Blanche d’Alpuget: biographer, wife, Bob Hawke’s lover
Katelyn Catanzariti |
Blanche d’Alpuget was a young embassy wife in Jakarta and a budding writer when she was introduced to a passionate young trade unionist with a fire in his belly.
Her tumultuous on-again, off-again affair with the married soon-to-be prime minister Bob Hawke would become one of the most scandalous events in Australian politics.
But d’Alpuget said their relationship was a slow burn.
“I had no idea who he was. I thought his name was Robin,” she would later tell Network Ten’s The Project about their first meeting at a party in 1970.
“He was just another visiting ‘fireman’ (industrial negotiator) and as an embassy wife I used to take people around the city.”
When the pair met up again in 1976 – after d’Alpuget had done her research – there was a meeting of the minds.
They talked politics, industrial disputes and the Vietnam war – and Mr Hawke’s ambition to lead the nation. D’Alpuget was impressed.
Their passionate affair began. But she had no illusions about the notorious playboy.
“He loved (his wife) Hazel, but he was perpetually unfaithful. I recognised he was that sort of a guy,” she said.
In 1978, Mr Hawke proposed to d’Alpuget but withdrew his offer when he worked out a divorce might hamper his ambition for the top job.
D’Alpuget was born on January 3, 1944, the only child of Josephine and Louis, a boxer, blue-water yachtsman and news editor.
She was given the same name as her great-aunt, a pioneering Sydney journalist.
By the time she met Hawke, d’Alpuget had worked as a journalist for a number of publications, had just published her first book – a biography of Sir Richard Kirby – and had two novels awaiting publication.
She had professional ambitions of her own and being the prime minister’s wife would have spelled the end of her budding writing career, she said.
“The two things would be too much in conflict,” d’Alpuget said.
“And I very much applauded his ambition to lead the country. I thought that would be a wonderful outcome for Australia.
“People recognise genuine leaders intuitively and he was a genuine leader.”
Not one to let heartbreak get in the way of a “good subject”, within two years of the lovers separating, d’Alpuget became Mr Hawke’s official biographer.
Robert J Hawke: A Biography was published in 1982 to critical and commercial acclaim. Five months later, he was prime minister.
After the book’s release, their contact stopped, d’Alpuget said.
In the years that followed, she would give birth to her son, Louis, divorce her first husband, Tony Pratt, and move to Sydney.
Then one evening in 1986, while she had a boyfriend over, she received a phone call out of the blue.
“This voice just said, ‘G’day’,” she later told the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Of course I knew who it was.”
The pair’s affair recommenced immediately and continued throughout the tenure of Mr Hawke’s leadership, facilitated by his security detail and even – it was claimed at the time – by Australian Federal Police.
“We were very, very clever,” d’Alpuget remembered.
Two years after Hawke was ousted as Labor leader by Paul Keating, d’Alpuget was a passenger in a light plane that crashed off the coast of far north Queensland.
Mr Hawke initially thought she was dead, but he became determined to change the course of his life after learning she survived.
Within two years, he had divorced Hazel, the mother of his three children, and the pair were married.
Their Sydney wedding attracted noisy protests, tourists and celebrity-spotters, while across the city Hazel held a “liberation party”.
“I thought that was a terrific idea,” d’Alpuget told Ten. “Mentally, I congratulated her for it.”
The couple would spend the rest of their lives together travelling and working and very happy, d’Alpuget said.
“When we were together, I just felt very contented,” she said.
“Just very … like a cat. A sense that something had clicked together, two parts of a thing had just clicked.”
As Mr Hawke grew older and more frail, their relationship took on an even greater tenderness and intimacy.
“He became such a radiant being as his body was letting him down … his soul, his spirit was becoming more evident and so our relationship took on that far greater transcendental experience,” she told Ten.
Hawke died at the age of 89 in May 2019.
D’Alpuget immediately sold off most of their belongings, along with their palatial home, revisited her biography, adding a chapter in which she featured, and completed the fifth and final book in the Birth of the Plantagenets historical novel series.
Within months of his death, she found a lump in her breast and underwent chemotherapy and surgery.
At the same time, she was dealing with a legal challenge by one of Mr Hawke’s children, who was dissatisfied with the amount she had been left in his will.
But d’Alpuget was confident her late husband would never be worried about her: “He knew I’d be alright.”
AAP