Penny Wong likes to be ready. She overprepares for press conferences. She’s been known to ring mid-level DFAT staff to discuss ministerial submissions, such is her appetite for detail. So it was with extreme irritation that as she was getting ready for the meeting of her career, she was battling an annoying, awkward cough.

It was December 2022. Five months earlier she had shaken hands with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in the first face-to-face talk between the countries’ foreign ministers in almost three years. That breakthrough had laid the ground for a half-hour meeting between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 in Bali in November.