“I liked his message of bringing people together, of getting the workers and unions working with employers,” he said in a radio interview on Friday morning. “I loved his message about protecting the environment.”

Mr. Hawke is, of course, an impossible act to follow. He was a maverick who led his center-left Labor Party to four consecutive election victories in the 1980s and early ’90s. He was a union leader who also pushed through free-market liberalization, cutting protective tariffs and privatizing state-owned industries.

He was also a Rhodes Scholar and a flawed husband whose image was hurt by his admitted adultery toward the end of his career.

Through it all, in the minds of many Australians, he was one of them: a leader just as comfortable with wine-sipping elites as beer-chugging farmers and ascetic environmentalists.

“Hawke was authentic in just about every which way,” said Stephen Loosley, national president of the Labor Party in the early 1990s, who worked on campaigns with Mr. Hawke for decades. “What you saw with him privately was the projection of him publicly.”

Memories of his boldness and his heart for all Australians were flooding social media.

Many Chinese-Australians, for example, were sharing clips of Mr. Hawke becoming weepy as he discussed the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the aftermath, he immediately offered humanitarian visas to 20,000 Chinese students — and later, their families were welcomed too.