Comment: Bob Hawke’s daughter has paid a high price, so leave her history alone
Poor, poor Ros Dillon. Her life has become a tragedy born of her father’s greatness. She is not alone. She is not the only damaged and lost child to have haunted the path of the very successful.
Canberra then was a smaller place and I vividly recall Ros flirting with a petrol attendant at the Deakin Shell, in front of a fascinated audience that included me. She and her children had moved to the Lodge to be cared for by her parents while she rehabilitated. This scene struck me as a demonstration of her desperate need for love and attention.
Male and female ABC radio reporters in Hawke’s ACTU days submitted to interviewing him in his Boulevard Hotel room while he was naked yet his extraordinary charisma meant it was tolerated in a way it would not be in any other. His alcoholic all-night binges, Hazel’s compensatory heavy drinking and what must have been regular dramas and fights at home – that is when Bob was at home – would not have been without effect on any child.
It is disingenuous to dismiss her claims as outrageous because his other children have not made them. Vulnerabilities differ. Suffice it to say that whether Landeryou did know, in that instinctive way predators know, how vulnerable Rosslyn was, or whether he was confident her father’s ambition would protect him from accountability, Rosslyn believes she has never recovered from those events.
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