It’s hard to put a price on what Bob Hawke meant to Australians, but at an auction of more than 200 of the former prime minister’s possessions in Sydney on Tuesday night they did their level best.

A curious mix of a few hundred bargain hunters and true believers gathered in an upstairs room at the Paddington RSL to bid for a piece of the people’s prime minister’s private life at an auction grandly titled “Bob Hawke & Blanche d’Alpuget: Mementos, Curiosities, Art and Design”.

What an odd event it was. Australia’s favourite PM has been dead only 104 days and yet here we were uncomfortably straddling the previously untested Venn diagram of memorial and garage sale.

“Bob was my favourite item but he’s gone so everything else can go,” d’Alpuget told the Sunday Telegraph matter-of-factly as the newly sold four-storey Northbridge mansion she shared with Hawke was thrown open for inspection at the weekend.

A packed house at The Paddington RSL for the auction of Bob Hawke’s old possesions. Most items have gone for at least three times the asking price, with some reaching more than 20 times. @TheTodayShow pic.twitter.com/ausMZpb2jn — Bethan Yeoman (@bethan_yeoman) August 27, 2019

Indeed, it’s mawkish to be sentimental when buying a Vico Magistretti three-seater Maralunga sofa ($3,800) or, seriously, Hawke’s Samsung flat-screen television ($420, the catalogue did not specify dimensions). A custom-made office desk went for $9,500. The unremarkable burgundy leather swivel chair it accompanied? $3,200.

An art collector, Lachlan Astle, shrugged when asked what he thought of Hawke’s life being auctioned off: “It’s her stuff.” Astle was there to bid for a Trobriand Islands splashboard, which he secured for $750.

Hawke’s desk fetched $9,500. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP

“I thought he was basically the best prime minister we had but I don’t need to have a piece of Bob,” he said.

Outside, Astle gossiped with an auction employee about some of the wilder bidding. A Hugh Sawrey painting that hung in Hawke’s office sold for $23,000 off a reserve of between $8,000 and $12,000. Immediately afterwards, Euan Macleod’s Lone Figure in Gully reached only $11,000, despite being expected to fetch as much as $18,000.

A nearby gallery had purchased the Macleod, she revealed. “So they can sell it, you know – so smart, they got such a good deal.”

But the lounges (plural, there were many lounges), furniture and paintings did not tell the whole story. Australians did – do – love Hawke, of course, and beyond the collectors and bargain hunters the greatest demand was for the things Australia’s 23rd prime minister might himself have cared about.

A collection of Hawke’s cricket helmets and balls, used by the Australian team, which were auctioned on Tuesday. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP

An inscribed mahogany chess box sold for $5,000. A silver-footed bowl presented to him by the then US Secretary of State Dick Cheney attracted $7,500. Two small silver dishes decorated with frogs sold for $22,000.

How else to explain Wendy Norris and Annette Zulian’s decision to travel up from Wollongong to spend $1,400 on Hawke’s crystal Versace ashtray?

“Everybody loved Bob Hawke,” Zulian said. “We saw him speak at a Labor function only a couple of years ago and he was just brilliant. He got up and sang Solidarity Forever. He was just a normal person, you know, have a beer, have a yarn have a smoke. He was one of us.”

Norris added: “Everybody loved him and everybody trusted him. And if he’d ever knocked on my door I’d have let him in.”

But why the ashtray?

“It’s Versace,” Norris explained. “But it’s also something he would have used and maybe cared about, you know?”

Vince Elias paid $1,400 for a Pakistani cigarette case. He conceded he probably paid “a little bit more” than it was worth – it had a reserve of between $100 and $200 – but, “it’s a piece of history”.

One of Hawke’s most profound legacies was his tearful promise to allow Chinese students to stay in Australia after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that anything with a link to China went for well above its reserve. A Chinese famille jaune porcelain vase sold for $4,600. A pair of carved Chinese bone horses fetched $6,000.

James Xie spent $20,000 on a miniature Chinese bookcase given to Hawke as a gift by Zhao Ziyang, China’s premier between 1980 and 1987. It had been listed with a reserve of between $300 and $500.

Xie, who came to Australia 30 years ago from China – but not because of Tiananmen – became emotional when explaining his affection for Hawke. “I have great, great respect for both men [Hawke and Zhao ],” he said.

“I was not one of the ones who came to Australia after but I know what he did for a lot of Chinese university students. When he died, I heard the speech he gave after when he cried and I also shed some tears.”

Was it worth paying so much?

“Certainly,” he said. “Every cent.”



