Bob Hawke: Drinking Again? From Hunting the Famous.

BOB HAWKE

FROM HUNTING THE FAMOUS

JOHN STAPLETON

Everyone loved Bob.

Bob Hawke, Australian Prime Minister from 1983 to 1991, enjoyed for a sustained period of time enviable approval ratings – during the 1980s the highest ever for an Australian Prime Minister. He led the Australian Labor Party to four successive election victories and to this day remains the lee’s longest serving leader.

“Hawkie”, as he was often known, was the Sydney’s taxi drivers’ politician of choice.

He wasn’t just another working class hero. Many of the Australian population genuinely felt that Hawke was one of their own, an ordinary person with their interests at heart. And such a person, after a string of upper-class residents, was finally living in the Prime Minister’s official residence, The Lodge.

There were celebrations across Sydney when Hawkie trumped the opposition with a lightning dash, becoming Prime Minister less than four weeks after overthrowing former Opposition leader Bill Hayden in an internal coup.

The Liberal leader’s attempt to exploit disarray in the Labor Party by calling a snap election backfired and the charismatic former union leader led his party to victory.

Like many a journalist I somehow thought of the city’s taxi drivers as the voice of the common man.

I wasn’t the first and certainly would not be the last reporter, lazy or pressed for time, to grab a quote from the taxi driver on the way back from a job. And then include a quote in their story so it sounded like the paper had surveyed half the country’s working class to uncover a common sense voice.

Bob was clever in a nation which confused cleverness with pretentiousness and regarded such a trait with suspicion.

Hawkie had won a Rhodes’ Scholarship to Oxford University where he distinguished himself by setting a new world speed record for beer drinking, a feat which gained him an entry in The Guinness Book of Records.

The Australia of the day lived by the motto: “Never Trust a Man Who Doesn’t Drink.” In a country with a strong beer culture Hawke believed the feat helped him become Prime Minister.

Australians loved their Hawkie even more when he told the nation in the lead-up to the 1983 election that if he became Prime Minister he would stay away from the sauce.

In what other country would a promise of abstinence made by someone running for the highest office in the land be regarded with such admiration?

It was a promise Hawke would keep, much to everybody’s amazement.

There was speculation that Hawke attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings held exclusively for high ranking government officials.

True or not; his anonymity was respected. His confessions, if he ever made any, did not become the subject of common gossip.

Often enough you would never have known Bob had any more neurons than your Average Joe.

Hawkie wasn’t about to let on to the voters he had ever read a book or could see straight through them in a micro-flash. The ability to act like a normal working class man was a keystone to acceptance. Chameleon-like-abilities were essential.

Hawke adopted the camouflage of the good bloke, an Australian male. It was part act, part truth.

Prior to his election Bob Hawke smoked, drank to excess, loved a party, a brawl, a fine curvy woman, he swore like a trooper and bulldozed his way through any given situation. Like many Australian men.

The dust stained workers perched on the bar stools after work took to commenting on how smart Hawkie was; how he had a Rhode Scholarship or something; but even so he was a “decent bloke”, the highest compliment one Australian male can pay another.

Australians loved him. That he was clever was forgiven or forgotten.

One of the world’s most urbanised countries, Australia was essentially a land of suburbs. Hawke was famous for going to the shopping malls of the country’s outer areas and shaking hands with anyone and everyone he met. We the media were often obliged to follow.

In that Arcadian world, prior to the Twin Towers turning security worldwide on its head, Hawke wasn’t the type of Prime Minister to hide behind a screen of police or national security officers.

Unlike the carefully scripted encounters with the “public” of his successors, Bob Hawke was prepared to take on not just the flattering praise of party members, but to genuinely front all comers. If someone wanted to verbally attack him over a real or perceived injustice, as sometimes happened, Bob would stand his ground, listen to what they had to say and promise to look into it.

Hawk’s successor Paul Keating dismissed Bob Hawke’s “shopping mall” antics as cheap populism. Unlike Bob, Keating also made the mistake of ridiculing the media as a bunch of low life grubs. Partly as a consequence, Keating experienced some of the lowest popularity ratings of any Australian Prime Minister in history.

Hawke’s shopping mall circuses were a vital part of how he won elections; a fact Keating never grasped.

Successive Prime Ministers, particularly John Howard, would try and emulate Hawke, even visiting some of the same shopping malls. But none were ever as successful.

When Bob Hawke committed troops to the first Gulf War, a controversial move in a country which had seen too many of its young men die in distant wars for the benefit of other nations, he slickly purloined what was an electoral risk into an issue of national pride.

To question the country’s commitment to Iraq was to denigrate, as the spin went, some of the world’s finest soldiers.

Having neatly survived the country’s natural anti-war sentiment post-Vietnam – and as common Australian decency would dictate – Bob Hawke went down to the docks on the day the first troops were being sent o to war, ignoring the band of protestors outside the naval yards.

Hawke lingered on the ship for hours, shaking the hands of every soldier he laid eyes on and wishing them all good luck.

After the official proceedings were over, Hawke wandered the battle ship decks, cheerfully posing with the soldier’s proud families.

I followed the Prime Minister, his circling minders and his ever despairing security around the battle ship.

Follow in Hawke’s wake as a reporter and virtually all one ever found were fans. And so it proved on the day the country sent the first contingent of soldiers off to Iraq.

“Hawkie shook my hand, he touched me here, he kissed me on the cheek, I’m not going to shower for a week,” one of the mothers clutching children gushed.

“He asked after my grandmother, he remembered her from the teachers union, and said he was sorry to hear she had passed away,” another threw in.

“He wanted to know the names of my children. He posed for a picture with them. When I told him one of the kids was sick, he said he knew an asthma expert, and would get one of his staff to send me the details.”

All of this and more from the devoted constituents left in his wake. Hawke didn’t win four elections in a row without a gift for electioneering. Nobody had the common touch like Bob.

Outside the heavily fortified Australian Navy docks at Woolloomooloo protestors waved placards and chanted anti-war slogans with little affect.

Journalism dignified the extremities of any debate.

Often enough the holders of minority views were quoted simply because they added color or tension to a story.

During the days when Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was still controversial rather than the city institution it became, we would always quote the Reverend Fred Nile’s consistent attacks on the parade.

In fact Fred Nile’s views, far from being common, were representative of the few members of the fundamentalist Christian tradition to which he belonged.

Critics liked to dismiss Australia as a country of rednecks and homophobes. In fact most Australians couldn’t have cared less who was doing what to whom, as long as it was not to them.

They might normally have been a focus, but few journalists bothered with the anti-war protestors on the day the first group soldiers were sent o to the Gulf.

Hawke had starved the placard wavers of media oxygen and stolen the limelight.

The fact that he was sending soldiers to a dangerous and far-off place where Australia had little business being purely to support the American Alliance was lost.

Manipulation of public opinion was just one of Bob Hawke’s many talents.

Years after he ceased being Prime Minister, a photographer and I were sent to cover a function in Eastern Sydney for the launch of something or other, a book, a restaurant chain, a new line of doilies, an inoffensive new charity for the ladies who lunch. In the end all the launches merged into one another.

It was one of those leisurely, well catered for events where someone had thrown $50,000 or so on the table for expenses and considered it money well spent.

Everyone was well dressed. Except, of course, for the journalists and photographers; the city’s riff-raff.

Hawke, like many politicians, knew half of Sydney’s media pack by name, he made a point of it, and even then, years after he lost the leadership, he knew exactly how to play them.

After the launch of whatever it was, lunch was served. The media were placed at a table well away from the main guests so they wouldn’t spill anything on the neatly starched table cloths or overhear a confidence no one wanted to read in the next day’s papers.

Bob as always was prominently situated near the podium.

As far as pulling a living legend was concerned, having Bob at your function was about as “good a get” as a society hostess could pull off.

And as always, Hawkie knew everybody. The working man’s hero was perfectly at home in the upper echelons of Australian society.

This was the refined, clever, upper-crust Hawke the general public never saw.

This was the man the nation’s taxi drivers, builders laborers, electricians and hard-working masses hadn’t vote for; because they thought they were voting for one of their own.

With all the charm and discretion for which the media were renowned, The Sydney Morning Herald photographer pulled off a string of shots of Bob drinking what looked suspiciously like alcohol.

He was no longer Prime Minister, having been replaced by the knife edged Italian suits draping Paul Keating’s elegant form, but to everyone’s knowledge he had maintained his pledge of abstinence.

Hawkie holding a glass of what looked like white wine was the first public sign that The Big Dry was over. It had been a long time between drinks.

All of those lay-it-on-thick sympathy articles about his long suffering wife Hazel, who was admired more than any other Australian Prime Minister’s wife before or since, disappeared in the wave of a glass.

The country’s women sympathized with Hazel for all those long nights spent alone caring for the children, waiting for her husband to come home from the office or whatever function Bob happened to be attending – including all those boozy late night Australian Labor Party dinners in Sydney’s Chinatown where drinking to excess was compulsory.

And Hazel was much admired for her dignified look-the-other-way response when Hawke’s womanising became the subject of gossip.

The parable of Hazel’s quiet heroism and Bob’s self-sacrifice disappeared with the first photograph of Bob holding a glass of “piss”, as Australians so elegantly called wine.

The Sydney Morning Herald where I then worked loved the story.

A common place launch of nothing in particular I was hopeful I wouldn’t have to file a single word on suddenly turned into a front page story – thanks to an enterprising photographer.

Wrung out from so many hundreds of stories, I wished the photographer had kept their lens cap on.

In a dreary afternoon under the News Room’s fluorescent lights I was obliged to ring everyone even remotely connected to the luncheon, from experts on alcoholism to the event’s caterers.

Hawke’s press person declared that he had no idea where Bob was and as Hawke was no longer Prime Minister but a private citizen his whereabouts wasn’t a reporter’s concern.

The helpful little press person turned o his phone after I barraged him with calls.

Former Australian Prime Ministers received ample benefits costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, but you couldn’t expect them to answer any questions in return.

The pictures of Bob drinking white wine, spread across the top of the front page proofs, looked fantastic.

The problem, the editors declared, was it could possibly be non- alcoholic white wine. It seemed unlikely. It was certainly news to me that there was any such thing.

I rang the caterers. They weren’t prepared to discuss. No, they couldn’t possibly put me on to the waiter who had been serving Hawke – they were casuals and had dispersed.

No, the head waiter could not comment and no, they couldn’t possibly pass on any of the staff’s numbers, a question of confidentiality.

The emphasis on individual privacy as a right and its progressive enshrining in legislation had become the bane of working journalist’s lives.

The restaurant delivered up the same story as the caterers: “Sorry, everybody’s gone home now. No, I don’t have anyone’s number. No, I’m so sorry, I would like to help but I just can’t. Best of luck with it.”

Non-alcoholic white wine!?

Would someone like Hawke even drink such a thing? Was it available in Australia? And if it was, what a nightmare assignment for some marketer that must have been!

Prior to the advent of Google, there weren’t any lightning fast computer searches which would reveal every minor reference to such an oddity as the sales of non-alcoholic white wine in Australia in 0.24 seconds.

The principal wine merchants were all bemused. Some suggested they had heard of such a thing but had no idea where to buy it.

As day turned to night there was only one thought on my mind – “I want to go home”. Lunch was an increasingly long time ago.

Journalism might seem like an interesting line of work, but being constantly under surveillance from the marauding layers of Chiefs of Staff, Editors in Chief, News Editors and Night Editors, to name a few, increased stress levels magnificently.

Journalism was a high burnout high turnover profession and only naturals, misfits or hardheads survived past the first two or three years. The rest of the annual throngs of eager young cadets soon lee for bigger offices, more respect and considerably better salaries in corporate public relations.

As night fell outside the Fairfax building – which to the amusement of the journalists working there never made it onto The Sydney Morning Herald ’s annual the list of Sydney’s Ten Ugliest buildings – the brewery on the other side of eight lanes of traffic lit up for the night shift. The editors continued to wring their hands over the possibility of being sued if the paper went with the Bob Drinks Again story.

Hawkie might have been all bonhomie to the nation’s working journalists, a seasoned master at manipulating the media which played such a crucial role in the stratospheric popularity he enjoyed for so many years.

But in fact Bob was no lover of the Fourth Estate.

Since his retirement Hawkie had lined his pockets with more money than he ever made as Prime Minister by suing the news’ organizations which had dared to malign, slight or allegedly defame him during his time in power.

This is my time in jail, I often thought, as I crossed the six lanes of ceaseless traffic on the strip of Parramatta Road known as Broadway. Here soot-covered camellias lined the edge of the highway, remnants of some optimistic council project aimed at bringing beauty to an unbeautiful spot. It didn't work. The plants and their usually much admired flowers were coated with pollution from the thousands of cars passing every day.

This Broadway had none of the lights, glamour or entertainment of its New York counterpart; and I would sometimes feel all was lost, lost, as I gazed up at the dreary concrete building where I worked. I knew I was a stranger in a strange land, that I would be lucky to make it through the day.

When I first started work at Fairfax the place resembled a self-contained factory with management on the top level, editorial in the middle, and production downstairs.

The place smelled of ink.

Arriving for work on a Sunday morning, I would find the docks full of drifting newsprint left over from the hundreds of thousands of copies of The Sun Herald which had just been loaded onto trucks and dispatched around the State.

When the printing machines started up the entire building shook.

Technology changed everything, not just the nature of journalism and newspapers, but the atmosphere of the buildings themselves. Within a few years of my joining the profession, the smell of ink no longer permeated newspaper offices. Printing took place tens or even hundreds of miles away from the editorial offices. The once compelling ambience of news rooms began to resemble that of any other city workplace.

The characteristic sight of a reporter smoking furiously at their desks and stubbing cigarettes into overflowing ashtrays as deadlines approached became a part of history.

The air came to smell like air conditioning rather than tobacco and the desks became occupied by bright young things with bottles of mineral water in their gym bags.

A former generation of journalist would never have even known what a gym bag was.

But more than just smoke free, news floors became silent.

With the introduction of electronic messaging the culture changed dramatically.

The news floors were no longer full of people shouting ideas at each other, comparing leads or arguing with Chiefs of Staff.

Many a proud production role also vanished with the evolutions in printing technology. The same was true of editorial. In the 1980s The Sydney Morning Herald’s library remained legendary. The personable librarians meticulously ran the daily clipping services. They often got caught up in stories and the hunt for detail, seeing it as an honorable role to help journalists.

The library’s banks of metallic grey cabinets were stuffed with files full of clippings from the Herald and rivals. In subsequent years all the same functions were fulfilled within seconds by computers.

In the mid- 1980s Sydney's most famous tabloid of all, The Sun, was in its final death throws, made uneconomic by rising labor costs and changing readership patterns since the advent of television. It eventually closed in 1988. Evening newspapers were a fading tradition worldwide. The demise of The Sun was followed by its rival The Mirror. The dueling headlines of the city’s afternoon papers slipped into history.

At first, when I arrived each morning at the offices of the SMH the old soldiers from The Sun would be just winding up their shifts. I watched in awe as the ancient sub-editors finished o the edition, excited to at last be inside that almost impenetrable citadel. And citadel it truly was. I had knocked so often, tried so hard.

By midday the sub-editors and pickled old newshounds would be found filling the surrounding pubs, where journalistic legends finished their work days by drinking themselves into a convivial state.

On the day of Hawke’s luncheon I had already reached the allotted hour for being swamped by a daily feeling of burnout. Other interests lay outside the newspaper’s precincts.

I might have been working since morning, but my bosses weren’t about to hand this story over to the night reporter.

“Ring him and ask him,” I was ordered.

“I don’t know where he is,” I replied.

“Do your job,” came the frustrated response. “Ring everybody you can think of who knows him and don’t stop until you’ve got him. Because you’re not going home until you do.”

Finally I tracked the quarry down to the bar in the Duke of Stamford hotel in Double Bay. It was the hotel of choice for the affluent and influential, discrete, tasteful and with top-of-the-line service.

“He’s not in his room, he’s in the bar,” I told the Chief of Staff , hoping I could wriggle out of making the phone call, knowing perfectly well Bob wasn’t going to take kindly to this sort of invasion.

“Ring the hotel and ask to be put through to Bob in the bar,” the Chief of Staff ordered. “It’s that sort of hotel and they’ll know exactly who you mean.”

“Ugh” I responded, grumbling as I went back to my desk.

I rang the Duke of Stamford and explained to the man on the switch what I needed.

We had bonded over the previous hour of multiple calls when I dropped the hint I might “bat for the other side”.

The switch-bitch was all aflutter at the gossip that one of the reporters on the city’s Bible of the Chattering Classes aka The Sydney Morning Herald might be sympathetic. Who knew what stream of stories might change the way conservative Australia thought about sexuality; if only he was kind enough to help out a reporter with a little show of brotherhood.

After some prevarication the telephonist did exactly as I asked.

I could hear the muffled flurry in the expensive padding of that exclusive watering hole as the barman said quietly: “Phone call for you Bob.”

And I could almost hear Hawkie’s self-important “harrumph harrumphs” as he excused himself from the group he had been entertaining and went to take the call.

Once I had that instantly recognizable and most famous of Australian voices on the line and apologized for interrupting him I explained to Bob that the editors were a pack of idiots with no respect for other people’s privacy, but they wanted to run a picture of him, probably in the gossip section at the back of the paper, probably not at all.

And they just wanted to know if what he was drinking in the photographs at that day’s function was actually white wine.

“For Goodness sake,” Bob snapped, slamming the phone down.

The story, including this response, along with a string of prominent photographs, was strapped across the top of the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald the next morning.

It would be some time before Bob let his guard down enough to be photographed drinking in public again.