Blanche d’Alpuget, who has just died after a brief illness, was a whole lot more than Bob Hawke’s second wife, even though she was the first to note that our former prime minister was ever and always the most important thing in her own life. Her final message released by her family was “our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life,” and she surely had Hawke in mind when enunciating it.
They met briefly in Indonesia in the mid-70s when he was leading the ACTU and she was living in Jakarta, married to an Australian businessman. On their third meeting, in Australia, shortly afterwards, she later detailed how she felt such a pull towards his charisma that there was, just a “wordless understanding that we were going to sleep together”.
“Now it’s none of my damn business,” I asked her when interviewing her last year, “and I deserve to be told to get back in my box and stop being so impertinent, but did it start again before he left The Lodge, or after he left The Lodge?”
“Oh, before!” she exulted.
Already an accomplished journalist, she would go on, shortly after beginning her affair with Hawke, to write one of Australia’s most acclaimed biographies of all time, Robert J. Hawke: A Biography, release in 1982. She added to it in 2010, covering his years as prime minister, and then in 2019, after his death released Bob Hawke: The Complete Biography. The first book, particularly, was a masterpiece, often hailed as the country’s first psycho-bio, where she was genuinely “in the head” of her subject, as she knew him so well.
After Hawke left The Lodge in 1991, he shortly thereafter left his first wife Hazel, to live with Blanche, and they were married in 1995, for another happy quarter-century before he began ailing badly in 2019.
When I asked her what were Bob Hawke’s last words, she replied: “His last words were, ‘This is killing me. I’m dying’. It was, and he was. I have a great belief in the spiritual world, and I believe the spiritual governs the material. The angel of death – for want of a better term – had come and taken a great bite out of him, taking his spleen when he was 17. And now the angel of death had returned, in exactly the same spot where he was seized with excruciating pain. The doctor, whom I called, who’d been treating him before, had no explanation.”
That was Blanche. She always felt that her love with Hawke was completely “other-worldly”.
I had got to know her in the course of writing Kim Beazley’s biography in the late ’90s, and she was wonderfully generous to me in her advice before publication on how to try and capture him, and always great fun to see ever afterwards. She had an impish sense of humour, mixed with velvet steel in her character which said: “I might be in my 80s, but I am NOT to be messed with.”
Blanche was confident and sure of herself. Ten days after Anthony Albanese was elected PM, I happened to be present when she took Jodie Haydon aside to give her full box and dice on what to expect, and how to adapt, to being the partner of the PM. Jodie listened closely, rapt.
In recent years, persistent illness plagued her. Every time I saw her for lunch or dinner in the past two years particularly, she seemed a little more frail, a little more bird-like.
“I’m … OK … Yes, OK is the right word,” she told me in that same interview last year. “I’m not yet ‘good’, right? I don’t recommend having COVID and pneumonia twice. As far as I’m concerned, I’m now … doing fine. But I’d say for the first four years after losing Bob, it was very rough.”
She was, nevertheless, always surrounded by friends, many of them denizens of the Labor Party. When I informed Beazley of her death just after the news broke, he replied: “She was a brilliant bright light. Very intelligent. Full of life. She was a source of joy in Bob’s last years. I did think she would go on a lot longer, she was full of life. Hard to think she is gone.”
I will remember her exactly like that. A woman full of life, who had lived an extraordinary one, and documented a great one.
Vale, dear Blanche. All of us blessed to know you, were proud to do so.
Peter FitzSimons is an author and columnist.
Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X.
