The men who pushed the Madrid Protocol in 1989: former French PM Michel Rocard and Bob Hawke. Credit:Glenn Jacobson, AAD And, he suggests, in a typically frank assessment, that today's leaders are not up to the task. "I obviously don't want to talk about myself, but the fact is that we are in a unique time, it is the first time since the Second World War when there is not one outstanding leader in the world," he says. "Think about it, there is not one. And to get things done you have to have capable people around. I don't want to blow my own trumpet, the facts speak for themselves. There are not people around today with that sort of initiative and capacity." The way he remembers it, Hawke's quixotic mission to save Antarctica began one weekend in May, 1989. He was at home at the Lodge reading briefing papers for Monday's cabinet meeting when he came across one item on the agenda that stood out to him.

Cabinet was to discuss the pending endorsement of a convention among member nations of the Antarctic Treaty on how to regulate mining and drilling in the empty continent. "I just couldn't believe it. Here was the last pristine continent. We were going to be called upon to ratify it and I thought, 'No bloody way.' "I spoke to my environment advisor Craig Emerson ... and I said this is nonsense isn't [it]? And he said 'Yes, prime minister, I'm glad you agree'." Hawke had environmental form by then. He had won office opposing the planned Franklin Dam, a development that was finally killed off after a High Court fight with the Tasmanian government. Emerson recalled this week that when Hawke told his cabinet that rather than sign the convention he was going to see it off there was, "mirth and merriment".

Then environment minister Graham Richardson backed the convention because he thought it better to regulate mining than let if off the leash. Then attorney general Gareth Evans supported it because he believed Australia would damage its international relationships to pull out at the last minute. Others, including treasurer Paul Keating and resources minister Peter Cook, backed Hawke. (Indeed, in the years since, Keating has argued that Hawke has since overplayed his own role at Keating's expense, that he had earlier alerted Hawke to the convention.) "With an amused tolerance and an enormous skepticism," says Hawke today, cabinet decided to "let the old boy go". He and Emerson set off on their mission almost at once. France was a major Antarctic treaty member and the two men believed it could be swayed. It was trying to re-establish its credentials in the South Pacific after its nuclear testing and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship sunk in New Zealand by French agents. With France's support the two men believed they could begin appealing to other smaller European nations, and then hope to sway the big guns. They first approached Jacques Cousteau, the famed French author and undersea researcher who had been campaigning against mining in sensitive areas since the Exxon Valdez disaster. With him on board they lined up the meeting with Rocard. Before they even sat down together Cousteau had held his own press conference congratulating Hawke for the initiative.

Rocard and Hawke were born in the same year, and in tracing their careers other parallels appear. Both men famously coaxed and cajoled their leftist parties to accept and embrace free market reforms, prompting surges of reform that seem almost unimaginable today. Both men had careers marked by a burning and in the end bitter rivalry – Hawke with Keating, Rocard with Francois Mitterrand, who killed off Rocard's presidential ambitions in his own pursuit of the office. The author Robert Schneider wrote a book about the two men called The Quiet Hatred. Rocard and Hawke sat in the gardens of Rocard's grand official residence, the Hotel Matignon, on a warm sunny day, as Hawke remembers it. Hawke smoked a cigar as the two men talked, Rocard a cigarette. Their rapport was easy and fast, and Rocard soon offered his support.

"It was a personality thing, we were very similar personalities. He was a very engaging personality, bright, imaginative, a good listener. We became very good friends," says Hawke. Rocard secured the backing of the Spanish leader, Felipe Gonzalez, and together they began rounding up the support of other smaller European nations, those that had supported the mining convention, but had little interest in the Antarctic. Hawke turned his attention to the Margaret Thatcher and George W Bush. "Like all meetings with Maggie it was very formal and proper, but what I was about was not her cup of tea," he says. Similarly Bush was unimpressed, but he voiced no objection to Hawke lobbying other US political leaders. Soon they had the support of Al Gore, the powerful Democratic senator. As support for it shifted the mining convention fell apart and in 1991 the nations that were to have signed it instead adopted the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, now known as the Madrid Protocol. All mineral extraction was banned for 50 years and the Antarctic was set aside as a "natural reserve, devoted to peace and science".

Emerson remembers the months he and Hawke flew around the world championing the protection of the Antarctic as the most exhilarating and satisfying of his career. Hawke says it was perhaps his greatest public contribution aside from the role he played in helping to bring about an end to apartheid. On the 2011 anniversary of the protocol's adoption Neil Hamilton, the Australian director of international polar conservation organisation Le Cercle Polaire wrote for Fairfax that in 18 months Hawke and Rocard had managed to convince the world to "set aside its differences, its insatiable appetite for power, control and resources, and decided that peace, knowledge, and environmental protection were absolutely and unassailably paramount". As a result, 14 million square kilometres of the last and purest wilderness on earth were protected.