Blanche d’Alpuget, writer and wife of Bob Hawke, dies aged 82 | Bob Hawke

Blanche d’Alpuget, Australian writer and widow of former prime minister Bob Hawke, has died at the age of 82.

D’Alpuget was an acclaimed writer, whose work includes the highly regarded biography of Hawke that won the New South Wales premier’s award.

Her final statement was shared with the ABC by her family.

“Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another.”

She was born in Sydney, lived in England, France, Indonesia and Malaysia and is survived by her son, Louis Pratt, from her first marriage and three Hawke step-children.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, mourned d’Alpuget’s passing, saying in a statement that Australia had “lost a true one-off” .

“As a writer, she was at home in fiction as she was in non-fiction, working in each realm with a keen eye for every telling detail that opened up the humanity of her subject to her readers,” he said.

“Blanche’s novels were compelling works of verve and originality, and her biographies comprehensive and definitive – most famously those she wrote of Bob Hawke, who became her great love and ultimately her husband.

“It is so fitting that Blanche’s final message to us all is this: ‘Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another.’

“May Blanche d’Alpuget rest in peace.”

D’Alpuget and Hawke married in 1995 and remained so until his death in 2019, aged 89.

The glamorous writer, who was of French and English heritage, published more than a dozen books, including Hawke’s biography, the bestselling 1982 book Robert J Hawke: A Biography.

The pair met in the 70s and began an affair – Hawke was still married to his first wife, Hazel.

D’Alpuget wrote that, when she interviewed him in 1976 for a biography of Sir Richard Kirby, that “the Muse had arrived”.

“With mutual, wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible,” she wrote.

As well as the Hawke biography she wrote hefty historical novels and, most recently, she wrote a racy detective novel.

“All my books have had quite a bit of sex in them. Without that, we’re not here,” she said.

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