by Philip Luker
Adams: ‘That’s why people love you, Hazel. What was it like to wake up in The Lodge and realise that you were the most scrutinised woman in Australia?’
Hawke: ‘I don’t think I had such an experience. When Bob became prime minister, I felt a very strong sense of responsibility and opportunity. I was attracted to women’s and community issues, and to children’s television.’
Adams: ‘How old were you when you met Bob?’
Hawke: ‘Eighteen or nineteen. He was six months younger than I was. He went to Oxford University for his Rhodes Scholarship and I followed a few months later. All that was exciting because I had no tertiary education and started work at 14. During our courtship, his uncle, Albert, was the West Australian premier (1953-59). Bob and I were married in 1956. His family was very ALP-orientated and there was a stated expectation in the family that he would become a Labor politician.’
Adams: ‘A prime minister?’
Hawke: ‘It was talked about in the family.’
Adams: ‘Did you urge him, or did you urge caution?’
Hawke: ‘I’m not an urger either way. Basically I agreed with the moves he made. We lost a baby boy (Robert Junior) at the time Bob ran (unsuccessfully) for the federal seat of Corio, which made it hard.’
Adams: ‘How’s life for you now, post the Bob years?’
Hawke: ‘Very good, very busy and full of interest. I do things I like doing, such as community work. I have one family in Sydney, one in Canberra and one in Perth. That’s how I like to see our children, Susan, Stephen and Roslyn.
(Hazel and Bob lived in Melbourne from 1958 until 1983 while he was ACTU President, but in 1970 he met Blanche d’Alpuget and in 1976 they met again and started one of the most publicised affairs in Australian history.)
Hawke continued in her conversation with Adams in 1998: ‘I’ve got another go at life. I’m not the slightest bit lonely. I’ve got a lot of friends and a good neighborhood where I live in Sydney. Life moves on. I wasn’t raised with books but now I’ve become more aware of the treasure trove they are. I’ve got friends who lend me books and round and round they go. Friends and family get you through. Women’s friendship is a great resource. In Melbourne, I was out in the suburbs with not much money and really on my own. I had no family there and had not yet made friends in the local community. You find each other, for example at the local kindergarten. Many of those people I got to know in Melbourne, where I was for 25 years, were from somewhere else and we were looking for each other.
‘Melbourne is more organised. Melbourne families have their churches and schools. Totally different to Sydney, not snobby but not so welcoming as Sydney, where it’s “How’re you going, mate?” Sydney has a different personality altogether. Melbourne has its social structures, and I admire them. For newcomers it takes time, but once you make your connection and your friends, it’s a wonderful city, resourceful and with a great community spirit. If an appeal is well organised, Melbourne people give to it. Sydney has a different mentality. It’s not mean but it’s different in the way it approaches community.’
Adams: ‘You must realise you have millions of friends. Is that a good feeling?’
Hazel: ‘It’s lovely, yes. I do feel a sense of friendship and belonging.
(Three years after the LNL conversation, Hazel Hawke was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease; two years later she agreed to take part in an ABC Television Australian Story about living with Alzheimer’s; in 2004, she and her family launched the Hazel Hawke Dementia and Care Fund; in 2009 she was placed in high-level care.)
***
Wombats’ secret underground life: James Woodford, Sydney Morning Herald environment writer and author of The Secret Life of Wombats (Text Publishing), said in a Late Night Live conversation with Adams on July 30, 2001: ‘Wombats are mysterious creatures and Europeans know little about them after living in Australia for more than 200 years. Forty years ago, a schoolboy called Peter Nicholson used at night to sneak out of his dormitory at Timbertop, a Victorian country branch of Geelong Grammar School, crawl down wombat burrows, get to know the wombats and learn to make the noises they make. It’s a sort of “humpff” and there is another noise, like a loud “shhh” when they want to scare other animals.’
Adams: ‘I’ll try that when someone is unhappy about being interviewed. I’ve always been fond of wombats. They are about a metre long and a third of a metre high, like a barrel on legs; they keep themselves to themselves when they’re not being skittled by cars, and they do most of their business underground.’
Woodford: ‘I had my first wombat encounter when I was 17 and went camping in the mountains behind Nowra after finishing the Higher School Certificate. My uncle left the three of us with a case of beer and we stupidly drank the lot. When I woke up in the morning, a big wombat was three feet away.’
Adams: ‘Did you say “humpff’ to it?’
Woodford: ‘I should have. I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. They are smarter than kangaroos or other marsupials.’
Adams: ‘I’ve always said that on the Australian coat of arms are a kangaroo and an emu, which have the biggest bums and the smallest brains. I think that’s deeply symbolic of our culture.’
Woodford: ‘Some scientists say wombats are the smartest marsupials in the world. Their lives are surprisingly complex. People I’ve spoken to have been sleeping in a tent across a wombat’s path and the wombat will just go straight through the tent. They have more personality than a kangaroo and they’re much smarter than a koala. A woman made the mistake of building her house on a wombat trail and one day she opened her front door and found a wombat there. It walked straight through her house.’
***
The enigma of Jim Cairns: Adams called Jim Cairns, who has a unique place in the Australian Labor movement, ‘one of the most valiant and vulnerable people I have ever met’. Adams had a warm and revealing conversation with him on October 28, 1996 and it was repeated on October 19, 2007, four years after Cairns died at the age of 89. Cairns was the minister for overseas trade and the minister for secondary industry in the first Whitlam Government, then deputy prime minister and treasurer but was sacked by Whitlam for his involvement in catastrophic foreign government loans and for misleading Federal Parliament. His career was also ruined by his affair with his sex-charged personal assistant Junie Morosi.
Adams: ‘No-one in the Labor movement has attracted more flak than you. Why?’
Cairns: ‘The determining forces in society are out to keep you in step, in politics and everywhere else. If you are an employee, you get on in the same way, by pleasing the boss. When Rupert Murdoch comes into the room, everyone knows what he should do. The most important day of my life was May 8, 1970, when I took a leading part in the anti-Vietnam War moratorium march of 100,000 people in Collins Street, Melbourne. It was completely peaceful and completely ineffective. The people had a human energy that could be felt. I’ve never had that experience before or since. It demonstrated what democracy really is. Parliament is a stage play, like something on television. If democracy is to mean anything, it has to be collective action by the people over something important. The moratorium was the clearest possible example of precisely that.’
Adams: ‘Hasn’t it been a sad story ever since? That was the mountain. The valleys seem to have got deeper and deeper.’
Cairns: ‘No Australian parliament, federal or state, has any values other than money values.’ Adams: ‘And that is true of all Western democracies.’
Cairns: ‘It’s true in England and Europe. It’s very disappointing and very serious. The alternative to concentrating entirely on economic growth is to concentrate on full employment. To reduce unemployment depends on a high level of government spending. And we can’t have that because the ownership of Australia’s economic structure has moved into foreign hands. Those companies pay their taxes overseas and foreign companies contribute only about ten per cent of total Australian taxation.’
Adams: ‘You didn
’t run away over Junie Morosi. You copped it. No-one in public life had ever done that. Do you feel, as others have said, that you are one of the tragedies of politics and you blew your opportunities?’
Cairns: ‘I presume that refers to 1975.’
Adams: ‘’You were dismissed before the Dismissal.’
Cairns: ‘But to say I blew the opportunities is completely invalid. By the beginning of 1975, the Whitlam Government was finished. Whitlam had sacked three ministers and the speaker in six months. Kerr (the governor general) was looking for an opportunity to sack Whitlam. All this I knew, and I told Whitlam about it. The only thing Whitlam could have done was to recommend to the Queen that Kerr be replaced. But Whitlam was incapable of making a decision of that kind. I didn’t blow the opportunity. I went out with it.’
***
Revelations about Charles Dickens’ women: Adams said on Late Night Live on September 10, 2007: ‘My friends have warned me about Miriam Margolyes. Miriam is an acclaimed British thespian and now an Australian citizen. She’s taking her show, Dickens’ Women, across Australia.’
Margolyes: ‘Dickens was a bit of a shit, a very bad husband, an adulterer, cruel, and he bore grudges, but he wrote like a god. He had a bad time with women and felt betrayed by them. He was not gay, but he was effeminate. His mother and his first love both let him down. He couldn’t stand humiliation. His women were scary but funny. He had a relationship with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, for 12 years, and founded a home for fallen women in Shepherd’s Bush in London. They must have loved having this nice man come and question them for hours. Dickens was a social reformer and was fascinated by people on the underbelly of life. I think all men are a bit titillated about talking to prostitutes.’
Adams: ‘One of the great things about Dickens was his recognition of the relationship between melancholia and happiness. They mingle and blend and enrich each other. That’s what is wrong with many television shows — people have only one emotion. It’s a comedy, a thriller or a series.’ Margolyes: ‘Everything’s become so bland, one colour. I require highs and lows and that’s why my shows are so jolly good. They make you laugh and cry, often at the same time. I do 22 women and two men, and I expose what a cad Dickens was to his wife, Catherine.’
Adams: ‘What would Dickens make of your show?’
Margolyes: ‘He would be furious! He would have regarded it as an infringement and an impertinence and would have tried to close it down.’
Adams: ‘You have been doing this show for 20 years.’
Margolyes: ‘I’m 66. I hang on to every year.’
Adams: ‘How does the show translate across cultures?’
Margolyes: ‘India loved it. But I went back only once to Jerusalem. I’m proudly Jewish but also pro-Palestine, a very uncomfortable position to hold because Jewish people feel I am betraying them. I’m not.’
Adams: ‘What did the Queen say to you when you were awarded the Order of the British Empire?’ Margolyes: ‘I got it from Prince Charles, who I like very much. The Queen, when I met her at Buckingham Palace, told me to shut up! I spoke when I should not have spoken, not according to protocol.’
***
The Romanovs’ tense last days: Ekaterinburg, the Russian city in the Urals where the Bolsheviks imprisoned and killed the royal Romanovs after the 1917 Russian Revolution, was a city on the brink of chaos and seething with soldiers and spies; the counter-revolutionary Whites were advancing on it, the British author Helen Rappaport told Late Night Live on July 30, 2008. She wrote Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs (Hutchinson) about the last Tsar (Nicholas 11), his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and son Alexei, all of whom the Bolsheviks shot dead on July 17, 1918, after 18 months’ captivity.
Rappaport: ‘I walked the streets of Ekaterinburg in July 2007 and stood in an all-night vigil with thousands of people commemorating the Romanovs’ deaths. It was an experience I will never forget and it connected me with the story. Boris Yeltsin had the house where they were held pulled down because the government was worried about the pilgrims. The Bolsheviks put a 15ft fence around the house, imprisoned the family on the top floor and painted out all the windows. On July 4, there had been rumours of monarch groups planning to get them out and their guards began to sympathise with them. Moscow tightened the security.’
Adams: ‘Was there a welcome mat anywhere in Europe for them?’
Rappaport: ‘No European royal family volunteered to take them. It was too much a political hot potato. Alexandra was hard to like — she had embraced Russianness to marry the Tsar but her spikey, unsmiling personality did not endear her to people. Once her son was born and found to be a haemophiliac, her world imploded and her life was spent willing him to survive. Nicholas was devoted to her but was dreadfully henpecked and weak, dominated by a very clever woman, a shrew who nagged him but who was a sick, hysterical woman. The government planned how to kill them as the White Russians advanced towards Ekaterinburg. Alexandra and Nicholas had a passionate physical relationship and an assortment of condoms was found in their room after they were murdered.’
Adams: ‘Heavens above! The Pope’s just been to Sydney. You shouldn’t say that. Wash your mouth out! We can’t ignore Rasputin in all this.’
Rappaport: ‘I’m a bit bored by Rasputin because he’s had such a lurid press. He wasn’t as influential in state affairs as people make out.’
Adams: ‘Did they realise they were about to die?’
Rappaport: ‘That’s the $64,000 question. Nicholas must have known he was doomed. But what parent would for one moment think that their children would also be slaughtered? There is no way the Bolsheviks would have taken the final step without Lenin’s say-so.’
Adams: ‘How much of the Romanovs resonates in Russia today?’
Rappaport: ‘This is the key. They represented nationhood to the people, a link to the past, to Mother Russia. With the Romanovs being canonised (their bodies are now buried in St Petersburg Cathedral), they are being turned into plaster saints. Even though all their bodies have now been found and identified, false claims by “descendants” will never die down.’
***
Noel Coward, the entertaining spy: Barry Day, Trustee of the Noel Coward Foundation, told Adams on Late Night Live on January 31, 2008 about his book, The Letters of Noel Coward: ‘Noel was spying for the Foreign Office from 1937 and this is revealed in his letters to and from them. Everything he wrote had an ironic touch.’
Adams: ‘He was the son of a piano tuner and created his own persona, educated himself and learned rather than was taught. Things would come at him and he would absorb them and express them.’
Day: ‘He said his good fortune was to have a bright, inquisitive nature but not an intellectual mind. He had to get out there and earn his own living.’
Adams: ‘He was only 24 when he started to make good. Did he fall into the celebrity trap of believing his own hyperbole? He was intent on shaping Noel Coward, behind whom he could hide, which he certainly did. Being Noel Coward was his best disguise as a spy.’
Adams read from a letter in Day’s book: ‘I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing, not arithmetic and I have a selfless absorption in the wellbeing and achievements of Noel Coward.’ He addressed a letter to his mother, ‘Dear darling old Mummysnooks, I know you don’t love Daddy nearly as much as me.’
Day: ‘He was certainly a mummy’s boy and quite proud of it.’
Adams: ‘There is a vast correspondence with celebrities. Are we talking of genuine friendships, or networking?’
Day: ‘You’re talking networking. As a young man, he would list the people he knew. But he had some genuine friendships, Gertrude Lawrence for sure, and Laurence Olivier, although that soured.’
Adams: ‘There is ambiguity in a letter to Virginia Woolf in 1928: “I am hot and glowing, and completely at your feet. Will you agree to become one of my top 500 best chums
?”’
Day: ‘They were friends for a while and then she told someone else that Noel was too clever by half. Most people, when they first came across Noel, felt obliged to be critical because others were so pro.’
Adams: ‘Let’s deal with sexuality and his long-term partner Graham Payn. Noel wrote the song, “Mad About the Boy.”’
Day: ‘There are many things you can take either way. One thing that concerns me is that some people want to turn him into a gay icon. There was an impeccable dignity in his sexual life, reticent but untainted by pretense.’
Adams: ‘He handled that part of his life with enormous style. Lawrence of Arabia used to preface his letters with his military serial number, 338171, and Coward replied, “Dear 338171. May I call you 338?”’
Day: ‘They became correspondents and saw each other from time to time. Whether they had an affair we will never know.’
Adams: ‘Why did Churchill stop Noel’s knighthood in 1942 after the King had approved it?’
Day: ‘There was a definite mixture of feelings. Each admired the other but there was an edge, and I think it was because of two huge egos. Churchill was an actor also, and wanted to be centre stage. Personal jealousy had a lot to do with it. They made it up over the years, to a degree. In fact, Coward hosted the celebration of Winston’s 90th birthday. The technicalities of why Winston refused Coward a knighthood were simple. The British Government sent Noel in the early years of the war to America, which was then neutral, to report back on attitudes. He got to know Roosevelt. When he returned to England, those who didn’t like him picked on the fact that he had spent his own money to do it and this was a technical crime because finances had been frozen at the outbreak of war. He was taken to court and fined. So Churchill told the King that to give Noel a knighthood would look as if the government was ignoring the offence or rewarding it. Noel didn’t get it for another 30 years.’