Long before “Bob & Blanche” was scrawled on a three-tier wedding cake in red icing, Blanche d’Apulget was a star in her own right.
“She was a tremendously successful writer before she was publicly associated with Bob Hawke,” University of Canberra professor Chris Wallace says.
“She had her own significant public profile, standing and esteem … she brought her own star power to the relationship.”
Wallace is a political historian and author of Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers, and she wants d’Alpuget to be remembered as much more than the glamorous woman who married former prime minister Bob Hawke.
D’Apulget died on Tuesday night from complications from influenza, aged 82.
Her family describe her as a generous and curious woman who “lived fearlessly” and “refused to be confined by convention or by other people’s expectations of who she should be”.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, paid tribute to her writing on Wednesday, and lamented Australia had “lost a true one-off”.
She “laughed a lot”, former Labor MP Craig Emerson remembers, and she believed in life after death. “Blanche was convinced there was one, which she fully expected to enjoy and assured Bob he would too,” he writes.
Susan Ryan, a feminist and the first female Labor minister described her as a “vivacious, unconventional woman”.
D’Alpuget was a journalist, a traveller, an advocate for refugees and people with disabilities, a novelist, and a biographer. Her novels Monkeys in the Dark (1980) and Turtle Beach (1981) won several literary prizes, while the bestselling Robert J Hawke: A Biography (1982) helped propel Hawke into the prime ministership.
She was living with her first husband, Tony Pratt, in Jakarta in 1970 when she first met Hawke, and moved back to Australia a few years later, landing in Canberra.
It’s here she discovered her love of writing, and in 1975 she won two Fellowship of Australian Writers’ prizes before being asked to write the biography of judge Sir Richard Kirby. It was a fateful request.
In 1976 she interviewed Hawke in Melbourne for the Kirby book, at first not realising she had met him before. “With mutual, wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible,” she wrote.
And so their “great love” began, the very next night, while she was still married to Pratt and Hawke was still married to Hazel.
Hawke was drinking. He was seeing other women. In the late 70s, he asked D’Apulget to marry him – and then changed his mind.
“One of the reasons that earlier relationship with D’Apulget faltered was because Bob asked her to marry him … but when he considered the full political costs of leaving Hazel he made a calculated decision to stay with Hazel,” Wallace says.
“Hazel had tremendous popularity among regular Australian women … Bob was a complicated guy.”
By 1986, D’Apulget was divorced and they were back together.
In the Canberra Times on 1 December 1994, Jenna Price wrote of the “fabulous array of rumours” swirling around Hawke when he appeared for the first time after announcing his split with Hazel.
“Hazel had finally kicked him out, tired of his infidelities,” she wrote. “He had taken up with an unnamed 31-year-old woman. Or he had moved in with Blanche D’Alpuget, biographer and confidant.”
The 20-year, on-again-off-again affair was not exactly a secret, but it was going on in an era when journalists by and large ignored philanderings.
But once Hawke left Hazel in November 1994, it was a different world and the media interest was fierce.
“It annoys me that people often underrate her. She’s still ‘the other woman’, who ‘stole’ Bob from [his first wife] Hazel,” Sue Kirby (daughter of Richard) told the Sydney Morning Herald last year.
“She got all the blame; Bob could do no wrong. I hear people say, ‘Oh she’s just a bimbo’ and I get so angry: she’s a very successful writer with an incredible life.”
For her part, D’Apulget told the ABC last year she was “madly in love with Bob” and didn’t care about people disliking her, although she was frightened when people sent her hate mail.
“But as for people not disapproving of me, I figured that was their problem. They were acting in prejudice and ignorance and didn’t know the circumstances,” she said.
D’Apulget married Bob Hawke in the Bay Room of Sydney’s Ritz-Carlton in July 1995, her hair as well coiffed as that of the Silver Bodgie.
“Ms d’Apulget wore a 60s-style floor-length ivory gown with a corded lace-fitted bodice (satin underneath) and a duchess satin bell skirt, slightly gathered, cream shoes with gold heels and what looked like a lace milkmaid’s cap on top of the mass of blonde curls, huge pearl ear-rings which just possibly might have been real, and a broad grin,” Price wrote.
“Blanche and Bob promised to love and honour each other but certainly not to obey.
“That, Blanche twinkled, would have been too much.”
Their almost 24 years of marriage ended when Hawke died in 2019, while D’Apulget went on to publish the last of a series of historical novels about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and a racy detective novel.
D’Alpuget left the world with these parting words:
“Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another.”
