Kate Legge

This intergenerational tendency, is that the word?

Predisposition or towards infidelity, you notice.

Let's start with how you met your husband, Greg.

Well, I first glimpsed him at a press conference given by the then Labor leader Bob Hawke at the Boulevard Hotel and he stood out from the throng of scruffy journalists because he was so immaculately dressed in a eucalypt green suit and a red vest and he had horn-rimmed spectacles and he was also the one who was giving Hawke the hardest time.

Now, you see, the Boulevard Hotel is where Bob Hawke has famously had many affairs.

No.

And, I mean, there we were.

We both wound up in Canberra together and that's how we, of course, you know, met.

And, you know, there were affairs going on under every desk, behind every door in the press gallery and, you know, right up in the Prime Ministerial suite because, of course, the grandest affair in Australia's public stage had been between Bob Hawke and Blanche Delpuchet.

But nobody mentioned it.

Nobody wrote about those sort of things.

Of course, everyone talked about it, but no one ever put pen to paper.

And really not for a long time in public life did people start to use this as a test of character.

And I mean, Greg and I were in Washington as foreign correspondents in Washington, D.C., when Gary Hart, who was a Democratic candidate, a photograph appeared of him on a boat called Monkey Business with a very pretty young woman sitting on his

Donna Rice.

Donna Rice.

I remember that, yes.

It's funny how that name comes back unbidden, doesn't it?

And that was really the first time that people, you know, that was the end of his candidacy, of course.

That was the end of it completely.