For 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, Bob Hawke, inevitably won the prime ministership he seemed destined for.
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 which Australian politics had not seen. The other thing about Hawke – the son of a couple who can only be described as religious fanatics, a Rhodes scholar, and a legally trained and brilliant advocate who ushered the Australian Council of Trade Unions into immensely powerful modernity – was the public sense that, for all his personal failings, he was an open book.
