WHEN the axeman came into the woods, many of the trees whispered to each other, "At least the handle is one of us."
This Turkish proverb, unearthed by Christopher Hitchens in his current memoir, Hitch-22, must have played on the minds of Labor Party parliamentarians when the Axeman of the Factions brought down the silver grey gum of Kevin Rudd. He drew only a little sap in his right eye when he haltingly resigned his office, accepted his fate and fell on the axes held by his enemies.
Rudd could summon only a single pallbearer for his political funeral on Parliament's steps, the solid and sturdy Senator John Faulkner. There was no eulogy. The Axemen of the Factions knew their Art of War by Sun Tzu. "All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him."
Way back in the bleachers of the backbench he resembled a pale party balloon fallen from the ceiling, bobbing, bobbing to a stop.
In mediaeval gospel paintings, Judas is often depicted as a redhead. More recently in an episode of South Park, Cartman claimed, "Judas was a Ginger." Despite Rudd's familiarity with these texts and portrayals, he just didn't see it coming, didn't twig to the link between the 30 pieces of silver and the greedy malevolence of the mining industry.
He thought that just because his wife Therese could be a bottle ranga from time to time, that being a bloodnut was only skin deep. For heaven's sake, didn't he see carrot-top Sarah Ferguson selling her husband off to the Arabs for thousands of pounds in cash and promises of much, much more? Hitler banned the marriages of two redheads as he feared the children would be "deviant offspring". History may have taught us that not all redheads are witches but certainly all witches are redheads.
Traditionally in Corsica if you pass a redhead you should spit and turn around. In Greek mythology redheads turn into vampires when they die. Russian tradition declares red hair is both a sign of craziness and a fiery temper. Even Aristotle knew that redheads are "emotionally un-housetrained".
As parish priest of my childhood Brother O'Connor often reminded us, those who forget history are bound to repeat it the next year. So ignore history at your own peril. They are not just old wives' tales.
Rudd must have been colour blind. It is one thing to speak Mandarin but it's completely foolish not to see a mandarin-coloured flag when it's waved directly in your face. Only her de facto hairdresser knows for sure whether the carpet matches the curtains but in Michelangelo's, The Temptation in the Sistine Chapel, Eve's fresco depicts her fleeing Eden with a shameful face and a twist of red hair.
All the flags in the field were pointing in the one direction. Adam's first wife before Eve, the notorious Lilith, was a redhead who refused to lie beneath Adam during sexual intercourse because she said, "Why should I lie beneath you when I am your equal since both of us were created from dust."
Everything is clear in hindsight, even deja vu. The question now is what can we do about it?
The gene for red hair was discovered in 1995, the melanocortin 1 receptor on the 16th chromosome. Red hair is a genetic mutation, it can pop up unannounced.
Another study, in 2002, found redheads are harder to sedate, requiring 20 per cent more anaesthesia in operations. Many woke up during surgery in a fury.
Hamburg researcher Professor Werner Habermehl studied the sex lives of hundreds of German women and found redheads "were clearly more active than those with other hair colour, with more partners and having sex more often than the average".
On the downside they have to deal with the red pigment as an inadequate filter of sunlight, their skin is more prone to sunburn and skin cancer, and gets more wrinkly with ageing. Their ageing hair does not go grey but skips it and goes white. All in all, not a bad trade.
In the South Park episode, Ginger Kids, Cartman makes a hate speech against "gingers", calling them disgusting, inhuman and inherently dumb, with no souls, very short and unable to survive in sunlight. In order to teach him a lesson, Kyle, Stan and Kenny knock him out with a baseball bat, bleach his skin white, dye his hair red and put henna-tattooed freckles on his face. At school the next day, he is laughed at and forced to eat with other redheads in the hallway.
Cartman eventually starts a Ginger Separatist Movement, which refuses to believe that red hair is a result of the disease "gingervitis".
Cartman's spirit lives on today. Coppercut, a YouTube user, posted a video, "Gingers Do Have Souls", which received several million views.
You cannot judge a book by its cover, even when it's red, although if it's read then you have gone beyond the cover. Not all chief executives of mining companies are big fat slabs, although a recent photograph of their gathering in Canberra did look like the formal wedding of the applicants for Australia's Biggest Losers.
Another Red Fox who prowled the halls of Parliament House was Alan Reid, the famous journalist, always authentic, never synthetic, but whose interference and participation in the game of politics proved countless times that the medium is the message, not the messenger.
Reid's life as lapdog and attack dog for press barons has been detailed in Ross Fitzgerald's and Stephen Holt's biography, The Red Fox. Reid's tobacco-stained fingerprints could be found all over a story written by Rupert Murdoch himself about the Labor Party's attempt to secure $800,000 from pre-Saddam Hussein's Baathist government to cover costs of the 1975 general election. History is not replete with ironic events but history is irony.
What Reid would have made of the coup against Rudd that has led to another coup, one could hazard a guess. Reid railed against the permissiveness of the Whitlam government which favoured an "articulate avant-garde", the West Australian Labor Party for, "concentrating almost exclusively on the problems of homosexuality, prostitution, pot-smoking or the like" and exposed the Victorian ALP's Status of Women Policy Committee as declaring, "In many instances marriage is also a form of prostitution, only the pay is a lot poorer."
On hearing of Gillard's ascension, Reid would turn over in his grave, although he was interred into an urn at Sydney's Northern Suburbs Crematorium and later spread across the Snowy Mountains at Currango.
The Prime Minister is an atheist, unmarried in a de facto relationship with a former hairdresser, childless, and a woman. God, therefore, is not in her House.