Tough start to a demanding role for Julie Bishop UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon listens as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop speaks during a Security Council meeting on Thursday. JUST days after being sworn in as Australia's first woman Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop is in the thick of it. She is already feeling the heat generated by her smooth but steely Indonesian counterpart, Marty Natalegawa, as he ratchets up the stakes and the pressure on her and Tony Abbott ahead of crucial talks in Jakarta next week. This meeting is taking place as Indonesian politicians and star public servants - Natalegawa is both - position themselves for the roller-coaster election year ahead, and for the aftermath. In opposition, Bishop gathered assiduously the private mobile phone numbers of foreign ministers such as Natalegawa, so she could call or text her counterparts without going through their gatekeepers. Communicating doesn't guarantee agreement, though it should minimise unwelcome surprises. In the case of the press release issued on Thursday night by Indonesia's Foreign Minister, it clearly wasn't enough. The tone of the Indonesian release indicates that the political load is too great to allow fulsome agreement in Jakarta. This visit will therefore test to the full the new government's declared modus operandi of operating in a low-key way and avoiding public rows, especially in the international sphere. Bishop spent much of her time as opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman building top-level networks rather than simply trading blows with Labor's international heavyweight Kevin Rudd. Since taking over her portfolio, she has been caught up in a whirlwind of talks with the world's top diplomats - though the most important meeting, the encounter with Natalegawa, proved the one that turned round and bit her. Only four days after being sworn in, she was in New York for the UN General Assembly. She had 30 meetings there this week on the sidelines of the assembly, including with the foreign ministers of the US, China, Russia, Britain and France - the five permanent members of the Security Council, of which Australia is the president this month. Yesterday, she chaired a Security Council meeting at which those powers debated their response to the Syria crisis. After leaving New York, Bishop joins the large team led by the Prime Minister meeting Indonesian counterparts in Jakarta on Monday and Tuesday. Then she flies to New Zealand and Singapore, and on to Bali for a meeting of APEC foreign ministers. She will return from Bali as Mr Abbott arrives there for the leaders' summit on October 7 and 8, to a deepening in-tray of administrative and policy issues that require tackling in Canberra. Australian of the Year Ita Buttrose has described Bishop as "the token woman again," a tag she obviously rejects. She is the only woman in cabinet, but the intensity of the Indonesian imbroglio demonstrates that the weight of her portfolio and policies is anything but token. She is already enjoying far more room in her role under Abbott than Rudd would have allowed. She likes, as a model, the way John Howard and Alexander Downer worked together. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a friend since the 1980s when they worked together on clearing up the mess left by WA Inc, says of Bishop: "She has a good lawyer's ability to master a brief very quickly - a handy skill for politics and for foreign policy in particular. She also has a quality of inestimable value in politics, and especially in diplomacy: charm. Seven Group chairman Kerry Stokes says: "There's not been much written about what a good executive Julie was ... She took that background into politics.