| Blanche d'Alpuget | |
|---|---|
Blanche d'Alpuget |
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| Born | 3 January 1944 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Known for | Novelist, biographer |
| Spouse | Anthony Ian Camden "Tony" Pratt (a civil servant) on November 22, 1965 (divorced; 1 child) Bob Hawke (1995-present) |
| Children | Louis Pratt |
| Parents | Louis Albert and Josephine (née Curgenven) d'Alpuget |
Josephine Blanche d'Alpuget (born 3 January 1944) is an Australian writer, and second wife of the longest-serving Australian Labor Party Prime Minister, Bob Hawke.
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d'Alpuget is the only child of Josephine Curgenven and Louis Albert Poincare d'Alpuget (1915 - 2006), journalist, author, blue water yachtsman and champion boxer. Her great-aunt, Blanche d'Alpuget, after whom she was named, was a pioneer woman journalist in Sydney and a patron of artists. Her father was a sports and feature writer and also news editor of the Sydney newspaper, The Sun. He was well known for his ferocious temper. The left-wing journalist and activist, John Pilger, recorded in a memoir that as a young reporter d'Alpuget, dissatisfied with a story Pilger had written, shouted at him with such vehemence Pilger fell to the floor in a faint.
d'Alpuget attended SCEGGS (Darlinghurst) and briefly Sydney University, before running away from home following a fight with her father. She worked at The Sun's rival newspaper, The Daily Mirror, then moved to Indonesia at the age of 22 with her first husband, Tony Pratt, whom she had married in 1965. She and Pratt have a son, Louis, an artist and award-winning sculptor, co-founder of the Sydney artists' colony, Mungo. While in Indonesia d'Alpuget worked in the Australian embassy's news and information bureau; later she was a volunteer worker in the Jakarta Central Museum, leading a team that re-catalogued the oriental ceramic collection of Chinese export ware. She was the world's youngest member of the famous, English-founded Oriental Ceramic Society. After spending four years in Indonesia d'Alpuget lived for a year in Malaysia. She travelled widely, and to remote areas, in both countries.
In 1973 she returned to Australia and became active in the women's movement. She began writing in 1974, inspired by her experiences in South East Asia. She has won a number of literary awards for both fiction and non-fiction, including, in 1987, the prestigious inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature[1]. She first met Bob Hawke in Jakarta, in 1970. They met again in 1976 when d'Alpuget interviewed him for a biography she was writing on Sir Richard Kirby. This meeting led to a long, sporadic love affair that culminated in their marriage in 1995. d'Alpuget and Pratt had divorced in 1986.
In 1995 she joined the board of Robert J Hawke & Associates, a business consultancy primarily focussed on China. For fifteen years d'Alpuget abandoned her career as a writer and traveled the world with her new husband, visiting not only capital cities but remote areas of China, Inner Mongolia, Moldova, Easter Island, Palau, Kazakhstan, the North West Frontier of Pakistan and the Antarctic peninsular. She returned to writing in 2008.
Her works include:
Her essays, Lust, that dealt with paedophilia, and On Longing, caused controversy.
Turtle Beach was made into a feature film in 1989 featuring Greta Scacchi and Jack Thompson.
All d'Alpuget's novels have been translated into other languages.
Asher Keddie played her in the 2010 multi-award winning telemovie, Hawke.
d'Alpuget's achievements include: