competed for him’. This was, perhaps, the origin of Hawke’s later extraordinary success in getting publicity: he had learned, when very young, how agreeable it was to be a cynosure, and in adulthood had an inner need to re-create—before a bank of television cameras, or a roaring crowd—the emotional landscape of earlier years. ‘Publicity is one of the things that keeps you going in politics’, another politician remarked. ‘The days when Bob’s been all over the newspapers and the television I’ve seen him smiling. And sad, when he wasn’t.’
Given the circumstances of his birth perhaps it was to be expected that his parents would rear him more tenderly than his elder brother. Certainly the difference in parental treatment of the Hawke boys was profound: Neil had few of the indulgences allowed to Bobbie. Before he was a teenager Neil was punished for misdemeanours ‘with a hiding from me once a fortnight—and that’s when he was good’, Ellie said; sometimes Clem gave him the strap. In his teenage years, in school holidays, Neil worked as a farmhand. Hawke took his first holiday job when he was at university.
Bordertown parishioners remembered Neil as a quiet, well-mannered boy yet Clem and Ellie both fondly described him as a young firebrand, physically reckless and deaf to caution, while Hawke, they said, was a quiet, angelic child with whom they could reason. Perhaps both accounts are accurate, from different perspectives. But as Hawke grew older he developed some of the characteristics that his parents attributed to their elder son. Most people want their children to live for them the lives they cannot: it may be that at an unspoken level the Hawkes encouraged their sons to break free of the extreme decorousness of genteel, petit bourgeois parish life, while insisting that they maintain the essence of Christian values.
Clem took Bobbie on rounds of the parish and by the time the child was three he had begun to model himself actively on his father: a bleary box Brownie photograph of 1933 shows Hawke, hands raised, preaching to an old woman lying on a cane chaise longue in her garden. She was too ill to attend church; Hawke had announced, ‘I’m going to cheer you up, like my Dad’.
Clem said,
We taught him the whole time, not only by talking to him, but also by the practical life we lived . . . In the Congregational church we had no creeds as such—the only creed I’ll accept is the Apostles—but we built religion around the human side of Christ’s ministry. And, of course, the divine side. We built it around His example—giving counsel to the dejected and the despairing, healing the sick, putting out a social program for the betterment of the world. What’s the use of preaching the gospel to a man with an empty stomach! It’s all pie in the sky, when what he wants is pie now.
The crash came to Bordertown in 1931: wheat dropped to 2 shillings 7 pence a bushel (36.4 litres) and oats to 1 shilling 3 pence. A dozen eggs sold for three pennies. Hawke was too young to remember the boom years and knew only the period of struggle and misery for farmers. Childhood memories of his parents’ friends talking about low prices, bad seasons and bankruptcies affected him strongly, instilling in him attitudes to rural life that were much more sympathetic than is normal among urban Labor movement officials. Country people noticed the difference: in 1979, in a national survey, farmers and cattlemen voted Hawke their first choice of leaders.
With the Depression, Clem and Ellie had to work much harder. On Sundays there was a special collection known as the Distress Fund. Ellie made meals from what she had to hand in the kitchen for the swagmen who came to her door, and would offer the manse’s spare room to people in need of lodging for a night, or for weeks. The ethic of hospitality transmitted to Hawke: his own household, friends commented later, resembled a motel, with all sorts of people making themselves at home there. ‘Bob’s the easiest touch in the world’, a man said of Hawke in middle age. ‘I’ve seen real rogues, people you wouldn’t look at, nudge him for a loan. He’s gullible, like that.’ It was a family characteristic: Clem and Ellie once lent most of their savings to a woman in distress, never to see the money again. Hawke recalled, ‘I used to be angry with my mother sometimes, watching her give money to characters whom even I knew were telling lies’.
Clem was considered an outstanding minister because of his pastoral work: while other churches’ congregations diminished in Bordertown during the Depression, the numbers in the Congregational parish grew. ‘He had the gift of listening’, a parishioner recalled. ‘He would never reject anyone. One day he ate seven afternoon teas, rather than discourage people from telling him their troubles by turning down their food.’ During these years when Hawke was his father’s shadow, visiting with him the houses of the dejected, despairing and sick, he was absorbing attitudes that were to stay with him long after he had rejected the Congregational as his church and Christianity as his faith: he was learning to dream of a future career in which he would be able to benefit humanity directly and practically. He was also acquiring his father’s habits—especially sympathetic listening, one of the most useful skills for a politician and a negotiator. Chris Crellin, Hawke’s chauffeur–bodyguard during his latter years at the ACTU, recalled,
I used to watch Bob at social functions. The way he could listen to people was brilliant: he’d cock his head on one side, like he does, and would stand there letting them bash his ear for half an hour. Whether he was really listening or not, I don’t know. But he always looked as if he were following every word they said. Getting him to leave a place was impossible. He’d say ‘Goodbye’ and two hours later would be only ten feet [3 m] closer to the door, listening to some story about a kid needing a job or somebody’s aunty from India wanting a visa for Australia. When he’d finally get in the car he’d have a pocketful of bits of paper with people’s names on them, people he was going to try to help. It was a never-ending thing. People would eat him up.
Hawke puts high value on what may be termed his pastoral skill. To a question about which of the thousands of newspaper articles about him he liked most, he replied, ‘There was one in the mid-1960s, by Richard Hall. He said I was “a good listener”. I was proud about that.’
While Clem’s long suit was fellow-feeling, Ellie’s was action. In Bordertown she was inaugural secretary–treasurer of the primary school welfare club; she gave lessons in handicrafts and divinity; she was an office bearer of the Girl Guides; she trained the children’s choir; she worked for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She was often in conflict with the parents of girls she was teaching because, with the crash, farmers were taking their daughters out of school and putting them to work as farmhands or housekeepers.
Before Ellie was married she had angered her sisters by resisting farm housekeeping; married, she maintained the view that housework should be shared by husband and wife, and so it was: Clem did half the chores. Ellie rescued several girls from manual drudgery by having them live in the manse. Parishioners had a respectful caution for what was known around town as ‘the sharp edge of Mrs Hawke’s tongue’.
There was never enough occupation for Ellie and in Bordertown she took up croquet, becoming an office bearer of the club. She had been a keen tennis player but found croquet more mentally stimulating—‘tennis lacks skill’, she declared—and in later life croquet became ‘Ellie’s second religion’. Hawke said, ‘Croquet! The politics and rules of croquet that we used to get at home were enough to drive you bloody mad. It seemed to be the most important thing in the world.’ He too plays croquet with enthusiasm; he once chased Margaret Whitlam across the green at the Lodge, waving his mallet at her when she beat him on a shot and whooping, ‘I’ve got to win! You know I’ve got to win!’ As a university friend remarked vividly, if not quite accurately, ‘Bob was his mother—inside out’.
At the beginning of 1933 the family made an important decision. Neil, who was eleven, was sent to boarding school. Ellie was determined that he should have the best possible opportunities so he was enrolled at King’s College, a Baptist and Congregational school in Adelaide. Neil’s departure from home turned Hawke, in effect, into an only child. His ‘spoiling’ increased.
In 1935 Clem was called to his next post in the Yorke Peninsula town of Maitland. The congregation there knew nothing about their new minister and his wife, with the exception of a detail that had drifted across hundreds of miles of pasture, bush and desert: ‘The Hawkes have a terrible kid’.
Hawke was not yet five. Already a motif in his life was emerging: people saw him as untamed, a disruptive element, an outsider who would have to prove himself before he would be accepted.