Australian year of hope, tragedy and transformation on a grand scale It was a year that flagged what it had in store - then gave us all that, and more. NEIL McMAHON reflects on a year marked by political mayhem, mass murder - and a national makeover with Malcolm Turnbull.
PM Malcolm Turnbull waited in the wings. Photo: Andrew Meares Nick Kyrgios perfecting heroics and brattish hubris.
Photo: Maddie Meyer I t was, on the whole, a bugger of a year. When it wasn't flooding us with sadness it was demanding we be scared and sometimes asked us to be sad and scared at once. It insisted these were serious times but was sometimes too silly for words, a year of great tragedy mixed with grand farce. In short, these were strange days indeed. 
How strange? This strange: even if you'd fallen asleep for 11 months - nodding off in   February and waking up on Boxing Day, asking for a recap of events - the year's general plot would still mostly make sense, by virtue of it having announced its intentions at the very beginning.
2015 was keen to make its presence felt.   January, that kick-back, chill-out, silly-season month that doesn't often trouble the history books, arrived as an impeccable prologue for the year to come.
  January gave us a terrorist horror at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, an attack that had an even bloodier bookend in the French capital in   November.
It featured an Australian ship of state that was taking water even as its captain seemed intent on blowing more holes in his own hull - and with an Australia Day honour for Prince Philip, Tony Abbott accidentally fired the red flare that made plain the seriousness of a fatal political emergency.
Also that day, one national hero passed his Australian of the Year baton to another - a prescient symbol of a year in which Adam Goodes and Rosie Batty were lightning rods in vital national debates on racism and domestic violence.
  January's final day served up another fire alarm in the form of a political miracle: Labor's rise from the dead in Queensland.
Further afield, a certain Mr Trump made a new year speech that included the line, "So if I run for president and if I win ..." - a gag whose significance we went on to grasp nervously by year's end.
Even in sports and entertainment, our 2015 distractions were front and centre from the start - Taylor Swift caught in a pop-snobbery stink with Triple J's Hot 100; Serena Williams setting out from Melbourne on her year-long quest for sporting immortality; and a cocky, kooky young man named Nick Kyrgios perfecting the blend of heroics and brattish hubris that would make him the year's most over-analysed and underwhelming public figure.
It was a breathless start to a breathtaking year - but being forewarned did not translate to forearmed.   January may have played out like a movie trailer packed with spoilers, but you had to be paying attention to catch the coming plot twists. And if you weren't paying attention, what then?
Just ask Abbott, whose   January trinket for the Duke of Edinburgh became   February's albatross around his own neck. He survived a leadership spill - the famous showdown between a PM and a valiant empty chair - but the albatross hung around, to be joined later by an onion.
Throw in the ever-present spectre of that empty chair - not to mention the amazonian shadow of his chief of staff, Peta Credlin - and it was clear this was going to be a year on the edge for a leader and his party.
In   March came a reminder that more was at stake than just Abbott's tenancy at Kirribilli House - with Malcolm Turnbull smiling demurely in the wings and the Liberal Party gripped by division between moderates and conservatives.
Malcolm Fraser's death at 84 placed the battle for the soul of the church of Menzies in its context - it was long-running and fierce and so divisive that Fraser was remembered more effusively by the Labor Party than his own kind. Funny business, politics, as Fraser well knew and as we were to be constantly reminded all year.
Australian politicians weren't the only ones bouncing on unpredictable waves. If there was a single moment for Abbott to take heart, it came from abroad in   May when his conservative counterpart David Cameron defied the polls and most pundits to remain at Number 10 Downing Street.
That was quite a week for Britain, which delivered Cameron's re- election in the immediate wake of the Duchess of Cambridge delivering that ever-reliable prod to national morale, a royal baby.
Princess Charlotte was an effortlessly happy news story in a year that didn't offer many.
In the US, there is no royalty - just Kardashians, the stepfather of whom delivered a pop-culture jolt to a vital social debate. Bruce Jenner's emergence as Caitlyn was a tabloid frenzy with a serious point to make and Jenner made it well - a landmark moment that landed perfectly in the same week in   June that the US Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage.
In Washington, Barack Obama hailed both turning points - amid a purple patch in the polls that rewarded his embrace of lame-duck status. With nothing to lose, he went big and bold. In one week in   July, he sealed a nuclear pact with Iran and restored relations with Cuba. He governed against the raucous backdrop of the campaign for his successor - a spectacle that captivated Americans and the world, though from the outside we were watching with mouths agape.
Donald Trump strode the political stage as a colossus in the polls and a colossal clown in the headlines.
Every time he added a new trick to his circus act - whether trashing Mexicans or demonising Muslims - his numbers would go up, leaving his conga line of rivals for the Republican nomination flailing.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton dominated a small field of contenders - lingering controversies over Libya and a classic Clintonian scandal involving state secrets and her email account failing to make such of a dent. Among her campaign pitches: being the loudest, sternest voice calling for gun control in a nation that spent much of the year wearily mourning yet another mass shooting.
By   December, gun control had morphed with national security into one scalding national fever after a shooting in San Bernardino, California, was blamed not on the usual lone nut but on Islamic jihadists with legal residence and legal guns.
That tragedy threw into sharp relief the issue that stalked politicians across the globe - the rise of ISIS, the war in Syria, and the astonishing tide of refugees unleashed by a hydra-headed crisis that seems likely to defy resolution any time soon.
We were invited to be terrified of ISIS - the "death cult" of Abbott's claim on national security credentials - and, belatedly, invited to open our hearts and borders to 12,000 refugees whose mass migration was convulsing the Middle East and Europe. The year's saddest but most potent symbol: Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, just three years old, lying dead on the shores of Turkey.
In Australia, the contortions and conflicts raised by the debate over Syria, ISIS and asylum policy were, in the main, the same as those we've wrestled with since the days of Tampa and 9/11.
And almost 15 years on, we're still ripe for a bout of divisive hysteria on the flimsiest of grounds, as evidenced by the year's dumbest scandal - a scandal so silly it managed to devour the national debate for weeks on end.
It involved Q&A, its deployment on the program of a former terrorism suspect with a mouth that ran to risible insults, the subsequent Abbott-ordered government boycott of the ABC's "lefty lynch mob" - and enough commentary to fuel another decade of culture wars.
It was red meat for Abbott, who seemed convinced he was on a winner even as many wondered at the nous of a government whose eternal search for political fresh air was marred by the almost daily question around Parliament House: who farted?
Watching the Abbott team govern could be entertaining in the sense that we'd never seen anything quite like it before. We'd endured the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd spectacle, of course, but Labor's epic dysfunction was more of a Tarantino film. This was Three Stooges, with cream pies flying.
When the nation awoke in   May to the news that Barnaby Joyce had threatened to kill Johnny Depp's dogs Pistol and Boo, it seemed a logical progression for a comedy troupe intent on refining its material to Pythonesque standards.
But as with Labor, it was wearying to watch. By the time of Bronwyn Bishop's fall from grace in   July - from the dizzy heights of the Speaker's throne - the public was pretty much done. Amused at the spectacle that launched a thousand memes, but done nonetheless.
Bishop learned belatedly that extravagant chopper rides on the public dime don't come with a parachute; a dithering Abbott should have learned that by now he was stranded up a familiar creek, not a paddle in sight.
The end came abruptly on a Monday night in   September, when Turnbull pulled the trigger on a leadership spill after a public pitch for support that included the promise that in every relevant particular he was not Abbott.
By a margin of 54-44, poll-rattled Liberal MPs took his word for it (a judgment his stratospheric approval ratings have since proved to be sound). Abbott, meanwhile, roams the media landscape doing the same as he did in office - blithely trashing his promises, in this case his post- spill pledge not to cause trouble.
In this he is at odds with the people, those same voters with whom he thought he had a pact - that it was OK not to like him if we let him take care of business. He didn't bargain that although it was true we didn't like him much before, it was still possible to like him even less.
The Abbott experiment won't be repeated. The new test models for political leadership are the anti- Abbotts - Mike Baird, a serene powerhouse after re-election in NSW; Daniel Andrews on secure ground in Victoria; and the miracle worker Annastacia Palaszczuk, cementing her victory in Queensland.
With a new PM taking his place in that club, we lurched with a general air of relief into Turnbull's Australia, where the words "agile", "exciting" and "innovative" have taken the place in daily discourse of "stop the boats" and its accessory slogans.
Elected just in time for global summit season, Turnbull took his show on the road - including to Paris, where the world signed a landmark climate pact - but it is at home where his message is focused as we enter an election year.
He promises a new Australia - one, for example, where a national emergency is declared on domestic violence, the focus of his first major policy announcement. Alongside him: Rosie Batty, the woman whose story and example have transformed national awareness.
But no one pretends ending that scourge will be quick or easy - and we learned elsewhere that a new Australia still has plenty of unfinished business to fix from the old.
The national furore over Adam Goodes and the booing brigade that stalked him was sad on many levels - from what it showed of our darker sides to what it did to Goodes himself.
He started the year serene and optimistic; he ended it having been driven from the footy field and then into retirement at season's end, grand final day honours declined amid concerns he'd be abused one last time.
It was not the only time sport made its presence felt beyond its playing fields and ladder rankings.
In   August, the doping scandal at Essendon reached an overdue climax when James Hird rounded off a disastrous season by finally falling on his sword.
Jarryd Hayne's boy's own adventure as an NRL recruit flying high on American football fields captured countless imaginations. Even the premiership triumphs of the Brisbane Broncos in the NRL and a relentless three-on-the-trot Hawthorn in the AFL found it hard to match Haynes' would-be fairytale for public appeal.
On a much uglier note, from Wimbledon came the self- destruction of Nick Kyrgios' short- lived experience as a larrikin hero on his way to number one, replaced with his current status as a foul-tempered global embarrassment ... still on his way to number one, if he doesn't get thrown from the game first.
Kyrgios already transcends his sport - in the worst possible way - but it's a rare achievement. And when it happens, you want it to be for the right reasons. For exhibit A, look no further than Michelle Payne, whose Melbourne Cup triumph took immediate pride of place in national folklore.
The Cup's only sad note: the absence of Flemington's king, Bart Cummings, who had died in   August.
He was part of the national DNA - as were in their way, author Colleen McCullough, who died in   January, and the bush legend Harry Butler, claimed by cancer in   December.
Blues fans mourned BB King in   May; Trekkies offered final salutes for Mr Spock, Leonard Nimoy, in   February; New Zealand wept for the loss of rugby titan Jonah Lomu; and Singapore farewelled the father of the nation Lee Kuan Yew in   March.
But perhaps our toughest collective grieving came in   April, when the long road from arrest to execution ended for Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
In all, it was a year when mourning seemed required of us far too often - and a year when it seemed entirely right to end proceedings with an escape into joy and an embrace of familiar comforts.
To that end, 2015 ends with much of the planet united on common ground.
A few weeks ago along came Adele, saying Hello and finding the world was delighted to listen in record- busting numbers. And then last week we went to the movies, obliterating the debut audience of every film in history with a collective cultural experience we first shared 38 years ago.
As 2015 drew to a close, Star Wars had come along at just the right time.
After a year of tears and turmoil, needed it we did.