Israeli ambassador rushes to Filipino surf town after tensions boil-over between Jews and local Catholics

Here’s a little taste of the Blanche book. Chapter 2. Purification. The death of the Old Man. Copy and pasted straight from the to-print file.

C H A P T E R 2
Purification

FELLED BY STOMACH PAIN EXACTLY WHERE HIS SPLEEN HAD BEEN removed 72 years earlier, Bob Hawke staggered to bed,
his agitation tempered with Midazolam, and 22 hours later
took his last earthly breath, a long, melodious sigh.
Hawke had been a prime minister many years before but
was now best remembered for his ability to shotgun beer, as
well as the very public betrayal of a now-dead wife. He held
a negative attitude towards death and refused to discuss its
inevitability even as the shadows grew longer.
Three years earlier, Hawke had become exasperated
when I asked him about his funeral, saying, ‘I just don’t
think about dying! I’ve never been worried about death
and I’m not now!’

He did allow that he would like ‘Ode to Joy’, the final
movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, to be played at
his funeral, and that he was ‘agnostic with a slight question
mark’.
He was almost 90 by then and crippled by a range of
malaises that were moderated only by painting over the pain
with fentanyl patches and morphine pills.
An immediate concern for the old man was to survive
long enough to see the May wedding of his stepson, Louis,
Blanche’s only child. It was a milestone he’d reach with five
days to spare although he’d be too ill to attend the recep-
tion. The newlyweds would recreate the marriage waltz
in Hawke’s living room, the bride in her gown, the groom in
his tux, dancing to a recording of the bride’s father playing
piano and singing ‘True Love’.
As he watched, Hawke’s milky eyes became alive with
joy. He imagined himself 50 years younger, limbs able to
move without pain, heart filled with the thrill of a life still
to be lived.
‘It was the last time we saw him. He was happy, serene,
almost nostalgic. A very sweet farewell,’ the bride, television
journalist Brianna Roberts, would tell The Guardian after
he died.
With the end near— increasingly frequent trips to the
emergency ward and the ever-present press crews camped
outside their house evidence that no man can escape his
fate— Hawke confessed to Blanche that he was overwhelmed
by the intensity and sweetness of their love affair.
Blanche described those last four months to me as a
crucible of emotion, all the negativity burnt out, leaving
only purity and perfection. ‘We felt our love was not just
without impurity but it had an intensity that neither of us
had ever experienced before. Those little things that made
us angry disappeared because we knew that very soon we’d
be parted forever.’
The love, she would later confide, was many rungs above
the ‘fiery, very physical and sexual love’ they’d enjoyed in
previous decades. ‘That love is so, so strong and so binding,
an electric force of some kind, but love near death is on
a subtler and more refined plane. Refined in feeling and
refined in texture and refined in colour. If sexual love is
a deep red, our love was the beautiful iridescent violet of
the rainbow.’
Love was important to Hawke, perhaps even more than
it is to most people. He’d been the adored child of doting
parents, their love sharpened when an older brother died
aged seventeen in 1939 during a meningitis outbreak in
South Australia.
He described his childhood to me as being ‘such a place
of love and happiness. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.’
Such was his connection with the Australian public
that even before he became prime minister women wept
in the streets at the appearance of a ‘suntanned god made
four inches taller by a beehive of meticulously whipped
silver hair’.
His former attorney general would wryly tell me,
‘We were in the presence of someone who a lot of people
perceived as God.’
Folded together in bed, Hawke and Blanche, who held
firm to the belief that a soul is only taken when your earthly
purpose is complete— even if, sometimes, the cosmic order
is upended with a murder, say— agreed that after 47 years
they’d finally reached the summit of their love.
‘It’s impossible to love you more than I do now,’ he told
Blanche.
There was one concession to death.
Two weeks earlier, Hawke had summoned the then
Auxiliary Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
Sydney, Terence Brady, famous for his work with the poor
and vulnerable, to see if Brady could convince him that
there was an afterlife.
He couldn’t.
—
Hawke’s last night on earth, Wednesday, 15 May 2019, began
with a dinner of butter chicken served in the house’s galley
kitchen, Hawke and Blanche eating in front of the 7 p.m.
ABC news. The meal had been prepared by their house-
keeper, Chinese national Vicky Ma, who was a student living
in Australia in 1989 when protesters were bulldozed by tanks
in Tiananmen Square.
Hawke, who was the prime minister at the time, had
been shocked by cables from the Australian embassy
in Beijing describing the bloodshed and tearfully announced
on television that any Chinese legally in Australia would be
offered asylum.
The student, one of 42,000 in Australia, never went
back to China.
Twenty-one years later, when an employment agency
sent her for a housekeeping job at a five-storey mansion in
Sydney’s Northbridge and Blanche mentioned whom she’d
be working for, Vicky begged for the job.
‘I’m one of his children,’ she said through her daughter,
who acted as interpreter.
Now, on the evening before he died, Hawke finished his
dinner then suddenly stood up, stumbled into the adjacent
sitting room and, on all fours, vomited and screamed, ‘I’m
in agony! This is killing me!’
Blanche told him, ‘I know! You’re dying.’
She’d later confide that Hawke had always boasted
of having no fear of death and, referencing the anguish
of watching her own mother die, she remembered
thinking, ‘Wait until you get there. It’s not easy.’
Hawke held the left side of his stomach just beneath the
rib cage, a right-angle scar indicating where his spleen had
been removed after a motorcycle crash in 1947. Blanche
wondered if the angel of death had returned for its final
triumphant strike.
Hawke’s doctor, fortuitously at dinner at a nearby
restaurant, was summoned. He guessed that an ulcer had
burst. Drugs were administered, morphine for the pain as
well as the Midazolam to calm Hawke down.
Blanche lay down next to her husband for the night,
noting the telltale rattle of pneumonia coming on, a common
side effect of opioids.
Morning came and Blanche got up, attended to familiar
chores, then went back and lay beside him throughout the
afternoon. If death was close, she would help ease him to
the other side.
Long ago, she’d embraced Pascal’s Wager, the philo-
sophical argument of French mathematician Blaise Pascal
that given the uncertainty of an afterlife, better to believe
in heaven and live happily than be an atheist and to live
without hope. ‘Death is a wonderful experience,’ the wife
would often say to her husband.
Slowly, a warm colour returned to his skin and his
breathing began to ease. A calm enveloped Hawke.
The housekeeper, relieved, said to Blanche, ‘He’s okay!
He’s going to live!’ and left the house.
At 4 p.m., Blanche was confident enough in Hawke’s
health to keep her appointment with a local acupuncturist.

She stretched out on the examination bench and the thera-
pist felt pulse points on her wrist, a major diagnostic tool in
acupuncture. Pulse qualities— fast, slow, strong, weak, thin
or slippery— indicate various maladies.
‘What have you been doing!’ asked the panicked therapist.
‘Why?’
‘You’ve got no pulses.’
Blanche explained that she’d been lying with her husband
on his death bed. ‘You’re dying,’ the therapist told her. ‘You’ve
given him all your energy. You’ll die if you do that. You must
not lie beside him. You can hold his hand, that’s all.’
When Blanche returned to the house shortly before five,
the pink that had come into Hawke’s face had gone and his
breathing had deteriorated.
Blanche sat beside her husband and held his hand.
At the foot of his bed stood a dear friend from the Labor
Party, Craig Emerson, and his partner, Tracey Winters.
At five minutes past five, with the bedroom flooded with
the pale yellow light of an autumnal sunset, Hawke died.
A feeling of elation filled the room, Blanche would recall.
‘His soul and his spirit were free. I sensed a room full of
angels. His face had become very calm and smooth and
lovely. His colour didn’t come back, of course. He was dead.’
The front door to the house opened, there was the
sound of footsteps on the granite stairs and the housekeeper
suddenly appeared. She’d forgotten her telephone.

When Blanche said Hawke was dead, the shocked house-
keeper, who was convinced Hawke had cheated death at least
for another day, said, ‘We must wash the body.’
As Emerson and Winters left the house, the housekeeper
brought a bowl filled with warm water and two wash cloths.
Gently, the two women eased Hawke out of his navy blue
Qantas tracksuit and rolled him onto his side.
Blanche noted that he smelled quite sweet. There was
some blood coming out of his mouth from the pneumonia
but ‘no nasty bodily fluids’.
For twenty minutes, the four hands lovingly washed the
cadaver, bathing and drying as they went. They started at
the head, moving to the trunk, the legs and the feet. Both
women treated the body with great care, as if he were alive,
gently massaging him, soothing him.
Blanche felt a sense of profound joy that Hawke was
finally able to die and escape the prison of his frail body.
The housekeeper and Blanche dressed Hawke and the
doctor arrived to issue Hawke’s death certificate.
As night fell and the press crews packed up after what
they thought was another fruitless day, the undertaker’s
refrigerated van drove into the garage.
The wife announced her husband’s death in a statement
to the press.
Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and their governments
modernised the Australian economy, paving the way
for an unprecedented period of recession-free economic
growth and job creation.
Bob’s consensus-style approach of bringing together
the trade union movement and the business community
boosted job opportunities while increasing the social
wage through Medicare and extra financial support for
low-income families.
Together with his highly talented Cabinets, he foresaw
the Asian Century and positioned Australia to take full
advantage of it through a program of sweeping economic
reforms.
Among his proudest achievements were large increases
in the proportion of children finishing high school, his
role in ending apartheid in South Africa, and his successful
international campaign to protect Antarctica from mining.
He abhorred racism and bigotry. His father, the
Reverend Clem Hawke, told Bob that if you believed in
the Fatherhood of God then you must also believe in the
Brotherhood of Man.
Bob would add today the Sisterhood of Women. Bob
was dearly loved by his family, and so many friends and
colleagues. We will miss him. The golden bowl is broken.
Clem Hawke had used the line ‘The golden bowl is
broken’ in 1939 at the conclusion of a death notice he wrote
in the Adelaide Advertiser on the death of his seventeen-
year-old son, Neil Hawke, Bob’s brother.

The full passage appears in Ecclesiastes 12:6: ‘Remember
him— before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl
is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and
the wheel broken at the well.’
The silver cord is life’s connection to the body, the golden
bowl the body. The breaking of the golden bowl symbolises
the moment when life’s spirit finally leaves the body.
When the coincidence was later pointed out to Blanche,
she didn’t regard it in any way cosmic, despite her lifelong
interest in the metaphysical, and said the Bible used to be
the foundation of any decent education and that she was
familiar with the phrase.
Eleven days after the undertaker’s vehicle exited the
Northbridge garage with Hawke inside, a private ceremony
for 30 people was held in the Lotus Pavilion at the Macquarie
Park Cemetery and Crematorium. Blanche had delayed the
service and cremation to allow Louis and his new wife,
Brianna, to complete their honeymoon in Bali and for
Hawke’s son, Stephen, to make the journey from Western
Australia.
When Hawke first met Louis many years before, he told
him, ‘I just want you to know I think of you as my own son.’
At the funeral, Louis read a meditative verse from Rudolf
Steiner’s book Guidance in Esoteric Training. Steiner believed
that human beings consist of the physical body, the etheric
body, the astral body and the ego, and that death is not an
end but a transition.

Louis felt it was more important to help ease his step-
father into the next world rather than deliver a litany of his
life, which he knew would be covered in other speeches.
‘My love, given in sacrifice, shall be woven into the forms
that now envelop you, cooling all warmth, warming all cold-
ness,’ Louis recited. ‘Live supported by love, given the gift
of light, as you ascend.’
Blanche read a poem from a piece of paper she had found
in a jacket, several verses of which she’d recited at her son’s
wedding two weeks before to the surprise of the bride who’d
given her something entirely different to read.
‘She swore this was the poem I sent her, but now claims
it must have been the holy angels,’ says Brianna. ‘After
Bob’s death she asked me for a copy so she could read it at
the funeral.’
The poem, ‘And Still the Constellations’ by the Christian
Scientist and writer Peter Henniker-Heaton— a man who
claimed to have overcome paralysis through faith— fitted
Hawke as perfectly as a schooner glass curled up in his
tanned paw.
The coffin was carried on the shoulders of Hawke’s sons,
Stephen and Louis, and grandsons, Kell, Sam, David and
Paul. Friends wept without restraint. Hawke’s longtime
secretary, Jill Saunders, and his driver, Rob Copeland,
struggled to hide their grief.
The mourners were spared the sight of the crematorium
door opening and the coffin disappearing into the flames.

Blanche said it’s one of the most horrible events a mourner
can experience, the coffin, slowly at first, then quickly being
engulfed by fire. Traditional images of hell.
At the State Funeral, held at the Sydney Opera House’s
concert hall two and a half weeks later, Blanche, whose
oratory concluded proceedings, had no prepared speech.
She was wrapped in a soft peach velvet cape made by her
dressmaker Hanna Kossowska and appeared to glow beneath
the lights.
Blanche finished the event with ‘Long live friendship
among nations and beyond all, long live love.’
Four months later, the contents of Hawke and Blanche’s
house would be sent to auction, and an aggressive and very
public challenge to the will would be launched by Hawke’s
younger daughter, Rosslyn, over its perceived unfairness.
When Louis arrived at the executor’s office one week
after Hawke’s death, a voice had muttered, ‘You’re not blood.’
—
In a $3.6 million pied-à-terre overlooking Sydney’s Hyde
Park, the new widow parted her nightie, a billow of pale blue
silk bought in Shanghai, and stood in front of a bed­ room
mirror.
The sun hitting the north facing floor-to-ceiling window
illuminated her slim-boned, pale body. It was a cruel white
light that allowed no secrets.

She examined a protrusion, a little smaller than a ten-cent
piece, in her left breast.
The widow had been around long enough to know that
it was now her turn to face death, to test the validity of
Pascal’s Wager.
‘Well, I didn’t expect . . . that,’ she thought.