Blanche D’Alpuget, the acclaimed author and widow of former prime minister Bob Hawke, has died at the age of 82, decades after her relationship with Hawke made her one of the most talked-about women in Australia.
The award-winning writer had asked her family to release a final message to the country after her death.
‘Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another,’ the message said.
D’Alpuget is survived by her son, artist and sculptor Louis Pratt, her daughter-in-law Brianna and her granddaughter Sienna. She also remained close to Hawke’s children, Sue Pieters-Hawke, Rosslyn Dillon and Stephen Hawke, along with their families.
‘Blanche wrote and lived entirely on her own terms,’ her family said.
‘She was full of vitality, generosity and curiosity, with an extraordinary appetite for beauty, ideas, history, new places and spirited conversation.
‘She refused to be confined by convention or by other people’s expectations of who she should be.’
D’Alpuget died seven years after Hawke, Australia’s longest-serving Labor prime minister, who she first met in Jakarta in 1970.
Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s widow and prolific Australian author Blanche D’Alpuget, has died aged 82
Hawke left his first wife Hazel (pictured with Hawke) after years of a secret affair with D’Alpuget
The pair, who were nicknamed B1 and B2 as shorthand, reconnected in the 1990s and began a long-running affair after Hawke enlisted her to write his biography.
When Hawke left his first wife Hazel after years of the secret romance, D’Alpuget faced severe public backlash and was labelled the ‘most hated woman in Australia’.
‘People called her a home-wrecker,’ her son previously recalled about the public after Hawke’s divorce from Hazel.
The couple married in 1995 and were together until the former Prime Minister’s death in 2019.
D’Alpuget refused to hide from the public eye, despite criticism over her affair with Hawke, and spoke openly about her sex life with Hawke.
‘With mutual, wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible,’ she told the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘He was charming, funny and straightforward: he liked me and enjoyed talking to me; what he loved was sex.’
She also said she was not under the illusion that she was his only affair and wrote in one instance that she realised Hawke was ‘having affairs with women all over the country’.
When Hawke left his first wife Hazel after years of the secret romance, D’Alpuget faced severe backlash and was branded ‘most hated woman in Australia’
D’Alpuget told the Herald that she was under ‘intense judgmentalism’ and said it was ‘really very unfair’.
‘But I still don’t blog, or Facebook, or Link-In or any of that, because I know I’d be trolled to death,’ she said.
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‘But I must also say that I don’t worry about what people think – or things in general, very much.’
While speaking to The Sydney Institute in 2018, she said that she thought she would die in a light plane crash in Far North Queensland in 1993 and the incident drove Hawke to take their relationship more seriously.
‘I was in a light plane crash in North Queensland. A friend who was our go-between rang him up and told him,’ she said.
‘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.’
D’Alpuget grew up as an only child in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and first worked as a journalist before travelling the world.
A rebellious teenager, she ran away at 17 years old with a married Polish immigrant and previously described their whirlwind romance in detail.
‘In one three-day stretch, we made love 21 times, stopping only to bathe and eat rye bread, csabai and cucumbers,’ she said
She returned to Australia at the age of 30 to begin working as a novelist.
The author also spoke candidly about how she was preparing for death in her final media interview earlier this year.
‘I think if you’re at a certain age, and you don’t start informing yourself, you’re foolish,’ she told News Corp.
‘Just as we prepare ourselves for life, by learning a language, reading, writing, and arithmetic, I think we should prepare ourselves for death.
‘But I do believe in the afterlife. Our soul lives on. I don’t know in what form, but this life in the body is not the end of your life. Maybe we are reborn. I don’t know, but it could be a huge, exciting adventure.’
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was among the first to pay tribute, hailing D’Alpuget as a one-off.
‘As a writer, she was at home in fiction as she was in non-fiction, working in each realm with a keen eye for every telling detail that opened up the humanity of her subject to her readers,’ he said.
Blanche’s novels were compelling works of verve and originality, and her biographies comprehensive and definitive – most famously those she wrote of Bob Hawke, who became her great love and ultimately her husband.
Derek Rielly, who wrote the Hawke biography Wednesdays With Bob, shared a heartfelt tribute with the Daily Mail.
‘Blanche believed that the pain of death is temporary, that it’s a fiery door and it will burn you but it’s a transient pain that will vanish,’ he said.
‘She lived a beautiful, complete and electric life and to her very last breath radiated a love for all humanity.
‘As she told me, ‘The more humans there are, the more love there is. Love is what distinguishes humans from the rest of creation’.’
