Blanche D’Alpuget was undeniably complicated.
Beautiful, talented and fierce, the celebrated writer lived life to the full, always refusing to be shackled with traditional conventions or expectations.
She did, however, admit to feeling guilt when former Prime Minister Bob Hawke left his first wife, beloved former first lady Hazel Hawke, in 1995, to marry his younger, more glamorous mistress after a secret affair that spanned decades.
“I didn’t set out to besmirch myself or redeem myself in public. What the public thinks one way or another is up to them. I can’t control it for a minute,” she told me in an interview in October last year.
The interview had to be rescheduled three times.
The first time was because I hadn’t been given the opportunity to read Fridays With Blanche, a memoir she entrusted to writer Derek Rielly, who she became friends with when he wrote Bob Hawke’s memoir, Wednesdays with Bob.
The memoir was a lot, even for someone who shared so much, detailing her lovers who included African, Chinese, Japanese, Israeli and Indonesian men, a visit to a brothel and, of course, her 42-year love affair with Bob.
The second cancellation happened because she was still feeling unwell after a bout of pneumonia, and when we did finally speak, Blanche was crook with terrible asthma but insisted on soldiering on, despite a dreadful cough.
When we did finally speak, the interview was at times combative, but it was also peppered with moments of vulnerability, with Blanche at one point even asking that I “be kind”.
She also seemed surprised at just how “unguarded” she was with the author of her memoir, and a little nervous about how it would be received. The next instant she told me she didn’t really care and that it was a testament to her truthfulness.
Blanche was also very funny and self-deprecating during the interview. Even over the phone it was easy to understand how she captivated Bob, and why so many men – and women – were entranced by her.
In between reprimanding me for zeroing in on the more salacious bits of her memoir, she also opened up about her strong sense of spirituality, and why she had no fear of death, albeit she also wasn’t in any hurry to meet her maker.
Blanche led a colourful life by any measure, including love affairs with publisher Max Walsh and more famously Bob Hawke, yet her conviction in an afterlife was absolute, and something she considered “a great adventure”.
It just wasn’t something she was in any rush to experience.
“I really want to watch my granddaughter (Sienna) grow up,” she told me, revealing that finally reconciling with Bob’s daughter Sue Pieters-Hawke after Bob died in 2019 filled her with joy.
Blanche famously slapped Sue three or four times at Brisbane airport in 2010 after a years-long feud that only ended when Hazel died three years later, aged 83, following a 12-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Sadly, Blanche won’t get to see Sienna blossom into womanhood, but just a day after she died following complications from influenza, her son Louis, shared a final message at his mum’s behest:
“Our highest calling and the greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another.”
Her family said she would be remembered as someone who lived fearlessly and took delight in living. “We will miss her force, her humour, her curiosity and her love beyond measure,” they said in a statement last week.
Blanche never reconciled with Bob’s other daughter Rosslyn Dillon, 66, after she challenged the will Bob had drawn up shortly before his death, but enjoyed a close relationship with her own son, Louis, Sue’s daughter Sophie and grandson Hugo.
With a breast cancer diagnosis and multiple bouts of pneumonia and Covid in the years after Bob’s death, Blanche, struggled with her health, despite daily visits to the gym and had taken a break from writing, fearing that AI would destroy her career.
She saw the future for artists and creatives under huge threat from the new technology that has been intensely criticised for stealing the work of many authors, musicians and other creatives, telling me she had hit pause on an idea for a new series of crime novels.
It was a frightening prospect for the acclaimed writer of celebrated biographies on her beloved Bob and Sir Richard Kirby, Turtle Beach, Winter in Jerusalem and her more recent series of historical fiction novels about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Blanche also never stopped grieving for Bob, telling me she missed him “a hell of a lot” despite trying to move on with her life, and enjoying at least two significant love affairs in the eight years since he died.
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