I was blessed to call Blanche d’Alpuget a friend. What an extraordinary life

September 9, 2026 — 1:00pm

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Blanche d’Alpuget, who has just died after a brief illness, was a whole lot more than Bob Hawke’s second wife, even though she was the first to note that our former prime minister was ever and always the most important thing in her own life. Her final message released by her family was “our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life,” and she surely had Hawke in mind when enunciating it.

They met briefly in Indonesia in the mid-70s when he was leading the ACTU and she was living in Jakarta, married to an Australian businessman. On their third meeting, in Australia, shortly afterwards, she later detailed how she felt such a pull towards his charisma that there was, just a “wordless understanding that we were going to sleep together”.

“Now it’s none of my damn business,” I asked her when interviewing her last year, “and I deserve to be told to get back in my box and stop being so impertinent, but did it start........

© WA Today