The king is dead. Long live the queen.

Australia has its first female Prime Minister.

I happened to be sitting in a café when it happened. There were no TVs or radios or laptops about. I found out because friends had been texting during the morning, keeping each other appraised of the latest we’d heard.

I felt like I should stand up and make an announcement: People, we have a new Prime Minister. We have our first woman Prime Minister.

(I didn’t of course. I just stared about, trying to read the faces around me, wondering if they knew.)

Julia Gillard seems to be an incredibly competent person. She’s handled several portfolios at once. Her electorate seems happy with her representation. When she was acting prime minister (which was quite often) they say she got through the paperwork like nobody’s business.

She deals with the media calmly. In fact she kept them well in their place at her press conference, no easy feat, making them wait their turn to ask a question.

She communicates her intentions very clearly and her statements are informative.

Importantly she does not conform to many of our society’s conservative expectations of womanhood or of politicians.

She is not married. She does not have children. She is not religious.

I am sorry that her leadership came about this way – impatient factional powerbrokers bowing to the polls and buying a little into the Opposition’s frenetic rhetoric about an electorate who would not/ could not (sorry, that’s a bit Green Eggs and Ham) support the outgoing leader, Kevin Rudd.

I think they underestimated people’s ability to be patient. I know big things take time. I can wait to see where a leader will take us.

It’s a bit like an emergency Ceasarean section. It’s not the birth that was planned - no transition period, not a lot of choice for the main participants. But it’s the one that happened.

And now here we are. Suddenly we have our first female Prime Minister.

But she’s no innocent babe. She’s an old hand at this already. Leadership is just the next logical step, the mantle that was inevitably her due.

I'm curious to see what she will do differently; whether things will move forward with respect to matters like mental health, paid parental leave, environmental issues, genuine consultation with other parties and representatives. I'd like to think so.

Enough gushing from me now. I wanted to give an emotional response. There will be plenty of others today from more political and intellectual viewpoints, many of which I’m looking forward to reading.

Politics has a profoundly emotional impact on J and on me. It’s one of the reasons we first got together.

We both cried (yes, really) as we watched Kevin Rudd give his farewell speech. And it felt good to be standing shoulder to shoulder again.

Flo