"The line's broken," said Malcolm Fraser. "In this world, anyway, it's broken forever."
No longer, said Mr Fraser, would he be able to drop in on Gough Whitlam to pass the time of day, so valued by old men with a history ... even, or perhaps especially, a history once scorched by loathing.
They met for the last time, these men who were decades ago the most bitter political rivals and who grew to become the unlikeliest of friends, early this year.
"As always, I remember that meeting with affection. I valued my friendship with him," Mr Fraser said. "He always had an independent mind. He had his way of looking at things and he was a very important person in Australia's life."
Mr Whitlam, frail by then, was confined to a wheelchair and living in a nursing home, but he had come in to his office in William Street, Sydney, because Mr Fraser had called to tell him he was in town and felt like a natter.
It was this way regularly ... had been for years.
They were bound together in shared agreement that their old parties had moved away from what they had once believed, and what they still believed.
"I see the [Liberal] party as having moved leagues to the right and I see the Labor Party having moved leagues to the right of Gough Whitlam's period," Mr Fraser said. "We both bemoaned a bit of this when we met. The whole political spectrum is entirely different from what it was in my time and in his time."
They never talked about what had happened all those years ago in 1975, when Mr Whitlam had been dismissed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr and Mr Fraser had slipped in, installed to lead the country, and Mr Whitlam, his anger so colossal that his words still crackle through Australian history, laid his curse upon Mr Fraser as "Kerr's cur".
"In political life, you develop a pretty thick skin," Mr Fraser said.
"Gough was very good with words, very quick-witted. I certainly didn't resent [being called Kerr's cur]. I knew what had happened. I think he knew what had happened. I just regarded that comment as just politics."
Anyway, he had never believed Mr Whitlam held personal animosity towards him, whatever hard words might have been spoken.
They were men of the world, and it was out there in the world, as they ran into each other at conferences and international events, their parliamentary years behind them, that the ice cracked.
"It was mostly during the 1980s when I also was out of Parliament," Mr Fraser recalled. "Bob Hawke had got me placed on the Commonwealth group to try and establish a negotiation between the government and the ANC in South Africa.
"We would meet from time to time. He [Mr Whitlam] appeared to me to be friendly enough. He didn't carry animosity forward. He didn't carry personal bitterness. He was a much bigger man than that.
"He took issues as they were: on issues of race, on issues of discrimination and issues of the integrity of the Australian media. I think on the idea of Australia's place in the wider world, we had a pretty common view."
Few knew of the growing relationship between the old foes, and when in 1991 Mr Fraser and Mr Whitlam stood together on the back of a truck in Melbourne's Fitzroy Gardens, their hands clasped and their arms raised, many who remembered 1975, when Mr Whitlam had demanded that his supporters "maintain the rage", were astounded.
Mr Whitlam and Mr Fraser were in solidarity over media diversity. They were protesting together against the prospect that the Fairfax Media empire could be sold to foreign interests.
The old rage was gone. And they remained friends to the end.
"I felt sad [when the news came of Mr Whitlam's death]," Mr Fraser said. "It's a sad moment in the life of Australia. Whether one's a great proponent of Gough or an opponent, he was a very great Australian who contributed enormously to this country. Whether it was in the arts or whether it was visiting China, he changed the way Australia started to look at itself."
Indeed, the line is broken.
