Bob Hawke’s widow Blanche D’Alpuget dies aged 82: Her final message for Australia

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Blanche D'Alpuget, the author and widow of former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, has died at the age of 82 following complications from influenza. Her family confirmed the death on Wednesday and said she had asked that a final message be passed on to the public: a call to see love as life's highest purpose. In a joint statement, relatives described her as someone who lived by her own rules, prizing curiosity, vitality and generosity, and who resisted being defined by convention or by others' expectations. She is survived by her son, the artist and sculptor Louis Pratt, his wife Brianna, and their daughter Sienna, and remained close in later years to Hawke's children from his first marriage, Sue Pieters-Hawke, Rosslyn Dillon and Stephen Hawke.

D'Alpuget's relationship with Hawke was one of the most talked-about in Australian public life. The pair first met in Jakarta in 1970 and reconnected several years later, beginning an affair while Hawke was still married to his first wife, Hazel. D'Alpuget later said she had no illusions about being his only liaison, recalling that she came to understand he was involved with other women at the same time. Hawke proposed marriage in 1978 but withdrew the offer soon after as he prioritised his political career; the two, known privately by the shorthand B1 and B2, rekindled their romance in 1986. A serious light-plane crash off the coast of far north Queensland in 1993, in which D'Alpuget was involved, is said to have been the turning point that led Hawke to commit fully to the relationship. Once his divorce from Hazel was finalised, the couple married in 1995, having weathered years of public hostility that at one stage saw D'Alpuget branded the most reviled woman in the country.

D'Alpuget went on to become a prolific and acclaimed writer, publishing eleven books between 1984 and 2025, including biographical work on Hawke himself. In an interview recorded in December with broadcaster Neil Mitchell, some of which resurfaced after her death, she spoke candidly about mortality and about difficult episodes from her past. She said she viewed death without fear, describing the process of dying as unpleasant but what lay beyond as 'glorious', and voiced support for voluntary assisted dying for those enduring unbearable suffering. She also disclosed that in 1974, after being told she might have multiple sclerosis, she had privately resolved to end her life rather than become a burden to her then-husband and young son, a diagnosis that later proved incorrect. She additionally revealed she had battled breast cancer in 2020, undergoing chemotherapy in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and later contracting Covid and pneumonia twice. In the same conversation, she admitted that after Hawke reneged on his 1978 marriage promise she had briefly contemplated attacking him with a kitchen knife, an impulse she said she abandoned once she thought of the effect it would have on her son.

When Hawke died in 2019, D'Alpuget inherited the bulk of his roughly $18million estate, including some $9.2million from the sale of the couple's Northbridge mansion, while his three children from his first marriage received nothing directly from their father. D'Alpuget subsequently gave $750,000 to each of Hawke's children, though his daughter Rosslyn Dillon, who has spoken of past struggles with heroin addiction and hardship, pursued a $4.2million claim against the estate that was later settled privately. A 2019 auction of Hawke memorabilia, which raised more than $670,000, caused friction with some of his grandchildren over the sale of family items. At the time of her own death D'Alpuget's assets were understood to include a $4.5million apartment overlooking Hyde Park in Sydney, though the full state of her finances and the terms of her will remain unclear; under New South Wales succession law, stepchildren are not automatically entitled to inherit, raising the prospect of a dispute between her son's family and Hawke's children. D'Alpuget had continued to appear publicly in her final months, including at the state funeral of former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson in December 2025.

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