It's hard not to feel sorry for this giant, iconic mammal.

So trusting! So vulnerable! So easily harpooned!

If you listen closely, the traces of the threatened behemoth's famous eerie song are still audible.

But the hunters care nothing, as they draw alongside with their cruel barbs.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, and the hunters have no mercy.

I write, of course, of the brutal, thriving industry that is the modern Garrett hunt.

Was ever a politician easier to skewer?

Most practitioners of politics have some sort of youthful exuberance from which they quietly distance themselves over time; Brendan Nelson's long membership of the Labor Party, for example, or Malcolm Turnbull's political apprenticeship at the knee of the anti-Semitic former NSW premier Jack Lang.

But how many of them leave us a whole discography to trawl through?