lit a candle 9 Sept 2026She helped Afghan women in refugee camps when most people wouldn't even say their names out loud. A quiet kind of courage that the world needs more of. Rest well, Blanche.
Their story
Josephine Blanche d'Alpuget was born in Sydney on 3 January 1944, an only child in the city's eastern suburbs. The name she carried was already a byline in the family. Her father, Louis Albert Poincare d'Alpuget, was a sports and feature writer and news editor of the Sydney paper The…
Josephine Blanche d'Alpuget was born in Sydney on 3 January 1944, an only child in the city's eastern suburbs. The name she carried was already a byline in the family. Her father, Louis Albert Poincare d'Alpuget, was a sports and feature writer and news editor of the Sydney paper The Sun. Her mother was Josephine Curgenven. A great-aunt, also named Blanche d'Alpuget, had been a pioneer woman journalist in Sydney and a patron of artists. The younger Blanche would spend a life writing about power, and then living beside it. This page is that biographer and novelist, widow of Bob Hawke. It is not a page for the great-aunt, and the two are not merged.
She went to SCEGGS Darlinghurst and, briefly, the University of Sydney. No completed degree is claimed in the sources used here. She did not stay in the lecture hall. She took a job on The Daily Mirror, The Sun's rival, and started travelling on her 21st birthday. Encyclopedia.com dates her marriage to civil servant Antony Pratt, known as Tony Pratt, to 22 November 1965. The next chapter was Indonesia. She was about 22 when she moved there with him. Their son, Louis, later the sculptor Louis Pratt, was born during those years. An exact birth date for Louis is not restated here, because it was not re-verified. In Jakarta she worked in the Australian Embassy's news and information bureau. She also volunteered at the National Museum of Indonesia, leading a team that recatalogued a collection of Chinese export ware, and was described as the youngest member of the Oriental Ceramic Society. After about four years in Indonesia she lived for a year in Malaysia, travelling into remote country in both places. Those years became the ground of her early novels.
She has said she returned to Australia at 30, to write, and to take part in the women's movement. English Wikipedia dates the return to 1973 and the start of writing to 1974. The first published book was not a novel. Mediator: A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby (1977) came out of a shared interest in Indonesian affairs and industrial relations. Kirby had presided over the Australian arbitration system. The book is still cited as a university text in that field. Then came the novels that critics called witness to history: Monkeys in the Dark (1980), set among the aftershocks of Indonesia's political violence, and Turtle Beach (1981), about a journalist watching Vietnamese boat people arrive into a Malaysia that did not want them. Turtle Beach won The Age Book of the Year and a South Australian premier's prize. It was filmed in 1992 and later banned in Indonesia. Winter in Jerusalem (1986) took the same reporter's eye to another contested place and won the inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature. White Eye (1993) moved the thriller back to Sydney and the bush.
The book that fixed her name in Australian public life was not a novel. Between 1980 and 1982 she researched and wrote Robert J. Hawke: A Biography. It became a national bestseller and won a New South Wales Premier's Award. She had first met Hawke in Jakarta in 1970, at a party, when she was a young journalist married to Tony Pratt and he was the rising leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. They met again in 1976, when she interviewed him for the Kirby book. Wikipedia and later timelines describe a long, on-and-off love affair that began then, paused, and resumed after her 1986 divorce. Hawke was still married to Hazel Hawke. The 1982 biography made Blanche the person who could see the larrikin and the political intellect in the same man. It also made the later marriage look, to many readers, like a story she had already begun to write. Later editions reworked the life as Hawke: The Early Years, then Hawke: The Prime Minister (2010), then Bob Hawke: The Complete Biography.
Hawke became prime minister in 1983 and left office in 1991. In 1995 he divorced Hazel, the first Australian prime minister to divorce while holding that place in public memory so soon after leaving the Lodge. Blanche and Hawke married in 1995. Encyclopedia.com gives the date as 23 July 1995. She was 51. He was 65. ABC reported that Hawke himself said the romance had begun years before the divorce, and that the public and his children criticised the affair. He later said he was grateful for a thawing in those tensions. Her own site describes the marriage as a second marriage for both, ended by his death in 2019.
Marriage changed the working week. She put the pen aside to travel with him and to anchor a consulting company they set up. She was a guest of heads of state, including American presidents and Queen Elizabeth II. Wikipedia notes the firm, Robert J. Hawke and Associates, and a China-facing practice, and lists travel that ran well past capital cities: Inner Mongolia, Moldova, Palau, Kazakhstan, the Antarctic peninsula. She returned to print in 2008 with the essay On Longing, then spent about eight years on a quintet about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Young Lion, The Lion Rampant, The Lions' Torment, The Lioness Wakes, and The Cubs Roar. The series is less a costume romance than another study of power inside a family.
Along the way she sat on boards that matched the writing: the ACT Arts Advisory Council, the Copyright Agency, the Australian Film Commission, and the chair of the Australian Society of Authors. Melbourne University Publishing lists those roles and two patronages, the Australia-China Friendship Society in New South Wales and Inala, a Rudolf Steiner organisation for people with severe disabilities. That page still says she lives with her husband and son, so the offices are treated here as a career record, not as offices held in September 2026. After the Vietnam war she had become an advocate for refugees, raising money and aid for camps, including Afghan women in Pakistan who had fled the Taliban. The official bio calls Turtle Beach and its companions works of witness. That is the line to keep, not the tabloid reduction of her to the other woman.
Hawke died at home on 16 May 2019, aged 89. Her statement that day called him a great Australian, many would say the greatest of the post-war era. She had been his carer in the last stretch. In a later interview she said they had not had the joy of young love, which he had with Hazel, but the joy of mature love and then the love of old age, and that looking after someone you love, when they are old and dying, brings an intimacy with no secrets and no pretences. In 2020 she disclosed stage two breast cancer, chemotherapy, and further surgery. She also spoke of COVID and pneumonia more than once in those years. None of those earlier illnesses is the 2026 cause.
She published again in 2025: a crime novel, The Bunny Club. In November 2025 Allen and Unwin published Fridays with Blanche, Derek Rielly's book of her stories from a year of Friday lunches. She is the subject of that book, not its signed author. She went on ABC Nightlife that month and talked about the public image she had carried since the affair became news. On 8 December 2025, in an interview with Neil Mitchell about that book, she said she had once planned to kill Hawke after he asked her to marry him and then drew back, and that she dropped the idea because she did not want her then six-year-old son to grow up the son of a murderer. She said they later laughed about it. That is a published recollection of a thought she says she did not carry out. It is not a charge, and it is not how she died. In December 2025 she was photographed at the state funeral of Graham Richardson, the Labor minister who had helped install Hawke as leader.
On Wednesday 9 September 2026 her family said she had died at 82. ABC News, quoting the family, said she died following complications from influenza. Nine.com.au, the same morning, said her cause of death had not been confirmed. Both accounts are kept. They are not collapsed into one cause. No hospital, street, or infection date is added, because the announcement did not give them. She is survived by her son, Louis Pratt, from her first marriage, three Hawke stepchildren, and a number of step-grandchildren. Her author site, written while she was alive, named six step-grandchildren. She had asked her loved ones to share a final message: our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another. The family said they would miss her force, her humour, her curiosity and her love beyond measure. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called her a true one-off, and her novels works of verve and originality. No funeral notice was in the first-day reports. English Wikipedia files 9 September 2026 as the announcement date and does not give a separate death day. This profile does not backdate the death to 8 September.
Biography adapted from ABC News, 9 September 2026; English Wikipedia; blanchedalpuget.com; Encyclopedia.com; Nine.com.au; AustLit; Key People.. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another.”
Final message she asked loved ones to share, as published in the family statement by ABC News, 9 September 2026. Her requested last words, not a book blurb. Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-09/australian-writer-blanche-dalpuget-dies-bob-hawke-widow/106312562
“We will miss her force, her humour, her curiosity and her love beyond measure.”
Family statement, ABC News, 9 September 2026. The same announcement also said she would be remembered as someone who lived fearlessly and took delight in living.
“Australia has lost a true one-off.”
Anthony Albanese, statement reported by ABC News, 9 September 2026. Prime minister's tribute on the day of the announcement. He also described the novels as compelling works of verve and originality and the biographies as comprehensive and definitive, most famously those of Bob Hawke.
“We didn't have the joy of young love. He had that with Hazel. We had the joy of mature love and then the love of old age.”
Blanche d'Alpuget, Now to Love interview on the last year of Hawke's life. Widowhood interview, not the 2026 announcement. Source: https://www.nowtolove.com.au/celebrity/celebrity-news/love-better-second-time-around-55964/
“There's a great deal of intimacy. There are no secrets, there are no pretences. You're getting the true human being on both sides.”
Blanche d'Alpuget, same Now to Love interview, on caring for Hawke at the end of his life.
“Today we lost Bob Hawke, a great Australian - many would say the greatest Australian of the post-war era.”
Blanche d'Alpuget, statement on the day Hawke died, as published by 7NEWS, 16 May 2019. The line is about him, not about her death. Source: https://7news.com.au/politics/bob-hawke-blanche-dalpugets-full-statement-on-former-prime-ministers-death-c-116321
Photos
1Blanche d'Alpuget, Australian biographer and novelist, widow of Bob Hawke. Studio portrait. This is the writer born in 1944, not her great-aunt, the earlier Sydney journalist of the same name.
by People Forever
Exactly. And then she actually did something about it, the refugee work especially.