It was a high-stakes meeting, at a delicate moment.
Four days ago Anthony Albanese sat down with Premier Li Qiang in Canberra for one of his most consequential sets of official talks since becoming prime minister.
Premier Li was the most senior Chinese leader to visit Australia in seven years, and the two countries are still grappling with a wide range of tensions, disagreements and complex interdependencies.
Now a few more details about what was (and wasn't) said behind closed doors are starting to emerge, bit by bit.
Some of the information is coming from diplomats from the foreign embassies dotted across the national capital who, unsurprisingly, were keen to get a sense of what happened.
The ABC has learnt officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Defence have been briefing several nations, formally and informally, about how the meeting went.
Those briefings give some useful insights; both into what happened behind closed doors, but also into how the government wants to present the meeting to other countries.
In a briefing yesterday for a cohort of Australia's friends and allies, the message was fairly clear: the meeting with the premier went fairly well, but the prime minister did not concede ground on any core issues.
You can see why Australian officials felt the need to give this reassurance, particularly to nations with their own deep problems with China.
'Panda diplomacy'
After all, there was plenty of public bonhomie during the trip, with Premier Li declaring that the relationship was now "back on the right track" and announcing that China would send two new giant pandas to Adelaide Zoo as a gesture of goodwill.
That could exacerbate anxieties in countries like the US and Japan that the Albanese government's pursuit of "stabilisation" might make it hesitant to push back against aggression, coercion and interference from China — whether in the South China Sea, within the diaspora here in Australia or on the cyber front lines.
But multiple diplomatic sources have told the ABC the Australian officials stressed in the meeting that they were fully aware of how China deploys "panda diplomacy" to burnish its public image, and that neither they nor the government were swept up in all the toasts and good-natured backslapping which inevitably followed.
They had carefully considered all the optics of all Mr Li's events, including at Adelaide Zoo.
For example, they pointed out that while the foreign minister attended that event, Mr Albanese did not, suggesting that was a deliberate choice.
Australian officials also told their counterparts that while the mood during official meetings in Canberra was quite cordial, with Mr Li often appearing relaxed, Chinese officials repeatedly made it clear that they believed that Australia was being used by the United States in a broader strategy to contain Beijing.
This has been a common refrain from China, and one which it has deployed against multiple countries both in official discourse and in state media, which often paints US allies as unwitting dupes being manipulated by the hidden hand of Washington.
"You got the sense that there was this frustration for Australia – they just couldn't break this idea that Li framed everything they did through the lens of competition with America, rather than as sovereign choices which Australia made," one diplomat told the ABC.
However, in their briefing, the Australian officials also said that the premier did not specifically bring up AUK/US or the federal government's nuclear submarine push – despite the fact Beijing has forcefully criticised the initiative in public, and has expended plenty of diplomatic capital trying to discredit the plan in South-East Asia, the Pacific and internationally.
That's in contrast to the approach Mr Li took in New Zealand, where he pressed Prime Minister Christopher Luxon not to join Pillar 2 of the pact.
The Australian government believes that China might have realised that it's now pointless to berate Canberra for a decision which is now very much locked in, whatever its merits.
Australian officials also stressed that Mr Albanese used the meeting to raise the government's concerns about China's conduct in the South China Sea, human rights in China, Australian citizens imprisoned in China, and Beijing's tacit support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine (as the prime minister has already said in public).
In addition, they said Mr Albanese made it clear that Australia was uncomfortable with China's attempts to insert itself as a security player in the Pacific by striking policing deals with multiple nations — urging Beijing to go through the peak regional body the Pacific Islands Forum instead.
But Mr Li rejected that quite forcefully by pointing out that some PIF members don't recognise Beijing diplomatically, because they retain ties with Taiwan.
Strengthening military communications
The prime minister also used the meeting to raise concerns over a series of recent military encounters between the Australian Defence Force and the Chinese navy — including one where the PLA(N) used sonar while an Australian diver was in the water, and another where China activated a flare near an Australian helicopter.
One of the modest apparent breakthroughs from these talks was an agreement to find new ways to keep on talking about some of these very prickly topics.
For example, Mr Albanese said on Monday afternoon that Australia and China had agreed to discuss setting up new channels of military communications to try and avoid any future confrontations.
But expectations around this are very muted in Canberra, at least for now.
Australian officials also stressed to their diplomatic counterparts in the briefing that the government would only participate in talks on the subject if both China's Defence Ministry and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs took part, to ensure it was worthwhile.
That's not the only instance of managing expectations which is at play.
After the meeting with Mr Albanese, Mr Li said that China and Australia had also agreed to "step up communication and dialogue to explore ways to better help development" in Pacific Island countries.
But Australian officials assured their counterparts that was simply a reference to both countries revivifying existing (or largely dormant) mechanisms for discussion on Pacific issues, rather than setting up new official talks or channels of communication.
Critical issues still need work
And while both Anthony Albanese and Mr Li were quick to celebrate booming Australia-China trade ties during the visit, there are some friction points here as well.
As expected, Australian officials said Premier Li pressed quite hard for Australia to back China's entry to the sprawling CP-TPP trade pact — a key regional agreement which the United States helped create but later pulled out of due to resurgent protectionism at home.
Canberra has been very reluctant to lend its support to China's bid because of Beijing's bruising campaign of economic coercion from 2020 through to 2022, although it has carefully avoided picking any public fights on the issue.
Officials said that Mr Albanese again simply pointed out that all bids to join the agreement would have to get a consensus agreement from all CP-TPP members — which at this point looks like a distant prospect for China.
This is not to say that Premier Li and Mr Albanese spent the entire meeting just talking at cross-purposes.
But the gulf between Australia and China on several critical issues still remains somewhere between gaping and wide.
Interestingly, Australian officials also suggested that Beijing was more fixated than Canberra was on the optics of the final outcomes.
For example, Chinese officials were very keen to ensure that Australia agreed to a joint statement from both leaders.
They were also initially pressing for as many as 30 new agreements or memoranda of understanding to be signed — far more than the five which were, in the end, announced during the premier's visit.
It's also worth noting that DFAT officials also acknowledged there was some discomfort — including, perhaps, among Australia's friends and allies — about Mr Albanese's decision to attend a Chinese community event with Mr Li in Perth.
Some critics targeted by the Chinese government in Australia have been fiercely critical of Mr Albanese for publishing pictures of himself at the event with Mr Li while praising Chinese Australians, arguing that the prime minister is equating the whole community with a regime that many are hostile to.
Perhaps the government felt it was damned either way, as a decision to skip the event would likely have drawn both attention and criticism from the other side.
But this debate is likely to only intensify as the federal election draws nearer.
Today Australian officials will brief more Canberra-based diplomats, including representatives from Pacific missions.
Politicians, public servants and pundits with a stake in this troubled but critical relationship will likely be picking through the entrails of what happened for quite some time to come.
The core challenge for Australia remains: how to maintain a diplomatic equilibrium with an increasingly impatient great power which is simultaneously your biggest trading partner and your largest source of security anxiety.