Walking with Bob Carr is highly apposite. His new book begins with him wandering Sydney’s night-time streets for kilometres in a trance of grief after the death of his beloved wife, Helena.
“You become what I call ‘memory struck’ in your bereaved condition. Knocked sideways. Unabashed nostalgia, I think, becomes part of the approach to life that a bereaved person takes,” says Carr, the New South Wales Labor premier for a decade until 2005 with Helena ever by his side – publicly, privately.
Today here is a man surviving grief, walking and talking, often poignantly but sometimes animatedly of heartfelt memories. He is moving in the sunshine now unlike the man who strolled silently through the darkness, wondering if he might not actually endure the pain of losing his wife.
His book Bring Back Yesterday is an affecting account of love, devotion, inextricably entwined lives – and Carr’s profound grief after Helena’s sudden death from aneurism while holidaying in Vienna in October 2023 after five decades of marriage.
We meander from Mrs Macquarie’s Chair around an edge of glittering harbour and through the Botanic Gardens of Sydney as he talks about the eventual catharsis of writing a book that at once honours Helena and parses with searing candour the profound aftermath for him.
On those night-time sojourns for many months after her death Carr would venture from their Maroubra home past countless places of shared experience. Restaurants where they’d dined, dilapidated and shuttered now. A city corner where he kicked a rubbish bin after Whitlam almost lost the 74 federal election. Belvoir St theatre (formerly the Nimrod) where they’d enjoyed productions with Paul and Annita Keating.
His existence since Helena died at 77, after “half a century of co-conspiracy”, involves “living the leftover life”. It’s an apt literary allusion in a book replete with them, referring to Leftover Life to Kill, a memoir by Caitlin Thomas (widow of writer Dylan) – a book bibliophile Carr describes as “unreadably bad” but whose title succinctly evokes continuing life for the surviving spouse.
It is a blistering autumnal morning, soupy air like that of a tropical jungle, as we negotiate the many tourists seeking Insta-perfection with those totemic backdrops of towering fig trees, azure water, Opera House and bridge. Carr, dressed for photographs in business shirt and tie, and suit trousers, is perspiring. But at 78 he is nimble (all that walking, plus weights; he’s already swum at Coogee earlier) as he talks about the phases of grief and the prosaic survival skills he’s had to acquire.
“I’ve got a friend who’s going blind, I’ve got another friend who’s living with long Covid and another bravely living with Parkinson’s. Others [are] facing results from the ever-vigilant pathologies of prostate and cardio disease. So, I’m sort of quickly saying that here to eliminate any impression that I’m elevating [my own experience] beyond the other disasters that can enter a life.”
Always a voracious and wide reader, immediately post-Helena the only books he could read were literary takes on loss and grieving. He went to accounts by Joan Didion and Julian Barnes on losing long-term partners and to A Grief Observed by CS Lewis. They were front of mind as he walked Sydney’s dark streets on those evenings while also composing in his head poignant letters to his dead wife.
“My motivation was to not lose images of Helena. There is a slight panic in the bereaved condition that the image of the lost one will fade. CS Lewis likens that to seeing a photograph on the floor and having snow fall upon it. I wanted to capture stories like Helena coming to school in Australia [as a young woman] and her upbringing in that beautiful corner of Malaysia [she was a migrant of Chinese and Indian Malay heritage] before they faded in my memory,” he says.
“The other motivation is to be of help for someone who suddenly unexpectedly loses their life partner and is thinking what the hell is this? How bad does it get? How does it end? If they read about someone they know of as a public figure saying I was slightly cracked … that perhaps would be helpful. It would’ve been helpful to me.”
Carr chose this walk along the harbourside path from Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and through the Botanic Gardens with its exotic flora, its gentle hills, verdant manicured grass and wondrous nooks and crannies, because it’s where he came as a child (“for a working-class family in the 50s the cheapest entertainment”). He came again to the gardens often as a university student after studying in Mitchell Library, and later, as backbencher, “lonely” opposition leader and premier, “it was a very inviting walk to do at lunchtime”.
“It is a creepy neuralgic experience to go from that daily partnership with its jokes and references into a lonely state. For weeks you’d actually feel the depression on the other side of the bed when there is no one lying in it. I think that severing, that rupture, the awareness of that obliteration is the very essence of it and will severely stress-test your sanity. But sadness, bereavement, is not mental illness, it’s not depression and I think most people will survive it … but it is a particularly uncomfortable condition to be flung into.”
Carr says, meanwhile, he’s also “had to learn to do everything” practical, beginning with using a coffee machine.
“I thought, ‘This is a joke on you Bob, but it’s going to be a start – you’re going to have to learn a lot.’ In days of getting home [from Vienna, with Helena’s ashes] I learned to turn on a washing machine. I learned to cook vegetables in a wok. I learned how to use Uber. She loved driving [he’s never driven]. I learned after a lot of false starts how to do internet banking. I learned how to shop at the supermarket and the butcher. And I really thought repeatedly, ‘Bob, the joke is on you,’” he says.
“She’d be quietly amazed that I was doing these things. She’d be proud and when it came to cooking she’d be irritated that I was doing things so wrong.”
We stop for a cold drink at the cafe, sit in the shade at a shared table. A woman recognises Carr.
“You’re Bob Carr! Weren’t you a politician?” she asks.
Yes, he confirms he was NSW premier for a decade. He doesn’t add: also foreign affairs minister for 18 months to September 2013.
Accordingly we finish on two of his outspoken areas of interest – Israel and the United States (we walk before the US and Israeli air attack on Iran). His tone, which had been gently contemplative, given the deeply personal subject, becomes more adamant.
Asked about the recent visit to Australia by the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, he says: “The challenge is what our attitude should be to a state operating blatantly outside international law … At what point do we acknowledge that this country [Israel] is doing things that are unconscionable to Australian opinion and unconscionable to so much that is in Jewish thought and Jewish history.”
Carr has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration, warning Australia can no longer rely on the US-Australia alliance as it long has and urging the Albanese government to rethink the Aukus submarine deal.
“We should be looking at the spectrum of possibilities, given that America has announced that just about everything about the postwar settlement is now finished. America is now repudiating the idea of a rules-based order. I had never in my wildest imaginings thought anything like this could possibly happen.”
He heads back into the sweltering heat and up the path towards his office near state parliament. Walking. Thinking.
• Bring Back Yesterday by Bob Carr is out now through Allen & Unwin ($32.99)
