Going to highest bidder: slice of Bob Hawke’s life
Australia
As Australia’s third longestserving prime minister, Bob Hawke disguised little: he cried on national television for his heroin-addicted daughter, sobbed to parliament over the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and when Australia won the America’s Cup yacht race, he merrily told the nation’s bosses that they were ‘‘bums’’ to sack workers who took the day off.
When the Rhodes Scholar and one time possessor of the world record for skolling a yard of ale died in mid-may at the age of 89, the nation grieved for a leader who was loved as much for the flaws he could not hide – a weakness for alcohol and women – as for the strengths he paraded as the great persuader.
At the weekend they were offered their most intimate look at the life of their former prime minister; his biographer, Blanche d’alpuget – who later married her subject, 14 years her senior – threw open the sumptuous Sydney harbour home she shared for nearly 25 years with Hawke as she prepared to sell off much that her husband owned.
The house, overlooking a tranquil bay in north Sydney, has already been sold for more than A$15 million (NZ$15.8M), money that has gone to D’alpuget, who now writes novels. Hawke’s three children from his marriage to his first wife, Hazel, who died in 2013, have begun legal action against D’alpuget to recover more from the estate than the A$750,000 reported to have been left to each of them.
Now there are predictions that another half a million dollars may be raised in a Sydney auction room tonight when the former prime minister’s possessions, ranging from his cigars and alcohol left undrunk to his fishing rods, are sold off by his wife.
When The Times joined hundreds of bargain hunters, Hawke admirers and the merely curious to inspect his possessions, neatly laid out in rooms of the home, D’alpuget was making herself a coffee in the kitchen. She said that she had few qualms about the disposal, despite having just returned from a church service to mark 100 days since her husband’s death in the house.
‘‘Bob was my favourite item but he’s gone so everything else can go,’’ she said. ‘‘I have all my memories and that’s what’s important to me. Bob loved one thing about this house, the view and the balcony where he had a cigar and did the Times cryptic crossword out there every morning, in nine minutes. So everything else was decoration. It was the view and the sun, the peacefulness.’’
Even the former prime minister’s whisky flasks, old cricket gear and cigar humidors will be on the auction block, as will his sterling silver soup ladle and coffee mugs featuring his image.
His other possessions, shared with his wife, include an Alessi champagne bucket, Versace ashtrays, white leather Paolo Piva sofas, his Raymond Weil and Bulgari wrist watches and a silver-footed bowl inscribed ‘‘presented by Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence, United States of America.’’