Dr Sue Kirby (left), 81, a retired health-services researcher, and author Blanche d’Alpuget, 81, met as eight-year-olds. It was partly because of Sue’s father that Blanche and former PM Bob Hawke got together.

Blanche: I remember seeing Sue in the classroom [at SCEGGS in Sydney’s Darlinghurst] and being immediately drawn to her. She had a sparkle. The school was quite strict and we were naughty together. There was no chance either of us would ever be a prefect.

We lost touch but met up again when I moved from Jakarta to Canberra in the mid-1970s with Tony [Pratt, d’Alpuget’s diplomat first husband]. It was all dinner parties and visiting each ­other’s houses, and Sue was still wild. She was statuesque and it was the days of tight jeans and high heels. At one of the parties, a man who wasn’t very tall opened the door and said, “Hello, I’m so-and-so.” She said, “Hello, I’m Sue” and swung her leg straight onto his shoulder so he was staring at her crotch.

We both had sons around the same age and we were both in increasingly unhappy marriages and talked about that a great deal. It was Sue who introduced me to the gym – I still go – and Mahikari, a Japanese spiritual movement. We both got bored with it, but it set me on a lifelong spiritual search. Not Sue. She’s a scientist, a rationalist. Probably thinks I’m batty.

Back then, she and her first husband were so broke she was going to apply for a job as a checkout chick. I persuaded her to sit the public-service exam. She went on to greater things.

Her father was Richard Kirby, a judge who’d been head of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. I agreed to write a biography of him [published in 1977]. For ­research, I had to go to Melbourne to interview Bob Hawke, who had appeared before Dickie for years as the ACTU advocate.

I’d already met Bob in Jakarta in 1970 and he took a shine to me, although I didn’t see him the same way. He came back a year later and, at one of our parties, he bowled up and ­announced loudly, “I’d like to f--- you.” Everyone pretended nothing had been said. It was so embarrassing. But when we met again in Melbourne in 1976, we quickly became lovers. Sue knew about our affair.

Over the years, I lost touch with her. She was living in Austinmer [south of Sydney] and I was living with Bob all over the world. We’ve now both been widowed: Sue lost her second husband, Jack [Goldring], in 2009 and Bob died in May 2019. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of February 2020 and Sue got back in touch. I’ve stayed at her place. I was frightfully impressed that she gets up at 5am every morning and goes swimming, rain, hail or shine, apocalypse or World War III.

‘[Sue] gets up at 5am every morning and goes swimming, rain, hail or shine, apocalypse or World War III.’

Blanche d’Alpuget

She’s very physically brave. She invited me to go to Papua last year to swim with whale sharks. She’s still vivacious and out there. She decided Jack looked like a wombat, so the house is full of wombats: leather, wooden, porcelain. And all her clothes are in shades of purple, even her glasses and, at one stage, her hair. Sue says it’s what happens to old hippies: “As the oestrogen levels go down, the love of purple increases.” Ours is a playful friendship with no rough edges. We can tell each other anything. Always could.

Sue: Blanche stood out at school, even at eight. She was blonde, with a big plait over her shoulder and those puffy lips. She was boisterous and very striking. We had to write an essay about the Harbour Bridge. The rest of us all wrote things like, “The Harbour Bridge is 3770 feet long, blah blah blah.” Blanche wrote: “There it stands. Huge and gaunt.”

We’re the same age, but she doesn’t look 81 and I do. She always looks immaculate. She cares about her appearance. Her father always introduced her as, “My beautiful daughter, Blanche.” She said that was a bugger because if he’d said, “My wonderfully intelligent daughter, Blanche,” she might have grown up differently. She felt she had to be beautiful to get her ­father’s approval. And, of course, she’s used to people noticing her – and they still do.

It annoys me that people often underrate her. She’s still “the other woman”, who “stole” Bob from [his first wife] Hazel. She got all the blame; Bob could do no wrong. I hear people say, “Oh she’s just a bimbo” and I get so angry: she’s a very successful writer with an incredible life. [A biography, Fridays With Blanche, by Derek Rielly, will be published on November 4.]

I suppose, indirectly, her relationship with Bob was because of my family. Their paths crossed again when she was writing Dad’s ­biography. It went from there. I often babysat her son, Louis, when she was off with Bob.

She had to put up with a lot of uncertainty. When he first asked her to marry him, back in 1978 [Hawke was then leader of the ACTU, president of the ALP and still married to Hazel], he asked his advisers what it would mean for his popularity. They said it would cost him a few points. [The proposal was ­rescinded and the pair didn’t marry until 1995, when Hawke was no longer PM.]

The unhappiest I’ve seen her was in Canberra when her marriage to Tony was failing, and then waiting around for Bob. It was a long, drawn-out ordeal, on again, off again. We were very ­intimate and told each other stuff we wouldn’t tell anyone else. We could trust each other and that trust has continued.

‘Blanche has always been great fun … She always seems happy whenever you meet her but she’s obviously had deep, dark days.’

Sue Kirby

Blanche has always been great fun, entertaining and intelligent. On our trip last year, she charmed the pants off everybody. She always seems happy whenever you meet her but she’s obviously had deep, dark days; you don’t see her at those times. She’s very direct. In Papua, I hadn’t done my hair and we were waiting to get on the boat and she said, “You look very disrespectful.” She wanted me to lift my game.

Blanche has a very rich spiritual life; I don’t. We were talking the other day about death, our imminent deaths, because we’re so old, and she said, “Well, it’s different for me, Susie, because I think things will go on after my death … but you don’t.” I think she felt sorry for me.

twoofus@goodweekend.com.au

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