Thirty-six hours before Blanche took her last breath, I negotiated the plastic tubes and mask she wore over a still beautiful face and gave her one final kiss. I wasn’t sure, then, if it was a goodbye but I knew it would be close.

Was she really, as the Sydney Morning Herald described her in an appreciation for Hazel Hawke, just “some lipsticked wraith”, a prowling blonde, the avatar for the other woman?

It was a cruel fate for a woman who was so pivotal in Australian literature and politics. It wasn’t easy to disrupt Blanche but the breadth of animosity she encountered after her affair with Bob Hawke became public in late 1994 was like nothing she’d ever experienced.

About 30 years after she was photographed with Hawke at Sir Richard Kirby’s holiday house, she told me: “I was very shocked and distressed by the trolling and abuse … as opposed to simple literary criticism. I developed a great contempt, distrust and loathing of journalists.”

Blanche first blew into my orbit in a tornado of Doris Day hair........

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