Guy Rundle writes:

Whatever Tony Abbott brings himself to say in the coming hours and days, one truth above all will remain: that the sort of Australia he and his ilk wanted preserved, deferential, limited and grounded in conservative fantasy was forever put beyond possibility by the Whitlam revolution. That did not happen everywhere else, not nearly. If what we thrill to in the memory is the bearing, the audacity, the wit, what we should also remember is the root-and-branch reconstruction of our institutions, the battle to open up opportunity, to go to war against received notions of what a white imperial outpost, a two-century improvisation, could and should be. To write this from a motel in Colorado, where the waitress at the truck stop next door earns $2.50 an hour plus tips, and the battle is to stop an amendment that would criminalise all abortion, is to remember that progress can be measured by the battles that no longer need to be fought, and to remind ourselves that audacious change has happened on our shores, and can do so again. What is owed to the memory of Gough, and all who made the era that goes under his name, the myth and the reality, is to find no shame in defeat, only in caution, to crash through or crash.

I'm getting all teary-eyed. I think it's too early in the morning to be reading eulogies.