YOUNG HAWKE

The Making of a Larrikin

The biography from award-winning historian David Day sheds fresh light on the formative years of Australia's most charismatic leader, who became a political legend.

David Day's biography of the young Bob Hawke takes readers on a journey, from his humble beginnings as the often-neglected son of religious zealots on the South Australian frontier to his wild ways at a succession of universities and his eventual rise as the country's most powerful union leader. Day provides a new perspective on a larrikin who was known for his overweening self-confidence and charm. A skilled negotiator with a drive to bring Australians together, he would go on to become our most popular and accomplished prime minister.

Drawing on a decade of extensive research and interviews with those who knew Hawke best, this ground-breaking biography by an acclaimed writer reveals how Hawke's difficult childhood shaped him into someone who was also known for his uncontrollable bouts of anger and notorious for his alcoholism, obsessive womanising and close links with some of Australia's more shadowy characters.

This gripping biography is a must-read for anyone interested in the first fifty years of Bob Hawke, our last truly colourful political leader.

Reviews of YOUNG HAWKE: THE MAKING OF A LARRIKIN

Day has written the kind of biography that could only have come after this famously thin-skinned subject’s death. 

Hawke … could only have risen in the Australia of the 1960s and 1970s, a country that had translated to the city pub and union office something of the rugged, hard-drinking masculine world of the bush frontier. It is among Day’s achievements that we can better see how this career was of its time and place, even as it also had about it a touch of the miraculous. 

Frank Bongiorno, The Sydney Morning Herald 

 Like any good historian, Day is adept at debunking myths and making tough judgements. As Day’s clear-eyed examination of Hawke’s life makes plain, his so-called larrikinism camouflaged a multitude of less admirable traits that would have ended the political careers of just about anyone else. Somehow he managed to survive and became one of our best prime ministers. Therein lies the mystery of Robert James Lee Hawke. 

Brett Evans, Inside Story