2017 made up its mind early on. If years could be arrested, it would have been done on sight for drunk and disorderly back in January and repeatedly ever since. It was a year on a bender, for better and worse - and with that as the theme we were left staggering in its wake, trying to keep up. Often, the year felt like it was lurching; occasionally like it was loitering with intent; and at other times like it had entirely lost the plot.

And my, there were lots of plots to be lost. Or to take another word of the year, BREAKING: in the sense of news, seemingly every other minute, and in a broader, more unsettling sense - that things we have taken for granted might be giving way to chaos.

And yet at key moments, the year was also uplifting. Energising, even. #MeToo? My word. #Resist? From the git-go in January. #MarriageEquality? Finally! Inspiring. 2017 was all of those things, but at its best and its worst it rarely felt less than a whole lot of crazy - and for this bit of branding, history will forever thank and curse the master of branding himself.

Donald Trump emblazoned Demented on 2017 as forcefully as he ever stamped his own name on any hotel or casino or golf course or son. We watched the man - whose preferred public identity, @realdonaldtrump, is one that highlights his limits of both characters and character - lurching, loitering, losing the plot, breaking and broken and taking the world to the brink of ??? what, exactly? We don't yet know. We don't dare imagine. Or if we do, we try not to linger there - and Trump's style is to not let us linger anywhere for long.

In 2017, a Trumpian scandal or Twitter-driven storm would often have a shelf life of half a day, sometimes half an hour, before another one would come along to replace it. And in Australia, our own political masters seemed to absorb this concept of perpetual chaos as if it were some sort of governance genius. Across a year in which our traditional allies and guiding lights, the US and Britain, were consumed by uncertainty after the Trump/Brexit upheavals of 2016, you'd have hoped Australians could look on from afar and thank our lucky stars for the relative calm at the heart of our national affairs.

No such luck: Canberra went troppo, too, turning on a festival of dysfunction that made the nation's previous decade of political delirium seem like a mere warm-up event.

Conveniently, the two worlds collided early on, with the week following Trump's January inauguration confirming this would be no ordinary year for the presidency - and no ordinary year for the prime ministership of Malcolm Turnbull, who for much of 2017 seemed cursed by an extreme version of Murphy's Law, one that ensures everything that can go wrong will not just go wrong, but will go wrong repeatedly and in ever more imaginative ways. Thus it was that the typically routine - say, a PM's first phone call with a newly inaugurated US president - ended up on the front page of The Washington Post, from whence it took flight as fodder for everyone from comedians to political pointy-heads amused or aghast that among Trump's first acts was to pick a fight with the most obsequious American ally on the planet.

Among the highlights, Trump to Turnbull: "I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call all day. Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous."

From Turnbull's point of view, the leak was squirmworthy but not disastrous - it could be spun that he was standing up to a bully, and the ugly subject matter (an Obama-era deal to take refugees off Australia's hands) was never likely to hurt him politically.

But the Trump call set the tone for Turnbull's year: blindsided by events, forever cleaning up one mess or another, blunders colliding with acts of bastardry within his own party and eventually facing a constitutional crisis that threatened the very survival of his government.

The citizenship crisis began with a quiet sensation in July - when the Greens' Scott Ludlam volunteered his unwitting dual citizenship - and over the ensuing months engulfed the Parliament in high-farce drama, snaring no less than 10 senators and 3 lower house MPs. It took a detour through the High Court and ended (for this year, at least) in a high-stakes trip to the ballot box for surprise Kiwi Barnaby Joyce and Bennelong MP John Alexander, a man lousy at both paperwork and telling jokes.

They - and the government - survived. Among those lost along the way: One Nation's Malcolm "I choose to believe I was never British" Roberts, and Tasmania's tearful unwitting Scotswoman, Jacqui Lambie.

It was, in short, a godawful mess. And while it was not of the prime minister's making, godawful messes tend to attach themselves to the man in the big chair whether he's directly responsible for them or not.

As an endless run of dreadful opinion polls confirmed, Turnbull was suffering the fate of strife-prone PMs before him - wearing the blame for everything, some of it accidental, some of it self-inflicted, a lot of it friendly fire. In February, Cory Bernardi quit the Liberals to launch the Australian Conservatives. Tony Abbott stayed in house, but revelled in his self-appointed role as Minister for Innocently Sniping From The Sidelines.

Conservative crossbenchers - with Pauline Hanson as ever out front and outrageous, at one point arriving in the Senate wearing a burqa - were of no comfort to a battered PM. He flailed on the right - with contortions on energy policy - and on the left, ditching the hopes for indigenous recognition embodied by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Perhaps most emblematic of his political year: a late November backflip on a royal commission into the banks. For voters wondering what on Earth had been going on in Canberra in 2017, there was this confidence-building offering from the Prime Minister, in blithe celebration of the difference between Tuesday and Thursday: "Government policy remains the same until it is changed."

However embattled he seemed, though, Turnbull always declared he was on top of the world, and on top of the job. His bumper sticker: Not Drowning, Waving! And then, as if to confirm the political gods really do enjoy taking the mickey out of him, in the final week of the year came a minor Malcolm bungle so perfect in its details it seemed conjured by a comedian: the PM pinged $250 for a safety breach in a dinghy outside his Point Piper mansion. The crime of our Not Drowning, Waving prime minister? Not wearing ... a lifejacket.

One thing's for sure: whatever Turnbull's political fate may be, by year's end he was close to drowning in metaphors.

It was a grim spectacle for voters. And to be fair, who'd be a politician these days? The ground shifts quickly. Just look at Mike Baird, a recent poll high-flier who resigned as NSW premier and from Parliament in January, handing the reins to Gladys Berejiklian. Or to Colin Barnett, routed in WA in March.

For the reverse effect, look to Queensland, where Labor's Annastacia Palaszczuk - the woman they called the "accidental premier" - affirmed her unlikely ascendancy with re-election in November. It's a fickle business, politics - but one that sometimes rises above its reputation. For this, you could look to the marathon, passionate and principled debate on voluntary euthanasia that defined the Victorian parliament; the historic legislation passed in November. Or you could freeze-frame just the final moments of the federal debate on marriage equality in December. The postal survey may have seemed a cruel and wasteful exercise to many, but when our parliament finally finished the job we were delivered of a moment of joy that will resonate long after the ugliness is forgotten.

At other times, our leaders grappled with the most fraught issue of the young century - terrorism - and its distant cousin: things that look like terrorism but might not be anything of the sort. In Melbourne, the year was bookended by horrors in the CBD - cars deployed as weapons in Bourke Street in January, and in Flinders Street three days before Christmas.

Neither incident had terrorist links, but the tragedies became part of the global narrative of the times. In Britain, vehicles were used in fatal attacks in March and June; in May, Britain and the world reeled from the deaths of 22 people when a suicide bomber targeted an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. In the US, the year's worst act of terror - also at a concert, in Las Vegas in October - did not officially wear that label, but what other word describes the nation's worst mass shooting: 59 dead, more than 500 injured.

Words were hard to come by at such times - unless you were Donald Trump, who had words for all occasions, very few of them appropriate. He blundered ham-fistedly into British politics on issues of immigration and terrorism. He used Twitter to bait friend and foe alike - from "rocket man" Kim Jong-un of North Korea, with whom he played a game of nuclear chicken that left the world on edge, to Theresa May, Britain's beleaguered PM.

He dissed Germany's Angela Merkel like a schoolboy. He trashed his own intelligence agencies. He fired his FBI director. He made, by the Washington Post's count, close to 2000 false or misleading statements. And he ended the year still railing against the man who might bring it all undone, special prosecutor Robert Mueller, whose remit now covers everything from colluding with Russia to presidential obstruction of justice.

Trump's best hope in 2018? That enough people buy the preferred presidential pejorative of 2017: #FakeNews.

Indeed, that might have won bragging rights as hashtag of the year, had it not been for the decidedly Trump-era revolution represented by the five-letter rallying cry that since October has turned the world on its head in ways shocking and searing and profound - and hopefully long-lasting.

The #MeToo movement was sparked by accusations spanning decades of sexual assault by Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. The floodgates opened, and the torrent consumes us still amid a long-overdue reckoning with the wretched reality of misogyny and sexual misconduct across the professional landscape - from the movie studio to the magazine office to the factory floor.

High-profile scalps piled up - in Australia, most notably, that of gardening guru and serial grope-fiend Don Burke. But it was #MeToo - the online outpouring of women's stories - that really made it matter, just as in January it was the mass protests by women the day after Trump's inauguration that established the alternative vision for 2017. For every action, a reaction. The other hashtag of the year? #Resist.

There was, of course, also time for pleasures and pastimes - and to take time out in the theatre of the absurd, where one might have found diversion in a royal engagement (Harry and Meghan Markle); a royal pregnancy (William and Kate); or a royal retirement (Prince Philip). Musically, you could decode the latest from Taylor Swift; at the movies, delight in a new Star Wars; in the tabloids, take your pick between homecoming queen Schapelle Corby or the heir to her throne, Colombian jailbird Cassandra Sainsbury.

Weightier distractions could be found on the sporting field, where broader cultural ripples could be felt amid the guts and glory. The AFL Women's league launched its triumphant debut season in February. Serena Williams continued to redefine the art of the possible in women's sport when she won her 23rd grand slam in Melbourne in January - while eight weeks pregnant. From the men's tennis tour came a sporting story for the ages - the revival of Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal, who split the four grand slams. And in the AFL, we witnessed a hardscrabble fairytale as the Tigers ended a 37-year premiership drought.

We also remember a year for its losses, as icons and institutions pass on.

Michael Chamberlain, a tortured figure in an indelible national legend, died in January. Journalism doffed its hat to the irreplaceable Mark Colvin and Peter Luck, and a man whose pencil became a national lightning rod, cartoonist Bill Leak. Australian music farewelled two towering father figures, George Young (closely followed by his brother Malcolm) and Dr G. Yunupingu. We lost the original "Golden Girl", Betty Cuthbert, and the legendary Lip from Collingwood, Lou Richards. October brought universal praise of former governor-general and High Court chief justice Sir Ninian Stephen, while December had us wrestling with the more divisive legacy of a former senator and spouse of a political louse: Queensland's Lady of the Pumpkin Scone, Flo Bjelke-Petersen.

Abroad, there were final bows from legends of music - Tom Petty, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Glen Campbell; of television and film - Mary Tyler Moore, Jerry Lewis, Sam Shepard, Roger Moore, John Hurt, Jonathan Demme and, gadzooks, the original TV Batman Adam West; of media empires - two giants of worldly and wicked repute in Hugh Hefner and Roger Ailes. The end came, too, for a man whose death inspired no mourning, just a final burst of morbid fascination: Charles Manson.

And then there was what felt to many the hardest loss of all: the passing in April of John Clarke, the Kiwi-born satirist who'd been making sense of the world around us for so long it seemed an injustice to lose him just when we needed him most. In this age of absurdity it is tempting to buy into the notion that satire is dead. In his absence, John Clarke is a reminder that we surely need it now more than ever.