Run for Your Life by Bob Carr

Author:Bob Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

KIDS?

It was one of those days when a public figure won’t want to leave the house, a day to crouch inside, curtains drawn and radio off. John Hewson was federal opposition leader and on Saturday 17 October 1992 he addressed the NSW Liberal Party Convention and made a clumsy attempt to praise Premier John Fahey by slighting me, the state opposition leader. He compared ‘full blooded’ John Fahey to Bob Carr: ‘You’ve got to be suspicious of a guy that doesn’t drive, doesn’t like kids and things like that.’ The indictment: Bob Carr is seeking to become premier, yet he and his wife don’t have children.

It was reported in Sunday’s papers and was an invitation for Prime Minister Paul Keating to clobber Hewson—a natural political fighter’s instinct—but to my distress, this elevated the issue into a raging controversy.The front page of Monday’s papers read: Hewson attacks Carr: ‘Doesn’t like kids’.

Forced into a media conference, I under-reacted, saying, ‘I wouldn’t dignify them with a comment.’ There was sympathy for me. Hewson apologised.

Writing my biography in 2003, the journalist Andrew West worked hard to get me to answer the question: why no kids? I presumed he wanted Helena and me, teary-eyed on the sofa, arms linked, talking about our inconsolable inner sadness, the quiet trauma of the day the specialist gave us the news and so on, thus fuelling women’s magazine publicity for the book.

I felt no obligation to justify our decision and declined to elaborate.

The truth is, going back a long way, I had decided I did not want to have kids. For Helena’s part, her business career took off around the time we married. She was to become a board member of a large public company and go on to own a half-share in a high-quality commercial printing business. There she managed a printery with 100 employees, maintained contracts and won clients. She suspected her Chinese-Malaysian mother (who had raised six kids) had regretted not having pursued a career—she had been a community nurse, bringing health services to kampongs (villages) in rural Malaysia. She was proud of what her youngest, Helena, had achieved, even if it meant not having babies. Helena was showing what a woman could do, as an economist working in private business.

Why didn’t I want to have kids? I had grown up as the oldest in a family of four and, in the wider family, with a host of younger cousins. Babies and infants were always there, in our little fibro house at Matraville. I love kids but, growing up, sort of had my fill of crowded domesticity, nappies in the laundry and cranky youngsters hollering and fighting while I, the eldest, was trying to study. Moreover, domesticity would have conflicted with my strong ambition later in life to compensate for my lousy education with a bookish program of self-improvement.

‘The world must be peopled,’ says Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. Except that between 1950 and 2020 the baking planet will go from hosting 2.5 billion to 7.

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