David Day’s biography of Bob Hawke’s first 50 years could only have been published after this famously thin-skinned subject’s death.
takes in the first 50 years of Bob Hawke’s life and leaves his story on the brink of election to the House of Representatives. Most of us have probably become pretty much whatever we are going to be by the time we reach that age.
Bob Hawke gesticulates during a speech in 1975 while he was president of the ACTU and the Labor Party.Perhaps that might form part of Day’s defence of the title – to which he could add that Hawke was also about to remake himself, to leave at least some of his old ways behind in his bid for the prime ministership. Yet, as Troy Bramston showed in his own recent Hawke biography, Hawke’s womanising continued into the 1980s, even if he no longer drank himself into a stupor.
All Hawke biographies live in the shadow of Blanche d’Alpuget’s 1982 classic, one very much designed as a selective coming clean in preparation for his bid for the prime ministership. But Day has written the kind of biography that could only have come after this famously thin-skinned subject’s death.
Such efforts still had the not inconsiderable benefit of raising Hawke’s public profile. His student activism helped him win a Rhodes Scholarship. The ACTU’s business activities, such as Bourke’s department store and Solo petrol stations, gained him lots of good publicity, building his reputation as a doer, at the same time as his charisma, physicality and larrikinism were building his celebrity. “Let’s face it, Hawke is a pisspot like us,” was a focus group response of the era.
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