And the incoming soon-to-be Canberra resident, recently announced US ambassador Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr, couldn’t be more different than the previous tenant.

The veteran republican lawyer is best known for personally vetting Sarah Palin as running mate to presidential candidate John McCain in 2008, and later Mike Pence as President Donald Trump’s deputy.

Known to many as ‘AB’, the Tennessee native is an established Washington insider. Early in his career, he served as White House counsel to Ronald Reagan, and has served on various advisory boards and committees. Until this appointment, his first diplomatic posting, he was the chairman of international law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where he began his legal career in the 1970s.

Culvahouse is yet to be officially confirmed by the US Senate, and hasn’t made any public comment about his own appointment. And despite a high profile in the US due to his involvement in vetting vice-presidential candidates (and the criticism that ensued when Palin turned out to be a dud), little has been reported about his private or family life.

The 70-year-old replaces John Berry, a Maryland native whose stint as ambassador ended in the final weeks of Barack Obama’s second term at the White House. Known as a professional ‘people person’, Berry had previously served as the director of the US Office of Personnel Management, contributing to record numbers of veterans and people with disabilities being hired.

In this role, he was the highest-ranking openly gay government executive in US history, and arrived in Canberra, aged 54, with his husband Curtis Yee in tow. During the Obama administration, before arriving in Canberra, Berry also agreed to take part in the “It Gets Better” campaign to support gay and lesbian teenagers in the US. He filmed a video in which he described the emotional turmoil of coming out to his conservative family. But he also described how, when his partner was dying of AIDS, his own father had by then come to love him as his son.

Berry also has a passion for wildlife, and had been director of the National Zoo, creating a new plan for its modernisation. From 2000 to 2005, he worked to conserve wildlife habitats and protect endangered species through public-private partnerships as director of the non-profit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

During their time here, Berry and Yee appeared comfortable in the public eye, releasing a video before their arrival detailing their excitement about coming to Australia.

The man set to replace Berry seems certain to take a different tack. Although his new role as the face of the Trump administration in Australia will place him squarely in the public eye, Culvahouse had been described in USA Today as an “unpretentious, easy-going Tennessee native who has moved for decades within Washington’s power circles but prefers not to call attention to himself”.

He is, in other words, the polar opposite of his boss, and has largely kept out of the public eye during his long career in Washington. A long-form 2011 profile of him in the Washingtonian set out in detail his humble beginnings in a rural Tennessee town, where he was born on July 4, named after his father and grew up on a farm, feeding the hogs and cattle.

Like Berry, Culvahouse has professed to love the outdoors. But while Berry and Yee enthused in their introductory video back in 2008 that they looked forward to “anything involving salt water and waves”, Culvahouse is said to enjoy hunting birds.

Australia has been without a US ambassador since Trump became president, although there have been a number of near-appointments.

One candidate was virtually on his way to Yarralumla when he was pulled at the last minute to head the US mission in South Korea instead. Another nominee, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, turned down the role in May this year.

And now, finally, in the wake of this latest announcement, foreign policy experts have been lining up to laud the choice of Culvahouse for the Canberra post. Not only is he experienced and politically astute, he’s also seen as something of a direct line of communication to the highest levels of the White House.

According to a story in The New York Times this week, Culvahouse’s biggest challenge will be “successfully navigating the nuances that distinguish Australia’s relationship with Asia from that of the United States”.

“There is considerable bipartisan anxiety in Australia over what critics see as an inconsistent, transactional approach to the region by the Trump administration. Some fear Australia could get caught in the middle of the superpowers’ rivalry, damaging its own interests,” the article says.

In the meantime, Culvahouse will also have to find a place in the so-called “Canberra bubble”, although over in the giant brick mansion (inspired, according to Wikipedia, by the buildings in the colonial town of Williamsburg, Virginia), he can stay as far removed from it all as he likes. He can also admire, up close, some of Canberra’s bird life, particularly exuberant in leafy Yarralumla. Hopefully someone informs him in time that he’s not allowed to shoot them.