by Derek Rielly
A year later, Hawke stopped calling. Eventually he rang and told you he wasn’t going to divorce Hazel. How did you respond?
‘He’d been so conflicted his doctor had sent him for a brain scan to see if he had a brain tumour. But I was just shattered. None of this is logical…’ Blanche laughs. ‘Because by then, even though I’d left my husband, I knew I didn’t want to be with [Bob] anyway. I wanted to stay in Canberra with Louis. But to know that he was jilting me… ’
A pause.
‘I was suicidal.’
Briefly.
‘Yes, it was brief. I decided to murder him instead. I thought that would be much more satisfying.’
Can you describe your fantasy of shooting your lover?
‘Well I can’t. Because I’d never used a gun. But I knew exactly how to use a knife.’
Can you describe your fantasy of killing Hawke with a blade?
‘Oh yes! That would be an embrace and then… I don’t know if you know, but with a knife you must always strike up to get through the ribs and to the heart.’
With gusto and a sudden ferocity, Blanche pantomimes jamming the Sabatier steel into Hawke.
That would’ve been a newsworthy event, I offer. Beautiful girl murders famous cheating stud.
‘Yessssssss. And I had this thing, Oh I’ll just be able to write while I’m in jail.’
Two years after the break-up and you’re back tapping on his office door for what would become your most significant work. Did you really decide to write Robert J. Hawke because you felt the media representation of Hawke was cartoonish? Or was it because you longed to reconnect?
‘Yes, and no, no, no. I didn’t long to reconnect. I was very, very interested in the trade unions, having done the Kirby book, and what they’d contributed to Australian society. And I first wanted to do the biography of Albert Monk, Bob’s predecessor [as ACTU president]. His wife wouldn’t let me because she was wife number two and she didn’t want people to know. And so it’s never been written. It’s a great pity because he kept copious notes, all in a very strange shorthand. But the trade unions formed a lot of the ethos, the values, of twentieth-century Australia.’
How did Hazel react when Bob told her you were writing his biography? How much did she know about the two of you?
‘Well, I don’t know. But he persuaded her that she should talk to me, and she did.’
How were those conversations?
‘Somewhat strained. And she was, very reasonably of course, extremely hostile towards me. But she saw it as something that she ought to do. She suspected I was only doing it for money. She actually said that to me. Which wasn’t the case. I was doing it out of the conviction that he was a very important force in the country and was not properly understood and presented.’
When the book, which detailed Hawke’s infidelities, was released and she was asked how she coped with his myriad betrayals, Hazel told the Sunday Press, ‘Of course there was hurt. That’s not unusual. But it’s gone. I suppose I coped in a very average way. I always felt it was just a phase… I didn’t see it as the core of Bob.’
Most importantly, for all his popularity, the biography convinced the Labor Party he had the depth of experience necessary to become leader.
‘It convinced two critical people, and they were on the national executive of the ALP. One of them was Lionel Bowen. The other was John Button. Both of them are dead. I’m sorry to talk about people who are dead, because they can’t verify what I’m saying to you, but it was really significant as far as swinging the vote. And you can’t underestimate the degree of hostility in the caucus to him. He was an outsider. He didn’t play by their rules. They’d done twenty years, man and boy before the mast, and here was this show pony who was going to waltz in and snatch everything. It was a hell-pit of jealousy and hatred. And it was only because they feared they were going to lose the election that they decided to change.’
You say that in January 1980, when you had your first interview for the book, you didn’t talk about the past – but did you feel something?
Blanche pauses, suddenly coy.
‘If you’ve had a really strong, physical, sexual connection with somebody, the energy from that is always present. And with it comes a degree of trust. So he could speak openly.’
Did something grow during those two-and-a-bit years working on the book? Did you sleep together? Oh god, I’ve gone Charles Wooley on you! Forgive me! But do tell…
A long sigh turns to laughter. ‘I’ll let that one go through to the keeper! But I do need some more tea.’ She signals to the waitress. ‘Excuse me!’
How did you feel when your book propelled Hawke to the leadership of the ALP and, ultimately, the prime ministership? You were in Israel, so you had time to think…
‘After doing a biography… I’d had this experience once before, so when it happened again I knew it was normal, but by the end of doing the biography I was so sick of him. Honestly, you give so much of yourself to concentrating on this one person and when it’s over you think, thank god! So, obviously, I was thrilled he’d won the election. I thought it was a lay-down miserè that he would. But I had moved on emotionally.’
Was that some sort of elevating feeling, that your book had helped put Hawke there?
‘No. No. Not at all. By then I was completely engaged with Israel.’ (Blanche was writing the novel Winter in Jerusalem, about a female screenwriter who returns to Jerusalem to reconnect with her father.) ‘But then, thrillingly, he rang me up.’
What did he say?
‘G’day.’ Blanche hoots.
Did you immediately know who it was?
‘Yes. Of course, there’s a seven-hour time difference, so you’re psychologically dislocated. He just asked after me and how it was in Jerusalem. I was very thrilled that he did ring up.’ Blanche smiles at the memory. ‘And he had to go to considerable lengths. God knows how he got my phone number.’
And you came back to Australia, you were living in Woollahra in Sydney, you found spirituality, you had boyfriends, a gorgeous life. Then, in November 1988, he called you again.
Blanche mimics Hawke calling. ‘G’day. I think that’s how it always is with a very deep connection. You don’t see someone for years and when you do nothing’s changed.’
Hawke told me he’d never stopped thinking about you in that period.
‘Really?’
And that the need to call you had become overwhelming… ‘Right. He’s never told me that.’
Eventually…
‘There’s a difference between – and it’s taken me a long time to understand it – there’s a difference between love and adoration. And adoration is on a higher level and a deeper level. And it takes longer to get there. But that, actually, is what we felt for each other. Adoration.’
How did your love affair part two differ from part one?
‘I was still very cautious,’ says Blanche. ‘I’d been let down once. I wasn’t going to take it seriously. I wasn’t going to get into that same position of wanting to kill myself, kill him, howling for three days. And, I did have a couple of nice friends … ’ Her eyelids lower provocatively, her voice is like honey. ‘Mmmm. Well, I was a free woman, I was divorced. But [with Hawke] it just intensified. It intensified. And a clandestine relationship when the secret service is involved is particularly exciting.’
These days, Hawke thanks Keating for taking the leadership as it opened the door for you and him to go public and, eventually, get married. How long after the second – successful – challenge did he call you and what did he say?
‘It wasn’t the successful challenge. He called me soon after the Kirribilli agreement [in November 1988, when Hawke promised he’d resign in favour of Keating shortly after the 1990 election].’
Did he tell you that, by virtue of his agreement with Keating, he was soon going to be free of all the obligations that had kept him married?
‘No! He had no idea! He never confided to me about the Kirribilli ag
reement. I learned about it from the media like everyone else. No, he just wanted to take up the relationship again.’
But after the successful challenge …
‘Well, that was three years later.’
Blanche was ‘deep in the country’ when Hawke lost his job to Keating. Still, through their intermediary, Hawke got through.
‘He was in a very bad way psychologically,’ Blanche says. ‘For a long while. He was really, really cut up. Cut up by the party and cut up that he’d done so much for them and they’d turned around and stabbed him in the back. That’s what he felt. But he’d made the agreement with Paul and he could’ve just realised he had to keep it. Of course, Paul had been stalking him from the day Bob had got the leadership. Initially those strains were very well papered over and they really did make a good team.’
And there were moments of love.
‘Oh there were! Politicians are basically warlords at that level. I don’t think I’m being romantic when I say there was a warrior love between them, how men who fight side by side feel about each other. They had that brother-I’ve-got-your-back connection. And that was very strong, that male love.’
Much is made of the schism between the two but not the love.
‘And Paul had magnificent gifts which Bob didn’t… parliamentary gifts. Paul was wonderful in parliament. Bob was never any good in the parliament. He was basically a barrister, and what you need as a lawyer is a different skill set… And Paul had been honing that since he was in swaddling clothes. And he pulled Bob’s chestnuts out of the fire quite a few times.’
Did Hawke appreciate it?
‘Yeah, although being a classic alpha male I’m sure it embarrassed him. Although now that he’s older and cannot drive, he mentioned the huge advantage of having a car and driver. He said, “That’s another thing for which we have Paul to thank.” Because it was Paul, as PM, who pushed through the legislation that former PMs could have a car and driver. It was immensely useful for Gough, John Gorton and Fraser, and is now an essential for Bob.’
Was it Paul’s line about not living at the arse-end of the earth and threatening to piss off to Paris that convinced Hawke to renege on the Kirribilli agreement?
‘It wasn’t just one thing. It was a gazillion small things. Snide remarks that Paul made to colleagues about Bob. He really started pulling as many bricks out of the wall as he could. Very active.’
In 1994, six years into their reignited affair, Blanche – an ambassador for CARE Australia – flew to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province to write about the terrible deprivations of Afghanistan’s female refugees. She’d arranged to meet Hawke in Hong Kong on the way home.
On the day of departure from Afghanistan, Blanche’s flight from Peshawar to Karachi was cancelled, thereby creating a chain of missed connections. She arrived in Hong Kong a day late. Hawke was deeply suspicious of the delay.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he lied.
Hawke had checked the flights and was told there were no cancellations. He was convinced Blanche had found a lover.
‘He was not angry or reproachful,’ Blanche writes in On Longing.
He was so heartsick he could barely summon the energy to speak. All the pain and agony of divorce, all the visions of happiness together, all our years of longing for each other shrivelled. In the end I said, ‘You just have to believe me.’ He couldn’t. He was about to do something irrevocable to be with me, and the thought that I had deceived him was unbearable. Back in Sydney it was clear we’d come to the end of the road and, whimpering with grief, we said goodbye.
Tell me about 1994, when you missed the plane?
‘Well, I was absolutely appalled that he didn’t believe me. I was truly appalled and I thought, Here we go again. So I said that’s it. Goodbye. He had rung the airline and the airline had said, “Oh no, sir, the plane took off!” and it was only through checking the story – I think he had to do it through the intelligence community – that he found out the truth, that the flight had been cancelled. And so then he was horrified [but] I was still adamant that I’d had enough and I wasn’t going to cop it anymore.’
The pair’s intermediary invited Blanche to dinner and pleaded Hawke’s case. Told her Hawke was distraught, destroyed, that he couldn’t concentrate, that he couldn’t continue to live without her. Would she at least let him apologise?
Only over the phone, Blanche stipulated.
‘And of course …’ Blanche erupts into laughter. ‘Foot in the door, isn’t it!’
And he was charming?
‘Oh yeah! And full of remorse that he’d not believed me.’
And the following year you were married.
‘July ’95.’
And not long afterwards, you left Hawke when he started drinking again.
‘We were living in Northbridge and he got very drunk, got very angry,’ says Blanche. ‘He could be very snide and abusive, but was never ever – to me or anybody else – physical. And I’d said to him straight up: I can’t cope with your drinking. Because he started drinking heavily again. As I said, he actually is an alcoholic. He will never say he is, because he successfully gave it up. These days he can keep his drinking down to an absolute minimum. But I think that comes with age. Anyway, I went to a friend’s place and he didn’t know which one.’
After the years of abstinence during his political career, was it ’92 when Hawke got a taste for booze again?
‘Yes, it was Hazel’s birthday. They were living in the Ritz-Carlton [in Double Bay] and this vile Italian restaurateur had said, “It’s Hazel’s birthday! There must be champagne!” Bob was gone. I was appalled, because he came to see me a couple of days later and he smelled of grog and he was stupid and I thought, I don’t want this.’
And after you left he squashed it down to one drink a day?
‘Oh no. No, no, no. Look, it’s terribly hard for alcoholics to drink in moderation. They have an on button but no off button. No, there were many more times when he would drink too much and I would shout at him and so forth. It was the only thing we ever argued about. And the kids, sometimes. His kids.’
You famously slapped his eldest daughter Sue in the Qantas Club in 2011. Yet in the ABC’s Australian Story episode on Hawke you appeared to be terrific pals. Was it all a confection for the cameras?
‘It was partly a confection. The first thing to say is that I love Sue, and the feeling is mutual. But she’s feisty, and we do argue. I thought she’d behaved appallingly towards me. She had stuff in women’s magazines about how I’d written Hazel out of history and so forth, and I was really furious with her. I was sitting, minding my own business in the Qantas Chairman’s lounge, when out of the blue she squatted down beside me and, all smiles, started to chat, as if we were the best of buddies. I thought, I could wring your neck.
‘I warned her, “I’m not speaking to you. Go away.” She was astonished but kept talking. I said a second time, “Go away.” She wouldn’t and seemed annoyed that I refused to speak to her.’
And then, slap, slap, slap, slap. Four times?
‘Just two, front hand, backhand. She said, “How dare you do that?” and I replied, “Would you like me to do it again?” She turned to a group of six men who were sitting behind her to ask, “Did you all see that?” They buried their heads in their newspapers and became deaf. Bob was horrified when I told him. “You didn’t! You didn’t!” he said, holding his head. It was very bad form on my part. Of course I apologised to Sue later, and our affection for each other was, if anything, heightened.’
A salvo of satisfied laughter.
‘I do have a temper,’ says Blanche, ‘and the contretemps was a storm in a teacup. But the barometric pressure for such storms comes from a deep seam of suffering in our culture that leads people to believe life is a zero-sum game. “You win. I lose.” The Hawke divorce was pitch-perfect for this attitude, but really it was a win-win-win. Obviously, for Bob and me, but also for Hazel.
She was liberated to be her own woman for the first time since her twenties. She escaped an ugly, dead marriage. She loved the view from the Northbridge house, but the rest of it was not so much to her taste. In moving to Castlecrag she got a house she loved and, as importantly, a garden she loved. She was always a mad keen gardener, but the Northbridge garden is a rainforest, a joy for fruit bats, possums and mountain goats. Not for human recreation. When I say it was win-win-win, I don’t mean it was painless. For the three of us, there was plenty of pain. I thought of Hazel often … It sounds so corny, but it’s true: I felt her pain. I should add, she herself said repeatedly she did not want to be seen as a martyr. She rejected the label as offensive … And life has pain, along with joy. Hazel had the joy of being wife of the Great Man.’
Ironically, you contributed to his greatness with Robert J. Hawke.
‘I can’t say that.’
But I can … Gareth Evans says your book Hawke: The Prime Minister caused the final rift between Bob and Paul. Is that true?
‘No. The rift was at the time of the challenge. When Bob rang Paul regarding my tinnitus, Paul could not have been more friendly, and that was years after Hawke: The Prime Minister was published. That book was just a record of what people who had worked closely with Bob said. As I mentioned earlier, it was a long essay intended to be an addition to the original biography. I was able to talk to people who wouldn’t talk to journalists, wouldn’t have talked to any other writer, but talked to me.’
But Paul wouldn’t talk to you?
‘Paul wouldn’t talk to me, no. I wrote to him and asked him. He was still very shirty with Bob. He’s got that Irish thing. But the other thing that I didn’t know at the time, and Bob didn’t know at the time, was that just before he had to do the budget, Paul got very bad tinnitus. And since I’ve had tinnitus I know how terrible it is and how it makes you very, very ratty. That’s why I’m wearing this thing.’ She points to the orthodontic brace she wears to correct the misalignment of her jaw. ‘So, he had this constant mental irritation. The poor man. Bob used to worry about it, “Ah, I wish I could do something for Paul, it’s really driving him nuts,” and I’m now saying, “Oh god, I hope this works because we’re the same age and if it works for me, maybe it’ll work for him.’”