Late Night Live — Full program podcast · ABC Australia

Bob Carr on suddenly losing his wife Helena

·55 min·3 clips

Carr describes Helena collapsing in Vienna after saying, 'I've got a strange pain in my back.'

1. Late Night Live speaks with Bob Carr about Bring Back Yesterday and Helena Carr's sudden death in Vienna. 2. David Marr hosts Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales and former Foreign Minister, and Carr discusses the life and loss that drive the book. 3. The episode asks how Carr lived with Helena for 50 years and how he is now managing what he calls 'the leftover life.' 4. Carr starts in Tahiti in January 1971, where he paddled up to Helena at a hotel pool while she read a Galbraith paperback. 5. He describes Helena Carr as coming from Taiping, a small Malaysian city between Penang and Kuala Lumpur, with a Chinese-Indian family background. 6. Carr says he was 22, 'gauche, unworldly, ignorant, a prig, and an abrasive smartass,' but already determined to build a Labor career through the branches. 7. He says Helena saw him as bookish, political, and interested in an 'interesting life,' not just campus drinking and football. 8. Carr recalls their first date at the Little Dutch Inn in King's Cross followed by Hamlet on Ice at the Nimrod with Kate Fitzpatrick. 9. He says their second date was a Labor Party fundraiser at Lane Cove, which Helena did not find tedious. 10. Carr also describes introducing Paul Keating to Malcolm Turnbull, and he quotes Turnbull's joke about Keating and Kerensky. 11. He says Helena was useful in politics because she enjoyed people, listened well, and knew how to move among meetings and celebrations. 12. Carr notes that Helena had a serious business career in security printing, including passports, bank documents, stamps, and work around cards and ATMs. 13. He says she drove him in her black Mercedes, handled banking, fixed technological problems, and made the travel arrangements work. 14. Carr recounts that Helena persuaded the Labor Party in 2003 to let her play a public role in an election campaign. 15. The central account is the Vienna night, when Helena came out of the bathroom after the opera, complained of pain in her back, and then lost consciousness. 16. Carr says he later found her medicines neatly packed in her carry-on bag, along with his gloves and beanie, which he reads as care for him. 17. He distinguishes shock from depression and says the first months brought constant grief, long walks, letters to Helena, and the speech he gave in St Mary's. 18. Carr cites Geraldine Brooks, Joan Didion, C.S. Lewis, Harriet Walter, and Tolstoy while thinking through bereavement, memory, jokes, and companionship. 19. The interview is reflective, intimate, and political, with Marr pressing Carr on family, grief, and the habits that shaped his public life. 20. Listeners interested in Australian politics, marriage, and bereavement will get most from this; listeners seeking light chat or fast-moving controversy may skip it.

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