Some days I itch to be back there: Bligh
Anna Bligh walked out of Queensland's government house, marched down the driveway towards the cameras and heard her teenage son pipe up: "Granny's dropped her dacks".
On the morning her former cabinet colleague Annastacia Palaszczuk was sworn in to parliament in Brisbane, Anna Bligh was in Sydney recalling her own swearing in as the first woman elected premier in Australia as she launched her memoirs.
"You're deeply conscious that you're making history," she remembered of the occasion on Tuesday.
She was there with her mother and two sons, holding hands and jubilant.
"There was a huge pack of cameras, and there was one part of the driveway where you are overshadowed and you cannot be seen because of foliage. And at exactly that moment, the elastic in my mother's skirt snapped and it fell to the ground," Ms Bligh said.
"My teenage son said, `Granny's dropped her dacks' ... my security guards were there not knowing where to look."
It is one of many private moments catalogued in her book, Through the Wall.
In it, she writes candidly about growing up on the Gold Coast, about how her mother's desperation to escape her psychologically abusive husband inspired her to achieve, and about the personal cost of blazing a trail to the top.
"Firsts are very important. But seconds and thirds and fourths are just as important," she said.
"They move it from novelty to normal. That's what I see Annastacia Palaszczuk doing: making women leaders the norm and unremarkable."
She said there are still moments she "itches" for her old life.
"I think anyone who's held the levers of power and says they never miss it isn't telling the truth," Ms Bligh told AAP.
"Are there days when I get up and think about how I would have done something that I see happening in political life? Of course there are, and I itch to get back to it.
"But I never wake up and think, `I want to go and do a big press conference today where I'm under the pump'."
