While many of Australians were waking, it was not the news of Trump or Biden that caught the imagination of readers, but a 22-year old poet.
Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in US history to deliver her verse at a Presidential inauguration – and joins a small coterie of poets endowed with this honour, including Robert Frost for John F Kennedy (1961), Maya Angelou (1993) and Miller Williams (1997) for Bill Clinton, and Elizabeth Alexander (2009) and Richard Blanco (2013) for Barack Obama.