The mystery of Julia Gillard's determination

Mary Delahunty doesn't pretend to be ''objective'' in any sense in her thoughtful and very human observations of Australia's first female prime minister. A Walkley Award-winning ABC journalist, Delahunty was an education and arts minister in Victoria's last Labor government. She's an insider, although she never seemed entirely comfortable with the game of politics even when she was playing it.

She brings all her humanity, curiosity and doubt to this portrait of the last year and final days of Julia Gillard's three tumultuous years in office. What intrigued her most was ''how she got out of bed every morning, put on her lipstick and political armour, and did it all again day after day''.

Delahunty had enviable access to the Prime Minister's office in the months before Gillard was defeated by Kevin Rudd on June 26, 2013. There are lots of shared peppermint teas, encouraging asides, and insights from Gillard's staff as she just kept going, determined to focus on policy as the best way to fend off her two enemies - Rudd and then Opposition leader Tony Abbott.

Delahunty is a Gillard admirer, though not a cheerleader. Mostly, she is interested in the intersection of the personal and the political and how Gillard coped with the ''sexism that poured without restraint'' after she deposed Rudd in 2010.

There is a fascinating observation at the state funeral of the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, Joan Child, in March 2013. The election date had been announced, immediately overshadowed by the arrest of Craig Thomson. Rudd supporters were leaking against her again and the media were relishing a ''government in chaos''. This was just months after radio broadcaster Alan Jones said her father had ''died of shame'' because of his daughter's lies, and a Perth radio host asked her about her partner's sexuality. Delahunty watched Gillard at the funeral, and afterwards.

''I thought she was shrinking,'' she writes. ''It was more than losing weight. It was a form of physical retreat. Yes she was there, all day, every day, we saw her working, speaking, moving. But she seemed to be closing away something of herself, holding on to what had not yet been stolen from her. Her enemies said JuLiar and they saw witch, bitch, liar, but they did not see her. She was not there.''

What has our politics become, Delahunty asks. What do we expect of our politicians, and of Gillard in particular? She grapples with how out of the mould Gillard truly was and the legitimacy she was never afforded.

''I always thought when I stepped up to the prime minister[ship] - of course the circumstances of how I got there have cast some pall - but I've thought on the questions of leadership,'' Gillard tells the author.

''With a man it starts with, 'what sort of leader will he be?' With me it started with, 'can she lead?' It's a subtle but quite a profound difference.''

Delahunty understands well that politics is tough and unforgiving, but it's the lack of decency that offends her most. This was a time - and it hasn't stopped - when there were no boundaries, when nothing was off limits. Gillard keeps going, introducing Disability Care, negotiating the Gonski school reforms, fending off the farcical non-challenge of Rudd in March, and then calling a spill in June in which her strongest supporters abandoned her for the good of the party.

Delahunty is scornful of Rudd's disingenuousness, and on that last day Gillard acknowledges that all this trauma had nothing to do with content. ''It's been all about ego and personalities.'' Yet Delahunty picks up something of Gillard's weaknesses, too, her inability to tell a story a nation could hear and understand.

Today, federal politics has reverted to the way it was - a middle-aged male prime minister and opposition leader, a male governor-general, and only one woman in Abbott's cabinet. Gillard's prime ministership seems so long ago, and what worries Delahunty in this intimate and thoughtful book is that there seems to be a determination to erase Gillard, as though she was a mistake, a failed experiment, airbrushed from our history.

Gay Alcorn is a former editor of The Sunday Age.