The childhood roots of Bob Hawke’s adult bad behaviour are carefully examined in this biography of the often lionised figure
or many first-time voters of my generation, the 1983 Australian federal election remains the first seminal moment of political consciousness: the contest when the workers’ Messiah,Hawke, elected Labor leader the very day Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser called that election, ascended with an aura of fate and celebrity, the likes of whichhad not seen.
And when it was all over, once Paul Keating had risen just as inevitably to oust Hawke in 1991, we learned even more about Hawke courtesy of his own memoir, that of his first wife, Hazel, and an updated version of the 1982 book by d’Alpuget .But the Labor historian David Day’s Young Hawke adds a gritty and sometimes disturbing dimension to the Hawke story.
While Hawke often spoke about his intense love for his parents, Bobbie emerges as a neglected child. He was left in the care of a lodger for long periods while his parents saved souls. Clem, particularly, emerges as erratic, unstable and deeply melancholic. In Young Hawke, however, the confusing flipside to this neglect was the sense of destiny the parents imbued in the son and the unerring self-belief that propelled him to the prime ministership.
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