Arabic version: تذكّر بلانش دابولجيه كاتبةً ومدافعة عن القضايا

According to The Guardian, Blanche d’Apulget, the author and wife of former prime minister Bob Hawke, has died aged 82 from complications from influenza. Her family described her as generous and curious, saying she lived fearlessly and refused to be confined by convention or others’ expectations.

D’Apulget had an established public profile before her relationship with Hawke. University of Canberra professor Chris Wallace said she was a tremendously successful writer who brought her own “star power” to the relationship. Prime minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to her writing and said Australia had lost “a true one-off”.

A journalist, traveller, advocate for refugees and people with disabilities, novelist and biographer, d’Apulget wrote Monkeys in the Dark in 1980 and Turtle Beach in 1981, both of which won several literary prizes. Her bestselling Robert J Hawke: A Biography, published in 1982, helped propel Hawke into the prime ministership.

She first met Hawke while living in Jakarta with her first husband, Tony Pratt, and later interviewed Hawke in Melbourne in 1976 while researching a biography of judge Sir Richard Kirby. Their relationship was on and off for two decades. D’Apulget and Hawke married in Sydney in July 1995 and remained married until Hawke’s death in 2019.

After Hawke’s death, d’Apulget published the final book in her historical series about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as well as a detective novel. Her parting words were: “Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another.”