D\u2019Alpuget died on Tuesday night<\/a> from complications from influenza, aged 82.<\/p>\n Her family describe her as a generous and curious woman who \u201clived fearlessly\u201d and \u201crefused to be confined by convention or by other people\u2019s expectations of who she should be\u201d.<\/p>\n The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, paid tribute to her writing<\/a> on Wednesday, and lamented Australia had \u201clost a true one-off\u201d.<\/p>\n She \u201claughed a lot\u201d, former Labor MP Craig Emerson remembers<\/a>, and she believed in life after death. \u201cBlanche was convinced there was one, which she fully expected to enjoy and assured Bob he would too,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Susan Ryan, a feminist and the first female Labor minister, described her as a \u201cvivacious, unconventional woman\u201d.<\/p>\n D\u2019Alpuget 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s here she discovered her love of writing, and in 1975 she won two Fellowship of Australian Writers\u2019 prizes before being asked to write the biography of judge Sir Richard Kirby. It was a fateful request.<\/p>\n \u2018Blanche and Bob promised to love and honour each other but certainly not to obey\u2019 \u2026 Bob Hawke and Blanche d\u2019Alpuget at their wedding in 1995. Photograph: Patrick Riviere\/Getty Images<\/p>\n In 1976 she interviewed Hawke in Melbourne for the Kirby book, at first not realising she had met him before. \u201cWith mutual, wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n And so their \u201cgreat love\u201d began, the very next night, while she was still married to Pratt and Hawke was still married to Hazel.<\/p>\n Hawke was drinking. He was seeing other women. In the late 70s, he asked D\u2019Alpuget to marry him \u2013 and then changed his mind.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons that earlier relationship with D\u2019Alpuget faltered was because Bob asked her to marry him \u2026 but when he considered the full political costs of leaving Hazel he made a calculated decision to stay with Hazel,\u201d Wallace says.<\/p>\n \u201cHazel had tremendous popularity among regular Australian women \u2026 Bob was a complicated guy.\u201d<\/p>\n By 1986, D\u2019Alpuget was divorced and they were back together.<\/p>\n In the Canberra Times on 1 December 1994, Jenna Price wrote of the \u201cfabulous array of rumours\u201d swirling around Hawke when he appeared for the first time after announcing his split with Hazel.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter | Every weekday<\/p>\n Sign up to Politics, really<\/p>\n Our political team brings you up to speed on the stories that really matter and what they mean for you<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cHazel had finally kicked him out, tired of his infidelities,\u201d she wrote. \u201cHe had taken up with an unnamed 31-year-old woman. Or he had moved in with Blanche D\u2019Alpuget, biographer and confidant.\u201d<\/p>\n At the launch of D\u2019Alpuget\u2019s biography of Bob Hawke in Sydney in 2010: former prime minister Julia Gillard, publisher Louise Adler, D\u2019Alpuget and Hawke. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy\/AAP<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But once Hawke left Hazel in November 1994, it was a different world and the media interest was fierce.<\/p>\n \u201cIt annoys me that people often underrate her. She\u2019s still \u2018the other woman\u2019, who \u2018stole\u2019 Bob from [his first wife] Hazel,\u201d Sue Kirby (daughter of Richard) told the Sydney Morning Herald<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n \u201cShe got all the blame; Bob could do no wrong. I hear people say, \u2018Oh she\u2019s just a bimbo\u2019 and I get so angry: she\u2019s a very successful writer with an incredible life.\u201d<\/p>\n For her part, D\u2019Alpuget told the ABC last year she was \u201cmadly in love with Bob\u201d and didn\u2019t care about people disliking her, although she was frightened when people sent her hate mail.<\/p>\n Blanche d\u2019Alpuget and Bob Hawke at the wedding of her son and his stepson Louis Pratt to Brianna Roberts in the Blue Mountains in May 2019. Photograph: James Simmons<\/p>\n \u201cBut as for people not disapproving of me, I figured that was their problem. They were acting in prejudice and ignorance and didn\u2019t know the circumstances,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n D\u2019Alpuget married Hawke in the Bay Room of Sydney\u2019s Ritz-Carlton in July 1995, her hair as well coiffed as that of the Silver Bodgie<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMs d\u2019Alpuget 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\u2019s cap on top of the mass of blonde curls, huge pearl ear-rings which just possibly might have been real, and a broad grin,\u201d Price wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cBlanche and Bob promised to love and honour each other but certainly not to obey.<\/p>\n \u201cThat, Blanche twinkled, would have been too much.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788999254_776_Politics_really_trail_1x1.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
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