Bold. That was Blanche d’Alpuget. She was bold, she was beautiful, she was elegant and confident, and she was for more than 40 years in love with our 23rd prime minister.
Yes, with Bob.
They were obsessed with each other. There’s no other word for it. Blanche was Hawke’s biographer, then his mistress, then his wife, then his widow, but she was also a writer, a journalist, a fine lunch companion, a gym bunny, an art lover, a hoot, and she was out and about just a few weeks ago, attending the launch of a new book by The Australian’s editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, presenting as she always did, like an exquisite, porcelain doll.
Tiny, immaculate.
Not a hair out of place.
Our photographer was drawn to her, as everyone always was, and we published some photos on our website, and then she called and asked if they could be taken down, because she looked “so old!”
Classic Blanche.
She ate like a bird, and never left the house without her makeup on. She was so used to being pretty – my goodness, you should see the pictures of her as a young girl, she could stop a clock, that woman – and she couldn’t stand the idea that she might be getting old. But age and death are striding towards all of us, and there will, in the end, be no taking it down.
Several weeks ago, Blanche was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital. She had been battling a severe case of asthma and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and she knew the end was near.
In one of her last text messages to her friend, the literary agent Jeanne Ryckmans, she declined a visit, but said: “I’d love to catch up when I’m confident I’ll be alive.”
Ryckmans didn’t think she would die – “that was just typical Blanche humour” – but then, on Wednesday her family announced that she had succumbed to influenza.
It was so unexpected, because, as Ryckmans says, “she was always so amazingly full of life”.
As is perhaps suggested by her name, d’Alpuget had both Australian and French pedigree. Her parents were Josephine Curgenven and Louis Albert Poincare d’Alpuget (which must have been quite the byline, when he was writing sport for the old Sun newspaper in Sydney.) An only child, she was given the first name Josephine, after another famous French beauty, but always went by Blanche. Her father taught her to box and to sail, and in time she became both a SCEGGS girl and a student of the University of Sydney before marrying at age 21, and moving to Indonesia with her first husband, Tony Pratt. He was a diplomat; she was both an “embassy wife” and a journalist who liked to party, and there was a soiree in full swing the night she met Bob Hawke in Jakarta in 1970.
By her account, he was already quite famous, but she had no idea who he was, and indeed thought his name was “Robin” not “Robert”. They sat down and chatted, but the affair did not begin until six years later, when she met him again, to discuss a biography she was writing about Sir Richard Kirby.
In a later book, “On Longing” she said they took one look at each other and “with mutual wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible”.
He loved sex, she added.
They remained lovers while she was working on her book about him, Robert J. Hawke: a Biography, which would go on to win the NSW Premier’s Prize. She wanted Hawke to leave Hazel (she would divorce Tony in 1986) but he wanted to be prime minister, and did not think he could get there if he quit his marriage.
Blanche threw herself into writing and there should be no question about her talent: her first novel, Turtle Beach, was described in the Australian Book Review as a “worthy successor to such socially important novels as The Quiet American”. Howzat, as Bob might say. The novel was adapted as a feature film in 1992 starring Greta Scacchi and Jack Thompson. In 1987, Blanche also won the inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature.
Still, she yearned for Bob, and she would later confess that he was still in office when he called her after much silence to say: “G’day.” She knew that he was fishing about, to see if she still loved him. She did, and the affair began anew.
“We got back together because he hunted me down,” she told The Australian last year.
“He used to say, I just can’t stop thinking about her.”
Hawke ended his marriage to his first wife, Hazel, to marry d’Alpuget in 1995, four years after being deposed as prime minister. The public did not respond well, particularly when they appeared in matching bathrobes for a magazine photo shoot, looking like they had just tumbled out of a two-person shower. Poor Hazel. That was the feeling.
The writer Troy Bramston met d’Alpuget many times while he was writing his own biography of Hawke, and he says “they were absolutely besotted with each other. It was intense. It was also turbulent … She was very much like Bob – very talented, very smart, very accomplished, and very vain. The public found it difficult to warm to her, because Hazel put up with the womanising, the drinking, the absences … and then he divorced her.
That was a shattering blow to Hazel who loved Bob still and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. But nobody could deny their obsession with each other. It was a grand love story, even if the Australian public didn’t always condone it.”
Bob and Blanche were married for 25 years, and she felt attitudes towards her had lately softened. She would walk around the park near her inner-city apartment, and people would say “G’day Blanche” rather than cross the street, which had happened a bit in the early years.
Reflecting on their love story, she told The Australian: “We didn’t have the joy of young love … we had the joy of mature love.” She cared for Hawke at home during his final years; she was there as he was dying, and who can forget the way she strode onto the stage at his memorial service in a pink cape, and called out: “To love!”
Leigh Sales conducted the first interview with her after Bob’s death – you should watch the clip on iView, it’s a cracker – and they became friends.
“She was truly one of the most charming, well-read, smart and hilarious women I ever met,” Sales told The Australian. “She was just the best company. Of course she is going to be remembered as the wife of Bob Hawke but I really do hope she gets the credit she deserves as a writer. She was a beautifully crisp wordsmith.”
Blanche developed breast cancer after Bob’s death, and attributed the cause to grief. Then came Long Covid, pneumonia, and asthma. She got on top of it for long enough to write a racy crime novel, The Bunny Club, which came out last year. Her publisher, Bonita Mersiades of Fair Play Publishing, was delighted to pick it up, after mainstream publishers passed on it, for being a bit too ribald (it’s got sex toys, a male escort, and a Japanese bondage session).
“Blanche was utterly committed to the craft of writing,” Mersiades said. “What struck me most was her fearlessness. She wasn’t interested in writing something safe or predictable; she didn’t worry about what other people might think. She did it because she wanted to, with a sharp eye for human behaviour, a warm sense of humour, and an enormous passion for life and its possibilities.”
Blanche d’Alpuget served on the boards of the Copyright Agency Ltd, and the Australian Film Commission. She was a former chair of the Australian Society of Authors, and a patron of Inala, a Rudolf Steiner organisation catering for people with severe disabilities. She was devoted to her son, Louis Pratt, and her granddaughter, Sienna. Born January 3, 1944, she died on September 9, 2026 at the age of 82.