Dunstan’s secret affair with Judith Pugh
The day after Dunstan and his estranged wife sold their home, he began an affair almost immediately with Judith Pugh, the partner of one of Australia’s best portrait artists.
The day after Don Dunstan and his estranged wife Gretel sold their home, the South Australian premier began one of many torrid and hitherto secret affairs, this one with the partner of one of Australia’s best portrait artists.
Judith Pugh, the much younger de facto partner of artist Clifton Pugh, himself married to another woman, met Dunstan at a Writers Week function in 1972.
Clifton Pugh, who would win the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Gough Whitlam that still hangs in Parliament House, had driven with Judith Pugh from Melbourne to Adelaide to meet Dunstan, whose portrait he had arranged to paint. Dunstan was instantly smitten with Judith, who arrived at the Writers Week function in a dress with a plunging neckline exposing much of her chest, on which her partner had painted ribbons and butterflies.
MORE: Inquirer; Don’s seriously wild ride
Dunstan started an affair with Judith almost immediately. Dunstan would ring her up to four times a day, once bursting into tears over the phone when a dinner party dish he prepared turned out to be inedible.
In a bracing insight into the swinging 1970s, Dunstan biographer Angela Woollacott reveals how Judith became pregnant but was unsure as to the paternity of the child, prompting the following resolution: “Clif realised that Dunstan’s political image was at stake, so he proposed a sequence of events that would make the situation respectable: he would divorce his legal wife and marry Judith; Judith would have the baby; she and Clif would divorce; then she and Don would marry.”
This convoluted arrangement was never implemented; sadly, Judith miscarried at seven months, but through all this Dunstan and the Pughs remained friends, even holidaying together at Port Willunga the following summer.
Diversity not on agenda in leftist echo chambers
The fact is there is more genuine political debate on Sky News in Australia and Fox News in the US than there is on the ABC or at the various taxpayer-funded literary festivals in Australia.
Seething disdain for Israel goes right to the top at unis
Universities are not helplessly beset by mutant radical groups espousing anti-Semitism. They themselves subscribe to that anti-Semitism, albeit without the loudspeakers.