The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library
Blanche is a biographer, novelist and essayist and has won a number
of awards, both for fiction and non-fiction, including, in 1987, the
prestigious inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature.
Blanche has been Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Australian Society
of Authors, a board member of the A.C.T. Arts Advisory Council, the
Copyright Agency Limited, and the Australian Film Commission. Austcare
named her Goodwill Ambassador in 1992, a post which she filled until
1995, writing and speaking about the plight of refugees from Indochina,
the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan
In 1995 she joined the board of Robert J L Hawke and Associates, a
business consultancy focussed on, but not restricted to, working in
China. In Sydney she is the Patron of Inala, a Rudolph-Steiner inspired
school and community for children and adults with severe disabilities.
As an Australian novelist and acclaimed biographer her works include
Mediator: a biography of Sir Richard Kirby (1977); Monkeys in the dark
(1980); Turtle Beach (1981) which won the Age book award in 1981; Robert
J Hawke:a biography (1982);Winter in Jerusalem (1986) and White Eye
(1993). Turtle Beach became a feature film in 1992 featuring Greta
Scacchi and Jack Thompson and all her novels have been translated into
other languages.
