Phillip Castleton and Getty
Blanche D’Alpuget is feeling “crook” with terrible asthma and would really, really, rather not discuss some of the shocking confessions she’s boldly made in a new biography about her celebrated life.
“Stop being salacious,” she tells Woman’s Day, while acknowledging she was “very unguarded” in a series of interviews over lunch with author Derek Rielly, who has just released Fridays With Blanche, a delicious memoir full of secrets and shocks.
Dubbed “Australia’s most hated woman” after former Prime Minister Bob Hawke left his beloved wife Hazel for the woman who was his mistress for many years, Blanche, 81, has long been embroiled in controversy. “I’m a frank person and I’m a truthful person, so that’s that,” she says.
RAISING EYEBROWS
Her candour this time is sure to raise some eyebrows, considering that the memoir includes a revelation that her Melbourne University Press publisher Peter Ryan once took her to a brothel where she had sex with a female sex worker.
“We started off having a spa bath and then we went into a bedroom, which was set up with two double beds. He and his lady got in one bed and I was with the sex worker in the other one,” she tells her biographer. “I was so impressed with how good she was.”
Blanche says her brothel “adventure” only reaffirmed that she’s completely heterosexual, and insists she has no idea whether this memoir, which also reveals her other affairs, is scandalous.
“I’ve had a colourful variety of lovers – African, Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, Indonesian. One of my lovers from Indonesia was known as ‘Hot Chocolate’, and the most exotic man was a Dayak man from Borneo,” she reveals in the book.
Fridays With Blanche delves into her 42-year relationship with former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, she admitting “he was screwing everything in town” early in their affair and that she was heartbroken when he retracted his first marriage proposal in 1978.
She also had a seven-year affair with the very married political commentator Max Walsh shortly after splitting from her first husband, Australian diplomat Tony Pratt for the second and final time in 1985.
“We were mad about each other. He once said I’d ruined him for all other women.”
Blanche also reveals that she lost her virginity at 16, had two abortions with Tony before she turned 20, and after remaining celibate for a year after Bob died, started not one but two love affairs simultaneously.
“Yes, I have got no horror of sex. Some people may have. Many people do have, and that’s their horror to deal with. But I don’t have a horror of it. I was not brought up to think that sex was bad,” she says.
Blanche is one of our most respected writers, having written biographies on Sir Richard Kirby and Bob, Monkeys In The Dark, Turtle Beach, Winter In Jerusalem and many more, but her glamorous beauty and the Bob factor often overshadowed her achievements.
PLENTY TO CELEBRATE
Thomas Keneally says she’s “almost politically incorrectly beautiful”, while her lifelong friend Sue Kirby hates that people think she’s “a blonde Barbie doll”. Political legend Graham Richardson says avowed feminist Blanche is “a model of courage for women”.
“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 says, acknowledging she did feel guilt when Bob left his first wife Hazel in 1995.
“I miss him a hell of a lot. It will be seven years since he died in May next year and I think I’m still in the grieving process.”
Blanche was diagnosed with breast cancer just 15 months after Bob died but has fully recovered and is in pretty good health despite multiple bouts of pneumonia and Covid – and says she has plenty to celebrate.
She has a close relationship with artist son Louis and adores spending time with her granddaughter Sienna and is also close to Bob’s daughter, Sue Pieters-Hawke, 68, who she once publicly slapped in Brisbane Airport.
She hasn’t spoken to or seen Sue’s sister Rosslyn Dillon, 65, since Rosslyn challenged Bob’s will, but has a great relationship with Sue’s daughter Sophie and grandson Hugo and will spend Christmas at Sophie’s home.
“It does fill me with joy,” she says, adding that she’s also looking forward to death because she sees the afterlife and reaching heaven as “a great adventure”, just not for a few years yet! “I really want to watch my granddaughter grow up.”
