Simon Crean. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
The period before a leadership challenge is like Darwin's ''troppo'' season. The pressure and humidity become unbearable. People begin acting bizarrely, drinking too much, sweating profusely and operating heavy equipment well beyond their capabilities.
A sense of inevitability abounds, and yet everything feels mired in a horrid, soupy inertia. When, oh when will the rains come?
In this environment, a catalyst is often required. And in politics, the catalyst is usually a human one. Out of the swamp of suspense, a lone form staggers. Often, it is the last person you would expect. Reedily, he gives voice to what everybody has been thinking. He may offer himself as a leadership candidate, in which case he is first deafened by a chorus of derisive laughter and then trampled to death in a stampede of his own making.
These brave, foolhardy individuals know that history will not be kind to them. They are the canaries fluttering down a poisoned mine shaft, the bomb-dogs skittering blithely across no man's land.
In 2009, this heroic role was played by the former Howard government minister Kevin Andrews, who battled through the anti-Turnbull hysteria to the doors of the House of Representatives to announce that he would be seeking the Liberal leadership.
Once everybody had dabbed the tears of laughter from their eyes, the real contest began in earnest, an awkward three-cornered affair that spat out - to his own mild surprise, and that of many others - the current Opposition Leader.
Last February, when the 2012 Rudd/Gillard troppo season was just reaching its sultry, unbearable zenith, Victorian Labor MP Darren ''Who?'' Cheeseman broke from the pack and called on Julia Gillard to resign, triggering the first resurgent challenge of the Rudd forces.
A glance at Mr Cheeseman's website indicates that he went on to lead a productive life, lobbying for a full-time fire station for Torquay and otherwise serving his electorate with quiet industry as a backbencher, which one suspects he will remain while a certain redhead remains Labor leader.
(Will Mr Cheeseman recover and flourish? Is Australia even ready for a Prime Minister Cheeseman? I doubt it, and I should know, because I, too, have a surname that bars me from solemn office, and can thus join the Cocks and Shufflebottoms in that privileged crew who are actually entitled to point and laugh at each other, because it's our compensation for never being Chief Justice.)
And Mr Crean's own intervention, on Thursday, was a spectacular example of the genre.
He began by chiding Mr Rudd for his game-playing, then indicated he would nonetheless support Mr Rudd's reinstallation as prime minister, while allowing that there was a chance Mr Rudd was still a bit of a knucklehead, but that would be OK because Mr Crean planned to be there as deputy to keep him in hand, the only flaw in which plan was that Mr Rudd didn't want him as deputy. At this point, this observer wondered if Mr Crean was delivering some kind of complicated performance art piece in honour of his recent well-received Creative Australia policy.
Behind the scenes, pandemonium ensued, including a spirited hunt for the member for Lyons, the bearded man-mountain Dick Adams, who was a definite Rudd vote but had confounded his co-conspirators by disappearing to Ecuador overnight for a whips' conference.
Hours later, Ms Gillard emerged with an intimidatingly large posse for the now-traditional team fun-run down the south-eastern corridor from the PM's office to the caucus room.
(Surely this element needs some creative reworking? In future leadership spills, I would very much like to see the Gillard forces advance in half-crouched, finger-snapping formation, in the West Side Story manner. Apparently, Jenny Macklin has a nice singing voice, which might partially drown out Craig Emerson.)
Mr Crean, his sacrificial purpose spent, handed in his portfolios and retreated to the backbench.
It's sad for the arts sector, which spent several years waiting for the highly anticipated Peter Garrett to climb into his Sorry pyjamas and - having been disappointed on that front - found his replacement Mr Crean to be quite a good arts minister.
(The arts community should probably go out for a long and maudlin night on the tiles with the tertiary education community, which in Chris Bowen lost its umpteenth federal minister on Friday and must by now be wondering if it's something they've done.)
Such is the life of the political coalmine canary.
Who will commemorate them, these brave souls?
Perhaps somewhere, in a Building the Education Revolution of the future, a perilous piece of play equipment - an especially treacherous flying fox, maybe, or a shoddily constructed swing set - will carry a plaque immortalising them, these forgotten martyrs.
■ Annabel Crabb is the host of ABC TV's Kitchen Cabinet. She tweets as @annabelcrabb
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