What could be a more fitting farewell for one who had lived such an eclectic, exotic, diverse and quintessentially Australian life than this?
On Thursday afternoon at the North Bondi Surf Life Saving Club, we gathered 80 strong to farewell our Blanche d’Alpuget, who died last month aged 82, a great literary identity in her own right and the second wife of former prime minister Bob Hawke.
Outside, the sun shone brilliantly upon caterwauling seagulls and surfers doing their stuff, while the sun-bakers baked, and gleaming youths kicked a ball about trying to impress scantily clad young women who laughed gaily at their antics. Any more iconically Australian a scene than this as a backdrop to proceedings and it would have been a meat pie with sauce.
Inside in the upstairs pavilion was gathered everyone from her son Louis Pratt and daughter-in-law Brianna Roberts, to a Roman Catholic priest in full regalia; a man in a kilt fully armed with a set of bagpipes and not afraid to use them; two young men who looked like rock stars, and a three-year-old girl in a pink fairy dress.
Among the mourners was Bob Hawke’s eldest daughter Sue Pieters-Hawke; federal Minister for the Arts Tony Burke; the journalist Leigh Sales; Graham Richardson’s widow Amanda; Blanche’s biographer Derek Rielly, and her oldest friend from their days together at SCEGGS Darlinghurst, 75 years ago, Susan Kirby. The only people dressed formally were very formal indeed, two dark-suited gentlemen who proved to be acting Chinese Consul General Chunsheng Wang, representing China’s ambassador to Australia Liu Jinsong, and Vice Consul Chenhao Yang.
Yes, that morning there had been a few tears when the curtain had closed on her coffin at a private ceremony at the Lotus Pavilion of Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium. Upon her coffin – painted according to her strict instruction, “red on the inside to represent the colour of life, blue and white on exterior, blue for the sky, and white for spirit” – had been taped a letter from Hawke’s youngest daughter, Ros, with words unknown. In short order, the mourners knew, her ashes would find their place in a niche in the wall right beside that of Hawke. Deeply moving, all of it.
But this occasion was far more celebratory of a life colourfully lived.
Tony Burke put it well: “Blanche was proof the sharpest of minds together with an innate sense of joy and fun, could all be housed within the same kind person.”
And for this farewell, it was just as Sue Pieters-Hawke said it was: “Blanche was a princess to the last, and this was her royal send-off, Australian style.”
In keeping with the Australianness of the whole thing, here the formalities were closer to informalities, with no more than very brief speeches.
“One of my earliest memories as a child,” said her son, “is of falling asleep listening to the sound of my parents having parties. My parents always liked to entertain. So it feels very fitting that we should celebrate Mum this way today.”
Her daughter-in-law Brianna told of Blanche once being in a plane crash that hit the drink in the waters of the Whitsundays, with urgent orders from the plane’s captain to “abandon ship” only for Blanche to insist on gathering her handbag first before stepping delicately out onto the wing. The gathering laughed, knowingly.
“One of the things I most admired about Blanche,” Brianna said, “was the utter fearlessness with which she lived her life. She saw fear as a choice, and a rather silly one at that. The result was a fantastically full life, which I think is a challenge to all of us.”
Amen to that.
And now apologies from Julia Gillard are read just before a message is enunciated in absentia from the actor Miriam Margolyes, which also hits the spot: “Yes, she was beautiful and knew it and enjoyed it. But it was the inner tenderness which illuminated her whole being. That radiance survived even the death of Bob Hawke, the love of her life. It was absolutely a love affair; we were all affected by such power and animal relish. When Blanche spoke of Bob, her gaze went to another place, and you knew that Amor Vincit Omnia even Death … she continued to be Blanche, showing endless kindness, interest in other people, a readiness to laugh, a joy in connection. She was witty in conversation, brilliant in analysis, in writing, in observing.”
Her biographer Derek Rielly closed the brief proceedings noting that Blanche had once pointed out a passage she had penned in an essay, On Longing, where she wrote: We know that the game is stacked – but what a delight to play it wild and free like Cleopatra, queen of gamblers, convinced that immortality awaited her.”
Blanche, he said, lived just like that: “Death, Blanche believed, is a wonderful experience. Getting born is difficult, dying is difficult and death is bliss, she said. You go from the Palace of the Child, back to the empire of the spirit.”
Courtesy of Rielly, there is just time left for Blanche to give one last request to the band, the Misfits, here for the occasion. For, yes, she had wanted the band to play the Black American spiritual about the Last Judgement, with its lyrics straight out of Revelation:
“Oh, when the sun refuses to shine,
“Oh, when the moon turns red with blood,
“Oh, when the trumpet sounds its call”
“So,” Rielly finishes, “without further ado, take it away…”
They took it away.
The band played on.
The sun shone on.
The surfies surfed on.
The youths gleamed on.
The little girl in the pink fairy dress – Blanche’s only granddaughter, Sienna – pranced on.
And Blanche was gone.
Vale, dear Blanche. It was a fair farewell.
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Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X.From our partners
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