Bob Hawke’s will confirms his children’s battler status while leaving Blanche a multi-millionaire

He spent the last half of his life, his biographer noted, lamenting a career-long absence from home and the breakdown of his first marriage, weeping publicly — and effectively — through confessions of having been a poor husband and father.

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He spent the last half of his life, his biographer noted, lamenting a career-long absence from home and the breakdown of his first marriage, weeping publicly — and effectively — through confessions of having been a poor husband and father.

But Bob Hawke has shown himself to have been a neglectful and thoughtless father to the end, leaving his three children one last final “kiss off” — an inheritance worth less than 5 per cent of his known fortune.

Bob and Hazel Hawke on holiday with their children Stephen, Sue and Ros.

Blanche d’Alpuget meanwhile, the long-term mistress who became Hawke’s second wife and sculptor of his legend — breaking his first wife Hazel’s heart in the process — will receive around 80 per cent ensuring her multi-millionaire status and a comfortable life and guaranteeing her only son Louis Pratt will become, within about two decades, a rich man.

Pratt, who sat front and centre at Hawke’s memorial service at the Opera House last month, is the real winner following revelations he was improbably given a cash sum — $750,000 — by Hawke upon his death.

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The amount is equivalent to the sum Hawke left his own flesh and blood offspring, Sue Pieters-Hawke, Steven Hawke and Rosslyn Dillon.

Does it sound unfair given the abandonment issues his children have battled with their entire lives?

Why yes it does.

Even the stingiest father, one might have imagined, would have left more to natural children from whom he was not estranged — as he and they all went to great pains to persuade the Australian public while Hawke was still alive — than to his lover’s son.

In a financial arrangement crafted separately to his final will, Hawke looks to have set aside $3 million for what executers might classify as “offspring”.

Hawke and his wife Blanche D'Alpuget in 2006. Picture: Patrick Riviere/Getty Images

That’s one fifth the value of the $15 million home he and d’Alpuget sold in Northbridge in the weeks prior to his death and does not include other investments and cash.

Hawke’s equine interests, this writer is informed, he had already sold off. The proceeds banked.

The sum, say insiders, was derived at initially because at one time Hawke planned to leave his children $1 million each. That pool was subsequently redivided to accommodate Pratt, the adult artist stepson who lived in the couple’s boat shed.

Hawke’s will bequeaths his entire remaining estate to his ardent torch bearer d’Alpuget, The New Daily reported last week.

Rosslyn, Ros as she is known, has become the unlikely hero in Hawke’s posthumous story.

The 58-year-old is the only one of his children contesting the will.

Unlike her siblings, Ros, who was relegated to a seat at the far end of the first row at her father’s Opera House memorial, declined the $750,000 payment offered by Hawke’s executers in May.

Ros knows well the price of being Hawke’s daughter. She knows $750k isn’t going to cover it.

The former prime minister with daughter Roslyn Dillon in 1985.

She famously battled heroin addiction as a teen — and had to suffer the ignominy of having
her father’s lover painfully rehash her experience of living in a drug den in one of the biographies she penned about Hawke — d’Alpuget profiting personally from Dillon’s national vilification.

Cast as the misfit, Dillon has struggled financially for decades but despite a broken marriage and many challenges, still managed to raise three children, one of whom, son David, former prime minister and noted sporting fan Hawke was happy to publicly celebrate after his grandson was selected to play representative rugby while studying at Canberra’s St Edmond’s College.

Unlike her sister Sue, who this writer once revealed had a physical clash with d’Alpuget at a Brisbane airport and who has courted the media after carving out a career as a writer as her mother Hazel’s biographer — Ros has always played her cards close to her chest.

As the only one of Hawke’s children to live in central Sydney — Pieters-Hawke lives in Hornsby and Steven in Western Australia — Ros knows well how costly it is to live in the Hawke family’s adopted city. The $750,000 would buy her a tidy house in Sydney’s far west — or in Canberra where her son still lives — far from d’Alpuget’s new $3 million apartment on Hyde Park, maybe that’s the hope.

Last week Hawke insiders said Hawke’s will leaves no doubt as to who had become the power in Hawke’s life in his declining years.

“He always allowed himself to be dominated by Blanche. How else do you explain his failure to provide for Hazel in her last years. She died in care in Hammondville in Sydney’s west — hardly a location befitting her former status. Hawke was love-struck by Blanche from day one. No one else mattered,” a close insider said.

Ms d'Alpuget and Hawke. Picture: Richard Dobson

Originally published as Bob Hawke’s will confirms his children’s battler status while leaving Blanche a multi-millionaire