When Brett Evans recently reviewed David Day’s Young Hawke: The Making of a Larrikin for Inside Story he referred in passing to Hawke’s “loutish behaviour” at the Australian National University, which even included, wrote Evans, “a drunken swim in the ornamental pool at University House.”
Did Hawke really swim in University House’s moat? Day’s book includes a three-page piece of micro-history that tries to understand the incident and related behaviour of a group of partying postgraduates on Sunday night and early Monday morning of 25–26 February 1957. It is the latest, and one of the best, accounts.
In 1957 both the university and its premier hall of residence were still developing, the former distinctive in that only postgraduates attended and the latter modelled on Oxbridge traditions and design. University House took itself seriously; Latin grace was said before dinner in hall (or as Day put it in one of his few slips, Latin mass).
The university, furious and fearing scandal, was initially divided on how to respond to the incident. Reports of heated verbal exchanges with alarmed female students, several senior academics and one or more Anglican bishops staying at University House at the time added spice to subsequent tellings. An investigation was conducted, the main participants disciplined and ringleader Hawke banned from the House, fined and forced to resign as one of the University Council’s student representatives. Abject apologies and the protection of his doctoral supervisor professor Geoffrey Sawer helped prevent expulsion. What did get out was a story starring Hawke, quickly adding to his reputation as an irreverent, hard-drinking good bloke, sporty and brainy but not a snooty intellectual.
If we add the fact that Hawke’s young wife Hazel was at home with a five-weeks-old daughter, this incident alone could encapsulate the character of the future prime minister. Though already twenty-eight, a former Rhodes scholar and current doctoral student, his “work hard, play hard” tendencies were well developed. He could be an aggressive drunk and enough corroborating recollections exist to suggest that some female postgraduates felt unsafe that night. Sawer recalled that Hawke tried to climb over the transom above one student’s door.
The Duke of Wellington famously compared the history of a battle with that of a ball — difficult for any one participant to fully comprehend or recall the sequence. More than two dozen academics, students, guests and fellows of University House were in various ways involved that Sunday evening and in the hours after midnight. They interacted for more than four hours on several floors, in corridors, stairwells, rooms and terraces. The complete detail would elude us even if we conjured H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and The Time Traveller and gave them an iPhone and a map showing the enclosed quadrangle, students’ and fellows’ rooms and the shallow, elongated ornamental pool.
Down the years, historians and biographers have tried to recreate the who, what and when of that night, to pin down, following von Ranke, “how it really was.” Jill Waterhouse’s official history of University House (2004) and biographies such as Day’s draw on decades-old student recollections, not the most reliable kind of evidence. Hawke himself must have been able to recall — more or less — his own part in the revelry; he was known rarely to suffer hangovers, though when interviewed by the official disciplinary committee the next day, several times said he could not recall. Whatever he told Hazel the next day, in her 1992 Autobiography she dutifully repeated he had “jumped into the lily pond.”
Subsequent biographers including John Hurst (1979), Blanche d’Alpuget (1982) and Troy Bramston (2022) benefited from interviewing him, and each referred to the legend that he swam in the pool, Bramston then refuting it and d’Alpuget stating outright that he did. Hawke’s own memoir (1994), running to 600 pages, dealt with his ANU years in a paragraph and ignored University House.
Both the university and University House came to relish and embellish the riper accounts, especially as Hawke’s fame grew. In an essay titled “The File on H” (2012) I quoted a former House master, Ralph Elliott, making light of it all:
You probably all know by now the story of Bob Hawke’s adventure in the gold fish pond… Early in 1957,… a conference of Anglican bishops resided in University House. During the night a noisy, somewhat inebriated group of students stripped naked before the Episcopal eyes and proceeded to swim up and down the length of our precious waterway. Legend has it that the chief culprit in this escapade was that future prime minister of Australia, Robert Hawke. He was certainly a happy participant.
On visits to ANU, Hawke himself joined in. In his commencement address in 2010 he skirted around the details. While urging students “to drink hard,” he recounted that “a few of us” had been “exuberant” that night, and when they were confronted by a professor and some of his religious friends whose “life experience” needed enhancing it was suggested, “playfully of course,” they might have a “dip in the pool… assisted by us.” A decade later, an item on famous alumni in ANU Observer repeated the key “infamous” details, noted they were frequently disputed and shrouded in mystery, but added (wrongly) that the University House historian confirmed them.
So, the “archival truth”? An ad hoc disciplinary committee convened by no less than the vice-chancellor met on the day after the incident and reconvened two and a half weeks later. With Sir Leslie Melville were the heads of the four research schools, professors Mark Oliphant, Oskar Spate, Geoffrey Sawer and Hugh Ennor, minute-takers led by the registrar and, by invitation, two eyewitnesses to some of the shifting drama, temporary University House resident professor Leicester Webb and House fellow and permanent resident Dr Bill Stanner. They were judge, jury and executioner.
Hawke was the first of fourteen students summoned. The minutes show the vice-chancellor explaining their procedures to him before going straight to the point: was he the swimmer? Instant denial followed. (“Did not go in pool — think only 1 went in” the minutes summarised.) The likelihood of the minute-taker mishearing, or of Hawke lying despite knowing the committee was cross-checking stories with other participants, is remote. As the student interviews continued, the committee kept questioning accounts until it was certain of the identity of the swimmer, J.M. Roderick. University House historian Jill Waterhouse got it right, and so did David Day.
Some stories grip from the beginning and can barely be moved; they morph but are never decisively demolished. As the saying goes, it is easier to slay a dragon than kill a myth. Even writers citing accounts refuting “Hawke in the pool” go on to repeat the opposite. Evans, quoted above, somehow misunderstood Day’s research, as did journalist Mike Welsh when he quoted Waterhouse to suggest the opposite of what she intended.
More puzzling still is the National Archives of Australia’s 2021 guide to sources on Hawke compiled by archivist Paul Dalgleish and Hawke biographer Troy Bramston. Having referenced the disciplinary committee minutes held by the ANU Archives and cited a guide to prime ministerial archives held by the ANU that discussed the pool incident in detail, Bramston bafflingly stated: “In February 1957, Hawke and other students drank to excess and, among other disruptive revelry, decided to take their clothes off and swim in a goldfish pond at University House.” No, not really.
Not that it changes anything, but we might end by noting, first, that all along, almost certainly, Hawke knew the truth. For a research paper on the ANU’s halls of residence, Ian Walker contacted the then University House master, professor John Richards. “I ran into Bob Hawke in Boffins last night,” Richards emailed Walker on 3 February 2011 — Boffins being the University House restaurant — adding “He confirmed he was ‘the encourager’ and not ‘the swimmer’.”
Finally, our 1957 story has an uncanny precursor. Last year Cameron Coventry published the wonderfully titled “Sedimentary Layers: Bob Hawke’s Beer World Record and Ocker Chic.” There he summarised his research into the drinking feat and its long afterlife thus:
The quoin stone of Hawke’s larrikinism was a world record for the fastest consumption of a yard glass of ale (2½ pints/1.4 litres) when he was an Oxford undergraduate in the 1950s, a record still much admired seven decades later. However, the record is apocryphal: its location and time remain uncertain; there are no known witnesses; the field of competition was exclusive and with no scientific accountability; the record was first published in a beer pamphlet; and Hawke’s recollections were unreliable.
