For most Australians who remember Bob Hawke as prime minister, it's easy to imagine him in his downtime playing golf, lounging in the sun or smoking a cigar.
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Although he didn't drink while in office, he was known for being every bit the bon vivant; his widow, Blanche d'Alpuget, reports he was smoking right up until his last days, and enjoyed an evening beverage.
"Three cigars a day, couple of glasses of red - he knew what he liked, and he enjoyed it," she says, with a hearty laugh.
But planting a garden in Canberra's inner north? Foraging for mushrooms in the tree-lined parks?
Not Hawkey, surely?
And yet, these were things he would remember fondly about his first years in Canberra, where he had been a doctoral student at the Australian National University in the 1950s, long before taking up residence in The Lodge in 1983.
"His eldest child was born there, and he had very happy times - early married life and early fatherhood, and making a garden," d'Alpuget says.
"It was his nesting period, because he and [first wife] Hazel went straight there from getting married."
Later, after he became prime minister, he would wake at 5am, several mornings a week, so that he could play a round of golf at the nearby Royal Canberra Golf Club.
He once played a round there with sporting legend Greg Norman.
He restarted the Prime Minister's XI cricket at Manuka after a 20-year hiatus, and was hit in the face by a bouncer bowled by a journalist during a media match at Kingston Oval.
He even represented the ACT as Player No. 270, playing first grade for Northbourne and Turner in the local Canberra competition.
He also tipped the Canberra Raiders to defeat Manly Warringah in the 1987 grand final, and when someone asked him why on earth, he famously replied: "(because) I live in the bloody place".
And this "bloody place", the city he called home for the eight years that he was prime minister, benefited in other ways.
The Australian Institute of Sport, established by the Fraser government in 1980, saw significant funding increases under the Hawke government, leading to dozens of subsequent Olympic medals.
And Hawke officiated at the 1988 opening of Parliament House, the building that would put the city on the world stage in time for the bicentenary.
So it's not surprising that Canberrans have more reason than most to remember the larrikin former prime minister with affection.
Unlike some of his more recent successors, who have chosen to live elsewhere, or who have otherwise reduced the city in the nation's eyes to a mere political bubble removed from the rest of Australian society, he took an interest in the city on its own terms.
D'Alpuget knows this intrinsically: she was his biographer from the late 1970s onwards, and spent many hours going over the early phases of his union, and later political, career, much of which was spent in the capital.
Bob Hawke: The Complete Biography is the weighty tome that led to the great love affair that played out in the public arena. Hawke eventually left Hazel, after he left politics, and married d'Alpuget. She was by his side when he died in May, aged 89.
And now the book is being reissued, with a new chapter picking up where it left off in 1983. D'Alpuget has also reworked much of the second part of the book, dealing with his time in office.
It's a project she began just three weeks before Hawke died, and setting out to revisit a work that has been 40 years in the making was no easy task.
"It's literally 40 years from when I first did the very first interview, and I simply didn't have time to go back to the first part, the one that was published in October 1982, although of course I had to keep on adding to that," she says.
"When I finished that one, he was still just hoping to become prime minister, and I'd gone off to live in Israel, and then I had to bring that bit up-to-date to 1983.
"In those days, my publisher had to fly to Israel with the press cuttings for me to look at."
It was her literary agent who, earlier this year, had the idea of publishing a third chapter, without knowing the end was near.
"We had no idea then, nobody imagined then that he would die so soon," d'Alpuget says.
"I was really hoping I would be giving him a 90th birthday party, and a lot of other people were too. We were planning out where we might have it."
As it happened, she was met with a vast outpouring of public grief and remembrance, a situation that was as predictable as it was confronting.
While the death of a former prime minister was always going to be a significant news event, she says nothing could have prepared her for literally thousands of emails, text messages and cards.
She is regularly stopped in the street, and routinely finds herself crying in the back of Ubers when the driver recognises her and offers condolences.
"It was emotionally very difficult," she says, although having the book looming over her turned out to be a blessing.
"It was good, in a way, because it meant when Bob died, I was absolutely frantically busy, flat chat with having to finish the book, which was a hell of a lot of work.
"I had to clear out the house, 25 years of collected stuff. I'd already pre-sold the house before he died, and I was hoping like mad that he would move with me into the city, into an apartment which was just walking distance from his office, but I don't think he would have because he couldn't smoke in the building." At this, she dissolves into laughter.
And yet. The final chapter, entitled At Large, is a detailed account of Hawke's last moments, one that promises to be as vivid and raw as if it had just happened, despite all the rewriting and polishing that went on.
"Everybody who's read it has cried, including blokes," she says.
"Writing about his death nearly killed me, I can tell you. It was so hard to write, but as you probably know, for books, writing is rewriting.
"So by the time I'd sort of polished and polished and polished it, I'd come to terms with it, but I was really in tears myself all the time I was writing it."
She says that even through her grief, it was clear to her that her book needed a definitive ending.
"I don't want to remember it very much, but I knew I had to, to properly record his life, and I knew that people would be fascinated to know how he died," she says.
"It's very rare that the actual death of any real person is accurately and intimately recorded, and I guess this is the only time the actual death of a prime minister has been recorded."
Meanwhile, she says, she is preparing to tour the reissued biography, including an event at Hawke's former university, the ANU, in conversation with historian Frank Bongiorno.
It's an event she's particularly looking forward to.
"I don't know what it's going to be like, and there is no way I can prepare, really, because I don't know what the questions are going to be," she says.
"You just take it as it comes."
She suspects that in a city like Canberra, there will be searching questions about the changes she has made to Hawke's grand narrative, especially those concerning the relationship between Hawke and his predecessor, Paul Keating.
She says now that she relished the chance to change her erroneous record.
"Any author can go back and correct their books - it's whether they can get it republished," she says.
"I was delighted to change it, because the first time, it was 10 years ago that I wrote about Hawke the prime minister, and at that stage, Paul was very wary of talking to me about Bob.
"He talked to me on the phone for a long while, but he didn't want to talk on the record, and he didn't want to go into things.
"But he's mellowed a great deal, as did Bob, so this time round he was happy to talk to me and I was really delighted.
"It is an awful thing how one gets sucked in to a constantly repeated lie. A narrative that's constantly repeated that's inaccurate."
She says that as a writer, and a one-time journalist, she places a high value on the truth; she has no concerns about having written about Hawke's relationship with his first wife, nor for being honest about how that marriage ended, and finally inserting herself into the official narrative.
"I put a fairly high value on honesty, and getting it right," she says.
"I remember my very first job was working on the Daily Mirror, as it then was, and we had a famous editor who ... put a note on the noticeboard for all the cadets: 'Make it bright, tight and right.'"
And as for the role she played in the end of Hawke's first marriage, she says there's little point in glossing over it.
"It's all out there, most of it's inaccurate and a lot of it's judgmental and vicious.
"I think I had to [put myself in the story] because I was going to write about the death."
Meanwhile, she has a book to promote - all 996 pages of it, a 40-year project.
"You could kill a burglar with it," she says, with another throaty chuckle.
It's the laugh of someone who had nearly 25 years of marriage to someone who, in her own words, knew what he liked.
- Bob Hawke: The Complete Biography, by Blanche d'Alpuget, will be published by Simon & Schuster on December 1.
- Blanche d'Alpuget will be in conversation with Frank Bongiorno in a free ANU/Canberra Times Meet the Author event on November 27, 6pm in the Cinema, Kambri Cultural Centre, ANU. Bookings at anu.edu.au/events or 6125 4144.