“Are you kidding?”: Blanche d’Alpuget responds to Lisa Wilkinson’s controversial question
Six months after the death of Bob Hawke, his wife of nearly 25 years Blanche d’Alpuget has sat down with The Sunday Project’s Lisa Wilkinson to address the controversies surrounding their relationship.
In an interview aired on Sunday, d’Alpuget said she did not feel guilty about how her relationship with the Labor veteran began.
Hawke, Australia’s third longest-serving prime minister, faced public criticism after divorcing his wife of 38 years Hazel in 1994 and marrying d’Alpuget the following year. He was the first PM in Australian history to divorce.
Wilkinson asked d’Alpuget if the late politician ever felt guilt about having an affair.
“Do you think Bob had a problem with the fact that this relationship had begun?” Wilkinson asked.
“Are you kidding?” d’Alpuget replied laughing. “He was perpetually unfaithful. He loved Hazel and he was perpetually unfaithful.”
When asked if d’Alpuget herself felt any guilt for Hazel, who stood by Hawke throughout his re-election campaign despite his affair.
“Did you feel guilty about the role that Hazel was playing at that point, she was publicly the first lady, she was also keeping the home fires burning with the kids, how hard was that for you to reconcile?” Wilkinson asked.
“Look, it wasn’t an issue because Bob was not a faithful husband, so I didn’t feel I was doing anything bad,” d’Alpuget said.
Hazel Hawke, who came public with her Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2003, died aged 83 in 2013.
“I think there was a mood in Australia around the time that we discovered that Hazel had dementia, I think there was a feeling that Hazel got the worst of Bob and you got the best of Bob, do you think that’s a fair assessment?” Wilkinson asked.
“No, because her time as the wife of the prime minister was absolutely wonderful for her, he wasn’t drinking, she had all of the liberty and the restrictions of being the prime minister’s wife but all the good things she was able to do, socially, for society and herself,” d’Alpuget said.
In another interview with The Sydney Morning Herald published on Saturday, d’Alpuget said their affair dated back to 1976. She said she then realised Hawke was “having affairs with women all over the country, that his love life was a kind of free-wheeling, decentralised harem, with four or five favourites and a shoe-sale queue of one-night stands”.
When asked whether Hawke was faithful to her, d’Alpuget said, “I asked him about that once towards the end, and he swore to me that he was.”
Today, the 75-year-old said she was getting used to life without her husband but was touched by the support from Australian people.
“People would come into supermarkets and I’d be trying to buy cauliflower and someone would come up and go, ‘I just wanted to say’, and I’d cry on the cauliflower,” said d’Alpuget.
She said she wanted Hawke to be remembered as “a man who loved his country and did his best to make it better”.