KEY POINTS:
A week, as the saying goes, is a long time in politics. Seven days ago, John Winston Howard was still a titan of Australian politics, the head of one of the longest and most successful governments in the nation's history.
On Thursday, he was showing his Labor usurper, Kevin Rudd, through The Lodge, the official Canberra home of Australia's political leaders. Just a few minutes down the road, Howard's former underlings were fighting for his crown. For Rudd, and for Brendan Nelson, who has assumed leadership of the Liberal Party and of the new parliamentary Opposition, Howard's end is a reminder that politics is cruel.
On Monday, all going to plan, Rudd and his ministers-elect will be sworn in as Australia's new government with an immediate life span of three years. There are no guarantees beyond that, and Rudd has put his team on notice that survival will depend on rigidly monitored performance.
History and the scale of Labor's victory suggests that Rudd will win a second term - even the ill-fated Labor government of Gough Whitlam managed a second victory in the 1970s - but if there is any faltering or too many mistakes, the knives will be out within and without the party.
On the other side of the House, Nelson will be a man looking over his shoulder.
The other lesson of Australian political history is that after a giant falls, his party room becomes a charnel house. Remove the head, and the body tears at itself.
This is one of those seminal moments in Canberra. Howard has departed after reshaping the nation in his image. Rudd intends to change it again. And Nelson will be struggling to create a new Liberalism that will learn from Howard's mistakes and to develop policies that will leapfrog the party back into power.
From this, a new Australia will emerge, shaped to its development as an upper-middle range power in a region dominated by China, beset by environmental challenges, and striving to keep pace with new human and technological directions.
Howard was preoccupied with national security and streamlining the economy without fully appreciating the changes that were overtaking it.
The Howard years missed the greater events swirling around Australia. He ignored - or denied - climate change and the vast environmental problems of his own fragile continent until popular sentiment forced them upon him.
His government recognised other waves of change thundering down upon it - the ageing population, rapidly emerging shortages of crucial skills, overloaded health systems - but failed to adequately address them.
In the suburbs, voters could see what was happening. They could also see that hubris had cemented Howard to power and that even if he could be dislodged his most likely successors were shaped in a too-familiar mould.
Rudd succeeded because he was a viable alternative and because he articulated a view of the future that many Australians shared.
But the new Prime Minister knows that he has to deliver. This will require not only rhetoric but tight discipline, and flexibility within an acceptable band to negotiate policy through a Senate likely to be controlled by the Greens. Achieve this and Rudd should be able to power through the next election in 2010 and, possibly, into a third or even fourth term. History and John Howard have shown that forming a fifth government is stretching ambition too far.
Immediately, Rudd only needs to look at Howard's fate to recognise the dangers facing his own. Until Rudd succeeded two-time election loser Kim Beazley as Labor leader, Howard seemed invincible. Even as polls consistently tracked his eclipse, analysts and commentators would not predict his demise: despite all evidence to the contrary, Howard's mystique was such that few could really believe he was doomed.
His party suffered for it. Heir apparent and former Treasurer Peter Costello could not muster the numbers to topple him and lacked the fortitude for a challenge. Within the party, Howard's authority was absolute.
Yet within days of his defeat, the rush away from his political corpse has become a stampede.
Senior Liberals have been telling reporters of their attempts to make Howard see sense, of the need for him to go, of the absolute necessity for new policies.
Health Minister Tony Abbott, a staunch Howard loyalist, withdrew from the leadership contest because he knew the party wanted to distance itself from the Howard years.
Others blamed defeat on Howard's "egomania" and ideological inflexibility: refusal to say "sorry" to Aborigines or to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change.
Senior Liberals have further said they vainly tried to moderate WorkChoices, the industrial laws that stripped workers of many rights and protections and which played a pivotal role in bringing down Howard.
Malcolm Turnbull, the former Environment Minister who urged Howard to ratify Kyoto, personified the rush to bury his former boss.
Standing unsuccessfully as leader on Thursday, Turnbull said history would judge that Howard stayed too long and should have apologised to indigenous Australia. "I think John got himself into, you know, into a bit of a semantic tangle there."
Nelson beat Turnbull for the leadership because he is a more experienced parliamentarian, has a less abrasive and more measured style, has an extensive and well-developed support network among fellow MPs, and because Turnbull is considered by many to be too self-serving.
But the former defence minister has inherited a hydra. He has hewed down two challengers - Turnbull and Abbott - but both will almost certainly sprout and strike again when they believe he is vulnerable.
Others will be watching and waiting. Former Liberal leader John Hewson has even speculated that Costello will be lurking on the backbenches, biding his time for a challenge.
History points to carnage. Liberal giant Sir Robert Menzies' 17 successive years in power was followed by four leaders in six years. His immediate and besieged successor, Harold Holt, drowned in 1967; John McEwan lasted 22 days; John Gorton scraped through the 1969 election but was ousted by Billy McMahon, who in turn was felled by Gough Whitlam's Labor landslide in 1972.
After Whitlam's nemesis, Malcolm Fraser, was beaten by Bob Hawke in 1983, the Liberals were torn by internecine warfare that helped Labor remain in power until 1996: bitter warfare between Howard and Andrew Peacock, the rise and fall of Hewson and Alexander Downer (later Howard's foreign minister), and finally the resurrection of Howard as leader and - ultimately - Australia's second longest-serving prime minister.
This, and the challengers in the wings, suggests Nelson's overriding priority will be his own survival but failure to impose discipline and develop policy will contribute to instability and potential challenge.
With a margin of only three votes over Turnbull, there is no doubt that Nelson will be struggling to maintain his ascendancy.
One day into the job, he is already having to weave a delicate path. He has supported Rudd's intention to ratify Kyoto, because the weight of public opinion demands this, because Turnbull has made his support very clear and because the party accepts the political wisdom of ratification.
But industrial law and Howard's WorkChoices legislation is a minefield.
Senior Liberals such as former employment and workplace relations minister Joe Hockey have argued that Labor's victory has given Rudd a mandate to dump the laws.
Others - including Liberal Senate Leader Nick Minchin, who will control an Upper House majority until next June - deny the mandate and want to keep the laws intact.
Nelson has prevaricated, trying to find a middle line.
He has been less equivocal on the question of an apology to the "stolen generation" of Aborigines forcibly removed as children from their parents.
While Rudd promised an apology without committing to form or timing, and Turnbull has supported a formal "sorry", Nelson has adopted Howard's line that no apology is necessary.
This is all good news for Rudd. If the Liberals are consumed by intestinal carnage, the job of installing his agenda becomes that much easier.
25 facts about PM Kevin Rudd
1 He grew up on a dairy farm in south-eastern Queensland. His father, Bernie, was a member of the Conservative Country Party.
2 His father died in 1969 after a car crash, leaving Rudd, 11, his mother and siblings reliant on the charity of relatives and neighbours. The experience shaped his socialist leanings.
3 He joined the Labor Party at 16. At school he was a straight A student.
4 After finishing as dux of his school, he studied Asian politics and Chinese at the Australian National University in Canberra.
5 He joined the diplomatic service in the early 1980s and was posted to Stockholm and Beijing.
6 In 1988, Rudd became a senior bureaucrat in the Queensland Labor government, where he earned the nickname "Dr Death" for presiding over public sector reforms.
7 His wife of 26 years, Therese Rein, is a self-made millionaire who built an international job-finding business. She will be the first wife of an Australian prime minister to keep her maiden name and be a working wife.
8 They have three children: Nick, Marcus and Jessica.
9 He took over as Labor Party leader last December, inheriting a demoralised party split by bitter factional divisions.
10 His nicknames range from Pixie, Tintin, the Milky Bar Kid and Harry Potter.
11 His older brother, Greg, married a former exotic dancer from Botswana - he met her in a strip club in Brisbane.
12 Rudd is a committed Christian and a regular church-goer.
13 Footage of Rudd eating his own earwax during a parliamentary debate became a YouTube sensation.
14 He has promised to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq by mid-2008.
15 At the Apec summit in Sydney in September, he upstaged Prime Minister John Howard by welcoming Chinese President Hu Jintao in Mandarin.
16 A pre-election poll found that twice as many voters wanted to see a nude Kevin Rudd than a naked John Howard.
17 Body language expert Allan Pease says he is stiff - "If he was in Thunderbirds, he wouldn't need strings".
18 A YouTube video satirising Rudd as Chairman Mao won a tongue-in-cheek political film-making competition organised by the ABC.
19 His deputy, Julia Gillard, is Australia's first woman deputy prime minister.
20 Dame Edna Everage, aka comedian Barry Humphries, asked on stage: "Do we want a prime minister who looks like a dentist?"
21 He claims to have been drunk only twice in his life: on his 35th birthday and during a visit to a New York lap dancing club in 2003.
22 He has a half-Vietnamese nephew, Van Thanh Rudd, who is an artist.
23 A Pulitzer-prize winning American historian has compared Rudd with US presidential hopeful Barack Obama, saying they represent new hope and generational change.
24 Disaffected former Labor MP Brian Courtice said during the election campaign that Rudd "couldn't go three rounds with Winnie the Pooh". 25 On a visit to his old high school in Queensland, he said fellow old boy and treasurer-to-be, Wayne Swan, was "very, very cool", before confessing: "I was very, very not."