MOST of us know where we come from, be it ever so humble, but Malcolm Turnbull knows where he's going, be it ever so grand.

The prime ministership and a life supported by a personal fortune of some $130 million is possible, even likely, when it is considered that what Malcolm wants, Malcolm usually always gets.

But who he is and how he got there is infinitely more interesting than the image of a potential PM that was presented in Canberra.

He knows this, which is why he started laying the lines the media might pick about an Opposition leader who is more likely to topple Kevin Rudd from the prime ministership than the hapless Brendan Nelson.

He has disappeared from the public consciousness as quickly as former treasurer Peter Costello became the man who never was.

Costello was old Melbourne but Turnbull is new Sydney and he has tapped into its reality as a repository of political power.

Malcolm Turnbull's first words after becoming leader of the Liberal Party this week were about his beginnings and so the political cover story will continue to play out.

Not that any of it isn't true, it is more the way the image is moulded.

Malcolm Turnbull is a remarkable and apparently considerate, emotional, decent alpha male with an overweening ego and a ruthless determination in applying himself to acquiring personal wealth and position.

Brendan Nelson connected with his colleagues, whereas Malcolm Turnbull will drive them before him. But his perceived arrogance is also his vulnerability.

The Labor spin is that if he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he represents those who were.

But Turnbull is wary of traps waiting for him in his rush to turn four short years in Parliament into a political legend.

His CV reads like that of a Liberal born to rule: he went to school at Sydney Grammar and studied law at Sydney University before going on to Oxford and a career as barrister and banker.

But the reverse is true. He was educated on scholarships and with the help of a father who scrimped to send his son to school with the sons of the great and the good.

Malcolm's father wanted the best for his son after his mother walked out on the family when Turnbull was nine.

Malcolm and Bruce Turnbull lived in a rented flat after Coral Lansbury, an ABC radio scriptwriter, went to the United States, where she died years later.

So it was Turnbull's father who was to be the greatest influence in his life.

"He was incredibly loyal," Turnbull said after his father died in a light plane crash in 1982.

"I should have been very resentful towards my mother. Not only did she leave me when I was young, she basically sold the flat, which had just been bought.

"But my father brainwashed me never to resent her. He created this goddess of a mother for me to adore."

Turnbull said his father, who left school at 15 to become an apprentice electrician, gave "complete and unconditional love" and opportunities he'd never had.

Brilliant at Sydney University, Turnbull was a Rhodes scholar who found the Poms at Oxford easy enough to get along with.

"There are a couple of good things about being an Australian in England," he said.

"For one, you don't fit into that class structure, so you're not restricted by it."

Nevertheless, Turnbull joined one of the most powerful clans in Sydney when he married Lucy Hughes, daughter of former Liberal attorney-general and leading QC Tom Hughes. Art critic Robert Hughes is her uncle.

Malcolm Turnbull married Lucy Hughes at Oxford University, where the minister at first refused to conduct the ceremony because neither were members of his parish.

Turnbull seized the chance to win an early argument. "You have to," he said. "We're living together, and it's your duty to discourage fornication in your parish."

Turnbull has now become a Catholic, and has aligned himself with a family such as he never had as a child.

To look at the Turnbull house on the water at Point Piper on a sunny day, under a blazing blue sky, is to gain a sense of what Turnbull has become, how he has made himself.

The four-storey harbour mansion and the slightly smaller house next door where the Turnbull children, Daisy and Alex, lived is a compound with a shared lawn running down to a private beach and a jetty.

It's not quite the Kennedy compound at Nantucket, but when you look at the family ties and the harbour-front houses in Turnbull's silvertail electorate of Wentworth, you can almost hear the money talk.

Along the leafy thoroughfares of Vaucluse the money purrs politely, it doesn't shout. The Turnbull houses are worth perhaps $80 million.

Lucy Hughes was lord mayor of Sydney and there is a farm of some hundreds of hectares out in the Hunter Valley.

Malcolm and Lucy are a power couple. She is blonde and striking. There is a rugged handsomeness about Malcolm and a charisma that draws lesser personalities along in his wake.

His contact book is a who's who of Sydney's business elite. In Melbourne, former Liberal Party treasurer Ron Walker says "given the right tools and the right backing I am sure he would make a very good prime minister some day".

Malcolm can be effusively charming when he wishes and volcanic when his temper is aroused. He has a lawyer's ability to read a room.

While his legal career might not match that of his father-in-law, reputed to have charged $20,000 a day to rise to his feet in court, Malcolm Turnbull chose his clients well.

He is as much an investor in himself as a stockholder in a list of companies that make up what might be only a modest fortune in American terms but is a considerable one in Australia.

His first career investment was in working for Kerry Packer, when he handled corporate affairs for Australia's wealthiest man.

Packer kept gold bars in a safe and a pistol in his desk at his Sydney office, and on the weekends delighted in breaking the nerve of bookies on the Melbourne and Sydney racecourses.

Some of the colour rubbed off on Turnbull. His most famous case was the so-called Spycatcher trial, in which then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher challenged the publication of the memoirs of a spook from MI5 who'd retired to Tasmania.

While the legal establishments of Melbourne and Sydney thought Malcolm the upstart would cop a hiding, he thought he was on "a winner", and "in the end so did 11 judges, the trial judge, then three on the Court of Appeal and seven on the High Court."

There was huge kudos but scant money in representing an impoverished author -- and less in leading the Australian republican movement to a referendum lost.

But it revealed the chameleon heart of a lawyer who, as a politician, always had a ready sound-bite. Prime minister John Howard, said Turnbull, had "broken the nation's heart".

That was a fair stretch, given that Australia would have become a republic had the right model been put forward. It was just that no one really put forward an acceptable way to go about it.

Turnbull blamed Howard but Howard, also a lawyer, outsmarted Turnbull. Turnbull then turned to politics and became his republic opponent's parliamentary secretary. Two lawyers together.

Along the way there has been the accumulation of wealth. Turnbull sees Australia as "a land of opportunity", and who better to know?

Apart from the $80 million Sydney waterfront properties, and the Hunter estate, there is a $3 million penthouse in Canberra and a $3 million house in Paddington.

There are offices in Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay worth $2.65 million and an apartment in Potts Point bought by Lucy and daughter Daisy for $2.7 million.

Family means everything to the Turnbulls, and Daisy's share was paid with a $1.5 million interest-free loan from the family company, Wilcrow.

There is a $1.6 million holding by Turnbull and Partners in tech company Melbourne IT and nearly $300,000 in NAB shares.

Labor would like to paint Turnbull as a son of privilege but, like Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, he is a product of opportunities taken.

And there is a softer side. He loves dogs, like old Rusty, who scrounged scraps from butchers and restaurants around Paddo and scoured building sites with his Dalmatian mate, Oscar, looking for stale sandwiches or pies that construction workers might have left behind.

His master reveals all this in his Dog Blogs on his website.

Yes, he loved old Rusty, who lived until he was 17, but the dearly departed dog might just sniff out a few sympathy votes for Malcolm along the way.

We are suckers for a shaggy dog story.

Additional reporting by Ben Butler, Craig Binnie and Ben Packham.