The most powerful woman in Australian banking has been portrayed as both dragon slayer and dragon in the biggest week of her meteoric career.
Nine months ago Gail Kelly was the boss of the nation's fifth-ranked bank, St George.
Today she is the chief executive of the bank seeking to take over St George's "Friendly Dragon", third-ranked Westpac.
If the deal goes ahead and the two merge, they will leapfrog the Commonwealth and NAB to become the biggest bank in the nation.
No matter what happens, Kelly has certainly breathed fire into the male-dominated world of banking.
She has shaken the pillars of the industry, in particular the so-called "four pillars" policy which prevents the Big Four banks - Commonwealth, NAB, Westpac and ANZ - from merging with each other.
If the $AU19 billion merger does proceed, analysts speculate that the other major players might look for acquisitions, too, further down the money chain.
News of the deal jacked up shares in smaller regional banks, including Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and Queensland Bank, as investors punted on that possibility.
Westpac's rivals, they reasoned, would have to keep up with a new mega-bank boasting 10 million customers, 1,200 branches, 2,700 ATMs, and a market worth of $AU66 billion, with funds under control of around $AU110 billion.
Kelly's rise has been all the more astonishing considering she has been in Australia just 11 years.
And the South African-born 52-year-old has done it all while raising a family of four, including triplets, with her paediatrician husband on Sydney's northern beaches.
Kelly has become a supermum icon, though once had a laugh at her
own expense when revealing that after performing the school
drop-off, a morning ritual for thousands of parents, she arrived at
work to discover one of her offspring still sitting in the
back
seat of her car.
Although she admits to having a privileged upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa, she certainly didn't start at the top.
Her first job in finance was as a bank teller, after the Latin scholar had begun her working life as a teacher in Ian Smith's Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
She gained an arts degree at the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the University of Witwatersrand.
She began her banking career in 1980 with South Africa's Nedcor Bank, and rose to head up its human resources, cards and personal banking departments.
When she and her husband decided to move to Australia, she landed a job as a strategic marketing executive with the Commonwealth Bank, rising to become head of customer service.
She was scheduled to talk with NAB officials, too, though they cancelled.
In retrospect that might not have been the smartest move to make.
NAB now sits on the sidelines pondering the merits of muscling in with its own offer as 50-strong teams from both Westpac and St George perform due diligence investigations during a two-week exclusivity period.
When Kelly was appointed chief executive at St George in 2001, she became the first woman to hold such a position in Australia.
She kept customers and shareholders happy alike as the bank's profits kept rising.
Since 2002 St George has more than doubled its assets to over $AU100 billion and more than doubled its annual profits to over $AU1 billion.
But she really hit the big time when her move to Westpac was announced last August.
Critics have targeted the haste with which Westpac set in chain investigations into taking over her former employer - a month after ending her enforced "gardening leave" in February.
But Kelly was at pains this week to stress the distance in time - nine months - since she left the top job at St George to run the bank that is now gobbling it up.
Referring to the US sub-prime crisis which has since weakened St George's position, she said: "Who would have predicted what has happened in the market place? It is very materially different. It's a new world that we're in."
Kelly, who is still sitting on some 1.4 million St George shares, is already a clear winner personally from the proposed merger deal.
The price offered by Westpac pushed up the value of her shareholding this week by $AU6.7 million to $AU33.3 million.
However, both she and Westpac chairman Ted Evans made it clear her stock holding had no bearing either on Westpac pursuing the deal or the terms that persuaded the smaller bank to agree to the merger.
Evans, a former secretary of the federal Treasury who assumed the Westpac chairmanship just over a year ago, said Kelly was not involved in the bid negotiations nor in setting the price.
As one commentator said: "Mr Evans was acutely conscious of likely criticism about conflicts of interest and Mrs Kelly's possible access to inside knowledge in helping to frame the bid even though she left St George nine months ago."
Kelly is the talk of the banking world.
She started her working life teaching history.
Now she is writing it.
