Blanche d’Alpuget, the acclaimed author who chronicled Bob Hawke’s life, knew the former prime minister more intimately than almost anyone. Aside from Hawke’s first wife, Hazel, few were better placed to describe him as “perpetually unfaithful”.
D’Alpuget, who died on Tuesday at the age of 82, spoke openly over the years about her complicated romance with Hawke. Their passionate affair stretched across decades before becoming a marriage that lasted nearly 25 years.
Their story began at a Jakarta party in April 1970. D’Alpuget was then living in Indonesia with her first husband, diplomat Tony Pratt, while Hawke was married to Hazel and raising their three young children.
At the time, Hawke was already one of the biggest names in Australia’s union movement as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. But d’Alpuget, who had spent years abroad, had no idea she was meeting a man who would one day lead the Labor Party and become prime minister.
“I’d been living overseas for nine years … I didn’t know who the hell he was,” she later recalled during an interview with the ABC’s Conversation Hour.
In another reflection on their first encounter, d’Alpuget said she initially believed his name was Robin. “He sat down and we talked a lot,” she said. “And I thought, ‘You’re a good guy.’”
The pair crossed paths again roughly six years later, when d’Alpuget was working on a biography of Sir Richard Kirby, the longtime president of the Australian Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.
D’Alpuget, who was 14 years younger than Hawke, said she immediately felt a powerful “energy” between them. Speaking to Conversation Hour, she said she knew from that moment their attraction would eventually be acted upon.
Blanche d’Alpuget wrote extensively about Bob Hawke and was uniquely qualified, aside from his first wife Hazel, to call him “perpetually unfaithful”. The couple are pictured on their wedding day.
Hawke and d’Alpuget wed in July 1995 and stayed together until the former prime minister’s death in May 2019 at age 89. This photograph was taken by a neighbour around six weeks before he died.
‘Neither of us said a thing about it… we knew we would become lovers that night,’ she said.
By then, d’Alpuget’s marriage was ‘going down the drain,’ she said in another interview – ‘the click was different’ and ‘affairs were par for the course’.
Hawke and d’Alpuget became lovers and arranged trysts when they could for much of the next 20 years.
‘I’ve been in love with Bob since 1976,’ she told news.com.au in 2018, a year before Hawke’s death.
‘I fell in love with his character. He was a man of absolutely good character, as far as I was concerned.
‘He was clever and genuinely charismatic. He’s a man of enormous compassion, and I saw all of those things.’
D’Alpuget also always understood she was not the only woman Hawke was seeing outside his marriage, stating he was ‘having affairs with women all over the country’.
She once told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘He was charming, funny and straightforward… what he loved was sex.’
Hawke and d’Alpuget first met at a party in Jakarta in April 1970 when she was living there with her first husband, diplomat Anthony Pratt, and Hawke was married to Hazel
After 20 years of marriage, d’Alpuget was still happily talking about the couple’s sex life in 2015.
‘I think sexual attraction is very important – it is to me – but I’ve always liked sex,’ she told The Australian.
‘I think sexual attraction, honestly, if it’s intense, really can stand the test of time. We’re the living example of it.’
Hawke first asked d’Alpuget to marry him in 1978 when he woke in a Canberra hotel room after a vivid dream but a year later changed his mind.
The aspiring politician believed divorcing Hazel could ruin his chance of one day leading the country, d’Alpuget revealed in her 2018 book On Lust and Longing.
‘As it turned out, he made the right decision: for himself, for me, for his family, for mine, for his party – and, as became obvious, for the nation,’ she wrote.
Hawke’s liaisons with d’Alpuget were an open secret in Canberra but Hazel clung steadfastly to her philandering husband.
‘Each of us asked the other to leave,’ d’Alpuget said of her paramour’s wife. ‘Neither of us did.’
The nation was scandalised when Hawke and d’Alpuget made their romance public in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes in February 1995 (above)
D’Alpuget actually penned two works about Hawke. The first was Robert J. Hawke: A Biography, published in 1982, the year before he was elected prime minister.
The second was Hawke: The Prime Minister, released in 2010, 19 years after he lost the Labor leadership to Paul Keating and 15 years into their marriage.
Hawke and d’Alpuget had become particularly close while she was writing the first biography but had little or no contact during the early years of his prime ministership.
D’Alpuget divorced Pratt, with whom she had a son, in 1986 and a chance phone call from Hawke reignited the affair, which continued after he left The Lodge.
In 1993, d’Alpuget was in a light plane crash in Far North Queensland, which led to Hawke taking their relationship more seriously after he feared she was dead and realised the depth of his feelings for her.
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‘A friend who was our go-between rang him up and told him,’ she told the Sydney Institute in 2018. ‘Bob said he felt himself die and that was it.
‘At that moment, he decided. He suddenly took the relationship extraordinarily seriously and made it clear to me. But it was timing. It was an angel, holy angels.’
Hawke and Hazel – who was much loved by the Australian public – jointly announced their separation after 38 years of marriage in November 1994.
D’Alpuget understood in the 1970s she was not the only woman Hawke was seeing outside his marriage, stating he was ‘having affairs with women all over the country’
The nation was scandalised when Hawke and d’Alpuget made their romance public in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes in February the following year.
That tell-all sit-down was memorable for d’Alpuget rubbing suntan lotion onto Hawke’s body as the besotted couple recounted their long love story.
D’Alpuget faced a vicious backlash for replacing Hazel but overcame being dubbed ‘the most hated woman in Australia’.
‘As for people disapproving of me, I figured that was their problem,’ she told the ABC in November last year. ‘They were acting in prejudice and ignorance.
‘If you’re very in love with somebody, that love so enhances your life and your attitude, that negativity doesn’t have much chance of getting a foothold.’
D’Alpuget said the reaction to her coming out from the shadows to declare her love for Hawke was harder on him.
‘It took an enormous amount of courage on Bob’s part,’ she told The Australian.
‘It took much more courage on his part than on mine. Because I was a single woman, divorced. But he was married.
D’Alpuget faced a vicious backlash for replacing Hazel but overcame being dubbed ‘the most hated woman in Australia’. She and Hawke are pictured in 2012
‘The whole country expected him to behave in this way and was unaware of what his true feelings were and so were bound to be shocked, angered and amazed when they discovered them.’
Hawke and d’Alpuget – dubbed ‘B1 and B2’ after ABC kids show Bananas in Pyjamas – married in July 1995 and remained together until his death in May 2019, aged 89.
D’Alpuget said in a statement marking his loss: ‘Today we lost Bob Hawke, a great Australian – many would say the greatest Australian of the post-war era.’
‘Bob was dearly loved by his family, and so many friends and colleagues,’ she continued. ‘We will miss him.’
Later that month, d’Alpuget described the final years of her life with Hawke to the ABC’s Leigh Sales.
‘We were so close and intimate during that time, while I was his main carer,’ she said. ‘And we often said to each other, we’ve been blessed to have this period together.
‘We didn’t have the joy of young love. He had that with Hazel. We had the joy of mature love and then the love of old age.’
D’Alpuget also admitted feeling sorry for Hazel, who died in 2013 aged 83.
‘I used to feel very sad for Hazel… my feelings about Hazel’s sadness didn’t change,’ she said. ‘I still always really up until the end felt that sorrow.’
Six months after Hawke’s death, d’Alpuget was asked by The Project’s Lisa Wilkinson if her husband ever felt guilty about his infidelity.
‘He was perpetually unfaithful,’ she said. ‘He loved Hazel and he was perpetually unfaithful.
‘Bob was not a faithful husband. I didn’t feel I was doing anything bad.’
Most of Hawke’s ashes were interred at Sydney’s Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium – the rest are in the Prime Ministers Memorial Garden at Melbourne General Cemetery.
When Hawke almost died of a stomach bug he picked up in the Middle East in 2015, d’Alpuget chose Macquarie Park as the place they would one day lie together.
‘The graves are side-by-side,’ she said. ‘We chose a spot where the public can come. It’ll be nice.
‘It’s in a rose garden and there’s a seat there so if a member of the public wants to come and have a sit, they can.’
– READ MORE: CHARLES WOOLEY: After Blanche D’Alpuget sensuously rubbed oil into Bob Hawke’s back, I asked: ‘When did the sex begin?’ It sparked a firestorm that haunts me to this day
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