Thirty-six hours before Blanche took her last breath, I negotiated the plastic tubes and mask she wore over a still beautiful face and gave her one final kiss.I wasn’t sure, then, if it was a goodbye but I knew it would be close.
Who was she?
Was she really, as the Sydney Morning Herald described her in an appreciation for Hazel Hawke, just “some lipsticked wraith”, a prowling blonde, the avatar for the other woman?
It was a cruel fate for a woman who was so pivotal in Australian literature and politics. It wasn’t easy to disrupt Blanche but the breadth of animosity she encountered after her affair with Bob Hawke became public in late 1994 was like nothing she’d ever experienced.
About 30 years after she was photographed with Hawke at Sir Richard Kirby’s holiday house, she told me: “I was very shocked and distressed by the trolling and abuse … as opposed to simple literary criticism. I developed a great contempt, distrust and loathing of journalists.”
Blanche first blew into my orbit in a tornado of Doris Day hair and Sophia Loren lips in the winter of 2016, looking at least a decade younger than her 72 years, as I pursued her husband for my first book, Wednesdays with Bob. Her silk cravat and wide black sunglasses touched on the side with gold detail delivered a 70s movie-star sheen.
We became friends.
As she turned the corner into 80, the age when she presumed her face would suddenly collapse, as her mother’s did, and she would become a crone, I was struck by this realisation: Australia would never know the story of this woman, whose own trajectory was as compelling as that of the man whose life would come to define her.
Born the daughter of one of Australia’s great journalists, Blanche moved to Jakarta at 22 with her first husband, Tony Pratt, where she had a front-row seat as Indonesia struggled with the bloodletting of 1965. She challenged the bolted-on moral codes of the time with her fearless writing, and her bestselling biography of Hawke, published in 1982, helped propel him into the prime ministership and thus helped change Australian politics for ever. She was still writing and living life to the full while many others of her vintage were staggering, zombie-like, along the fluorescent-lit corridors of a nursing home.
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And so, at the suggestion of our mutual agent, Jeanne Ryckmans, a book deal was sought and made.
If Wednesdays were spent with her husband, Fridays would be with Blanche. Over the course of late 2023 and through 2024, we lunched, talked, messaged and flirted.
Over several lunches, our talks had drifted to the topic of dying. It seemed, then, that everyone was dropping like flies.
Death and the process of dying interested her deeply. She believed death was like walking through a fiery door but that the pain was only temporary.
Blanche had seen up close what it’s like to die. She had nursed her mother through her final hours, remaining awake for days, and did an all-nighter alongside Hawke on his final day.
She likened dying to “untying a million little knots”.
“The soul wants to be released, but it’s held in by the body very, very strongly, and it’s an enormous effort to untie all of those knots,” she said.
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Regarding her final wishes, she said that her headstone was already in place next to Hawke’s at the Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium in Sydney’s North Ryde.
Her coffin, she told me, must be red on the inside and blue and white on the exterior. The blue represented the sky, red the colour of life and white the spirit.
Blanche wanted a band to play When the Saints Go Marching In.
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“The more humans there are, the more love there is,” Blanche liked to say.
“Love is, I believe, what distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal world or creation. Love that extends beyond one’s family and friends, beyond the blood bonds of tribe and race, to all other humans and to the rest of creation.”
