Stan Grant electrified the chattering classes on Monday night's ABC TV Q and A program with the revelation that he might – just might – be considering a move into politics.
But in the days since, the Sky News broadcaster, Guardian columnist and proud Wiradjuri man has yet to firm up any aspirations towards Canberra (and it would be Canberra, he says, not state Parliament).
"Look," he says, "if you had asked me a couple of weeks ago [about a possible political career] I was not thinking about it at all, it wasn't in the mix for me."
What has occurred since is the continuing and overwhelming response to his powerful speech on Australia's troubled relationship with its Indigenous peoples, made towards the end of last year but only posted on the Sydney-based Ethics Centre website just before Australia Day this year. That speech changed everything for the 52-year-old.
Now he's wondering how to channel the reaction.
He was on overseas assignment in January when the media maelstrom broke and he initially found himself nonplussed. "As a media practitioner, to find that you are central to a story that something has moved you out of one context and into another, it takes a bit of getting used to."
Now he feels an "obligation to those words, to actually do something with it".
"As Noel Pearson says, for us as Indigenous people, you bang against the door, shout from the fringes, even have a measure of access but you don't make the law. Its important to get in there and engage with that process. Now is that me? Aged 52, with a media career that is really satisfying to me? I have to really think about that."
The weight of enormous expectation has been laid on Grant's shoulders. Commentator Mike Carlton described the speech as a "Martin Luther King" moment.
The day after Grant's Q and A appearance, Liberal Minister Ken Wyatt and Labor Senator Nova Peris, both indigenous MPs, were urging him to join their respective ranks. As yet Grant is nowhere near that stage. "I haven't locked off on anything" he says. Asked if he has engaged with any party since, he says: "Look, I've spoken to people but on a scale of one to 10? Seriously I'd be around a two to three, and to get to a six or seven you have to have serious conversations about where and when and which party and all the rest."
He stresses that he's a pragmatist, not "ideologically driven". If he does start serious major party engagement, he might contemplate the mixed experiences of former ABC broadcaster Maxine McKew and singer Peter Garrett, who both found themselves chafing at times against the discipline of the Labor machine once they entered Parliament.
Grant has been at the eye of a media storm before, though for less happy reasons. In 2000 he and then Channel 7 co-star Tracey Holmes ( now his second wife) became tabloid fodder when his first marriage broke up and he and Holmes got together in the run-up to the Olympic Games, the pair sensationally resigning their jobs after pressure from station management
The couple then worked overseas for more than a decade before returning to Australia three years ago. He credits the infamous booing of Adam Goodes as galvanising him into a more public stand on the plight of Indigenous people, saying it reopened his own painful memories.
"I had been back in Australia for a while by then but this felt like my true homecoming," he wrote last year.
Grant's book Talking to My Country is due out in coming weeks and is likely to further fuel speculation about his future.
