Paws for thought: artist captures Kevin Rudd on long knight of reflection

After a lengthy delay, a reflective Kevin Rudd, without ‘a big head’, will now look into the corridors of Parliament House for perpetuity through his official prime ministerial portrait.

Artist Ralph Heimans with Kevin and Therese Rudd at the unveiling of the ex-prime minister’s official portrait. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

After a lengthy delay, a reflective Kevin Rudd, without “a big head”, will now look into the corridors of Parliament House for perpetuity through his official prime ministerial portrait, grateful the artist has captured a “reflective and thoughtful” moment.

The former prime minister’s portrait, in his study complete with chess-playing family cat, by London-based Australian “artist to the royals” Ralph Heimans, joins those of later prime ministers Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, who have both had portraits hung in Parliament House.

But as someone at the unveiling joked about his reputation for being demanding, the portrait was deliberately unlike those of other PMs and set Dr Rudd in the broad setting of his office with a large backdrop designed to restrict the size of his “noggin”.

Heimans is renowned for not concentrating on the head of the subject and was chosen deliberately for this reason.

“What appealed to me was not having a huge noggin in a painting as people sometimes do and having something much smaller with a more interesting set of surroundings,” Dr Rudd said. “I am quite in favour of denogginising.”

When asked by The Australian about the white queen on the chess board being on the attack against the king, potentially one move from checkmate, a laughing Dr Rudd said that was “being excessively analytical, which is what I would expect from The Australian”.

As a former prime minister and as the ambassador to the US, he warned that Australia was in a region in which the risks of crisis, conflict and war were not a ­“theory” but “real”.

Dr Rudd said the challenges and risks facing Anthony Albanese and the Labor government are greater than the risks he faced during the global financial crisis and from climate change a decade ago.

He said the challenges his government faced were “really hard” to deal with but when he looked at the day-to-day challenges now, as well as the deep fundamental challenges to society from the risk of war, accelerating climate change and artificial intelligence, today was worse.

Dr Rudd’s official portrait. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Addressing Mr Albanese, Dr Rudd said: “PM, you have the harder job.”

He also said the challenges were not just towards Australia but all democracies trying to ­defend the “delicate flower” of freedom.

While declaring he did not wish to be drawn into the partisan debate over the referendum on the Indigenous voice to par­liament, Dr Rudd referred to his ­own experience with the National Apology to the Stolen Generations.

“When they said the Apology would be a problem for the nation and unleash a torrent of litigation from Indigenous communities across the country and set the process of reconciliation backwards and not forwards, we proved them wrong,” he said.

“We brought the people of our country together, black and white, Aboriginal and non-­Aboriginal; we began a process, a hard process, for both sides of politics of closing the gap between Indigenous and other communities,” he said.

“It is not my place to wade into the politics of this referendum, but I would simply reflect on this: fears were raised 15 years ago about why we should not do this thing called the Apology. Other fears are being raised today.

“I would simply ask all Australians to reflect on whether the fundamentals of those fears are justified or not.

“The arc of history bends slowly towards justice,” he said.