Review of David Day, Hawke PM. The Making of a Legend, Harper Collins Publishers, 2025, published in The Recorder, Official Newsletter of the Melbourne Labour History Society, No. 313, November 2025, pp. 2-3.
This is a competent telling of the Hawke PM story. The book’s footnotes, interview credits, and other research is evidence of wide reading and examination of archives. Not counting the front cover, the book is illustrated beautifully with 34 photos.
Hawke and Whitlam have now attracted more interest in book length assessment than other Australian prime ministers.
Books on them and Keating are popular and usually interesting because of the changes wrought by each leader and contemporary and continuing interest in their vision and record.
Day disappoints, however, in failing to dwell on the significance of some events and trends. This contrasts with Paul Kelly’s The Hawke Ascendency (2008) which better explains who did what and why. Day’s scholarship’s lacks original, detailed archival sleuthing aka Troy Bramston’s Bob Hawke: Demons and Destiny (2022). But few can match that. There are blind spots where the author overlooks evidence that might spoil his arguments and interpretations. It is cliché to say a history narrative is just “one damn fact after another”, and Day is better than that, but the structure of the book facilitates that dismissal.
The setting out of the Chapter headings, in years, invites focus on the detail of the period covered. Hawke’s parliamentary career is covered in three chapters, 1983 has six, 1984 has two and a half (I am counting the 1984-1985 chapter as if equally divided over those years), half a chapter for 1985, 1986 bottled in one, and one for 1987 another for 1988, two each for the years 1989, 1990, and 1991, and then there are three postscript chapters. The footnotes and index complete the 374 pages.
Sometimes Day’s distaste for his subject is apparent. Hawke’s philandering, uncouthness, and ill-disciplined choices of friendships are exampled. Day even suggests misogyny – an improbable charge. On D’Alpuget’s 1982 Hawke biography, Day correctly estimates the assessment at the time, that it “might … drown out the whispered warnings in the caucus room about his fitness for high office.” Her book limited the potential muckraking of Hawke’s life, his numerous affairs, by investigative journalists.
It is mildly aggravating to find the author’s amateur psychologising. Hawke’s narcissism explains too much. Day says “…as a narcissist, he expected to be forgiven and embraced whatever he did.” As he aged into the role, “Hawke’s messiah complex was bordering on becoming a God complex.” Towards the end of his prime ministership: “As Keating was coming to realise, Hawke was never going to leave of his own accord. His narcissism impelled him to stay, cemented in place like a gargoyle on the roof of Kirribilli House.” The mystery is why, despite Hawke’s preening self-regard, he was so successful for so long.
Early in the book, a companion to Day’s Young Hawke: The Making of a Larrikin (2024), the author acknowledges: “After the mayhem of Whitlam’s final year and the subsequent divisive years of the Fraser government… Australians were yearning for a unifying and inspirational leader.”
The gap between the light treatment of Australia’s governance challenges in Hawke’s Boyer Lectures (1979) compared to his ultimate performance, is nicely outlined.
Several Hawke quotes from Stephen Mills underrated book The Hawke Years (1993) are cited but not made effective use of. On the privatisation and economic reform priorities of his government, Hawke is quoted saying to his staff: “Fuck the past. Or the past will fuck you.” On the ALP’s history Hawke says it is “both an inspiration and a dragon to slay.” These are confident statements about a leader who felt that what needed doing in the 1980s had to have regard for Labor’s history, but in finding solutions, not be ‘albatross-ed’ by that.
Day writes about government policy paralysis in the early 1990s, and “that [this] impression was only reinforced by the necessity for [Hawke] to call a special party conference [in 1990] to approve the required change to the party platform” on the privatisation of government-owned airlines. Was it? A better explanation is that Hawke, like his hero Curtin with conscription in World War II, wanted to get major policy changes approved by, not by-passed from, the ALP Federal Conference.
A lack of scepticism matched with a lack of curiosity in examining hunches mars the book. For example, the sections dealing with corruption in NSW would have benefitted from a perusal of Milton Cockburn’s The Assassination of Neville Wran (2024), which dispels many rumours. Day refers to Wran’s (and Hawke’s) links with Abe Saffron, the Mr Big of Sydney, without a skerrick of real evidence.
The Accord between the ACTU and the government, is mentioned without much detail on origin and why it succeeded. The conventional wisdom before Hawke was elected was that prices and incomes policies, as were tried in the UK under the Wilson and Callaghan governments, would fail. The success of the Accord, its seven new versions after 1983, could have been more thoroughly examined. Medicare and compulsory superannuation are two transformative reforms adding to the social democratic credentials of Labor under Hawke (and Keating).
Hawke’s, Keating’s and ACTU Secretary Bill Kelty’s mastery of political reform helped set Australia for more than twenty-five years of uninterrupted economic growth.
The creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum by Hawke is glossed over as if it was merely a precursor to Keating’s subsequent initiative to make it a leaders’ gathering.
By the time Keating challenged and failed the first time, “interest rates were at an all-time high and unemployment was rising.” The gloss was wearing off. Instead of the love of Australians, “[Hawke] was skipping across the surface of their hardening regard…” He fell after Keating sparred from the backbenches.
Day credits Hawke, a four-times elected PM, with numerous policy initiatives and policy leadership, and tributes Hawke’s cultivation of the Chinese relationship, economic and cultural, including with Chinese Communist Party General-Secretary Hu Yaobang. Overall, however, there is a lack of analytical firepower in this writing. Not that the book is terrible. It is just that it could have been better. This is a pity because Day excels as an historian in so many other works.
- Michael Easson was Secretary of the Labor Council of NSW, 1989-1994.
