In my twenties I was living in Melbourne, out of work and looking up ads for a job. One that sounded promising and different was for builder’s labourers' on a construction site in outback Queensland. I applied, was offered an immediate start and hurried up there. The job was at the recently opened Mary Kathleen Uranium Mine, in the bush fifty miles out from Mount Isa.

Bob Hawke is happy, come to think of it, I have never seen him not happy. He is walking down Lygon Street, across the road from the Trades Hall Building, and is greeting everyone he meets with the same wide grin and a friendliness which precedes him. Even to my very young eyes, I recognise him as a person of charisma and power. Today he is visiting his barber, a middle-aged Italian man who has been cutting Bob Hawke's hair for years, and whose bursting pride is behind a collage of photographs of Bob Hawke and others he has stuck on his wall.