Blanche d’Alpuget – novelist and wife of former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke – talks to Juliet Rieden about her latest book, men, and how love has grown sweeter with age.
Every weekday around 9.20am Blanche d’Alpuget climbs into her car, drives seven minutes down the road from the home she shares with husband and former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and sits alone in “an ugly little flat”.
“I’m completely locked away. I have a blank wall in front of me with lots of notes on it. I won’t answer phone calls unless I can see it’s somebody important and every hour I get up and do a few minutes of stretches,” she reveals.
This is Blanche’s writing studio where for a minimum of four hours, five days a week, for some years now, she’s been delving into a past life. It’s a world of lusty, fascinating, powerful men meeting their match in an independent fun-loving woman; a mighty nation with a smart, egotistic leader who falls head over heels in love with an alpha female loaded with charm. Sound familiar?
No, Blanche is not writing her autobiography. The five-part rollicking tale of sex and power she has been conjuring, is not about Bob and Blanche, it’s about King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine – although yes, between the lines, there is a whiff, a dash and a dot of the well-known former politician, who turns 90 this year.
This is Blanche’s me-time, when she indulges her first love, writing, while Bob puts his feet up at home. “I’ve been interested in the 12th century since I was a kid. In my 20s I started, for no good reason that I can understand, collecting little books about pharmacopoeias, bestiaries, weaponries, clothing, manners, mores, etc. There was a wonderful lane in Sydney which has now vanished called Rowe Street and it had a bookshop with all of these funny little books. You can’t get them now and they’re not even in libraries. Fortunately, I kept them.”
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