It’s meet-the-candidates night in Upper Hunter, where all roads lead to roads

“I didn’t want to be a candidate in this election, but God had other plans.”

At a stand-up microphone in the Doug Walters Room of the Dungog Memorial RSL — small curtained stage behind, serving hatch, shining honour boards, it’s the old town hall. Archie Lea, an aged Christian bruiser in a leather jacket, is revealing the divine plan for him to be the member for Upper Hunter. Except it didn’t come out that way. He said: “Din wan be cand slectch buGog tuther pass.” That’s cleaned up. Archie makes Martin Ferguson (“Hi. I’m Marn Fern”) sound like Kenneth Williams.

Each candidate has 10 minutes. Archie, a respected local doctor, is just getting started. The room’s patient. They seem to know him, all too well. The doors flap in and out a couple of times as people go for drinks and the noise of the main bar — Bubbleburblebapbadking! of pokies and Peter Hitchener on the TV — floats in. “Godsa rope Lill passton,” Archie says. (God says we should reopen the Liddell power station, I think it was.)

Welcome to meet-the-candidates night in Dungog. 

Sixty or so people had come out in the misty warm rain for this, one of the last events before the March 25 election. The field was mercifully short: the 2021 byelection that had made local-ish boy Dave Layzell the sitting member had had close to 20, with One Nation and the Shooters all in the hunt. Now there are only six, and the Sustainable Australia dude hadn’t turned up — bad chemtrails, one assumes.

Everyone was getting their 10 minutes, but people were really here to see the Nationals and Labor duke it out. “Truss in Go” Archie ended with, I think, and got stronger applause than the cogent, insistent Green candidate. It is ever thus, deep in the valleys, the old seats, where the whole Australia thing really began. But who were these strange New South Welsh people who said “Hooroo!” all the time, like they were in a Dr Seuss book, and carried their foam stubby holders everywhere, what is that? I had come to find out.

On the main drag

Midday in Dowling Street, Dungog’s chi-chi heritage main drag, fresh-painted high-plumed Victorian frontages, plaques everywhere (“This vacant store was occupied by a spofforth works until 1936, before being taken over by an industrial grunting supplier”) and the Dave bus is in town, Layzell’s very local face grinning out from the side. The nice young man sat in the folding chair… Is this Dave Layzell? No, it’s another Nat. They all look a little the same, tall young men poured into RM Williams, their sole variation a different check on the shirt. Brian? Bevis? Stanford is telling me how the Nats are holding up quarry construction in the seat.

“We’ve been front and centre in saying that there needs to be a new plan for the Martins Creek Quarry, otherwise there’ll be trucks through town, the roads are already worn down … We want to get it on to rail…”

“That sounds great! But it also sounds very Green.”

“Uh…”

“I mean, isn’t that a green thing, stopping things for quality of life…?”

“Well, we don’t want to stop the quarry, just do it better…”

“OK, what about this great big money giveaway?”

“The what…?”

The previous morning at the Liberal state campaign launch, Premier Dominic Perrottet had announced that the state would be putting $400 into an account for each NSW child, every year, until they turn 18, and matching funds that parents put in. This was pork on a staggering scale, like a New Guinea potlatch, 40 pigs roasting on spits. Catholic familialism of the old school, it’s tough to oppose from the left, unless you start a long conversation about how money should be spent on collective goods, targeted to the most need- … Four hundred bucks! In my kids’ account! 

“I mean, isn’t it socialism?” I say, utterly inaccurately.

“Hi hi Sam Farraway!” from across the road, an older, Akubra’d version of the kid comes bounding over: “Roads minister. How ya doing?” Sam must have spotted the kid’s brow furrowing from the opposite pavement. The answer on the family bung? “Well, I think it’s preparing for the future. Now let me tell you about the Singleton bypass…”

In the Upper Hunter, all roads lead to roads.

“I’ll see you tonight…”

“Hooroo!” they say.

Travellin’ men

“No false exoticism now, Rundle,” I thought as I took the cab from Newcastle Airport to the rail station, a new interchange in the blast zone awaiting apartments, where a working port used to be. It was V8 Supercar weekend and half the city was blocked off. A low angry vroom echoed continuously from over the way. “No false exoticism now. This is not a separate country. If it weren’t for a line along the Murray, we’d be the same state. They were founded by military bastards and we were founded by freebooting bastards. No false exoticism.”

I got on the train for the Hunter. A connecting train pulled up and a crowd piled in. It was like nothing I had ever seen in my life. 

“Hooroo, Jack!”

“Hooroo, mate!”

Something like 30 huge men in blue singlets piled in. They all wore caps. The caps all had cheap sunnies perched on them. The men all had bushy goatees. The blue singlets all advertised one or another form of beer. They all wore shorts. 

Their skin was tanned and cracked. “Hooroo!” they kept yelling as they recognised each other at opposite ends of the carriage. They all had so much hair. Hair covered every bare, unsingleted surface, clumps and swirls of it, going up arm and round into the pits, which were like small dark forests. These men had hair on their knees. Their hair had hair. “Hooroo!” these shambling, beefy men cried, as they worked the adjustable seats back and forth, like they were TAFE-accredited seat adjusters. This way, that way, turning a three-line seat into a facing six-seat arrangement, and back again. 

Between them threaded young, thin skegboys with the vague air of hot Albo, rat-haired and a little snarly, carrying surfboards, which everyone seemed to think was fine, just fine on a glorified tram. “Hooroo!” they yelled. So it’s intergenerational. 

The girls were blonde beach bunnies, green tinge of chlorine in their hair, daisy dukes and tanned legs down to the floor in instalments. The blue-singleted sasquatch men squeezed in next to them, farted loudly, laughed and turned their phones on to six different broadcasts of the V8 race or aftermath. It was impossible to tell in the cacophony, bouncing off the tin walls and the surfboards. 

Like something out of Norman Douglas’s Naples ‘44, that great record of society coming apart amid the squalor of an occupied city. But no false exoticism. They all got out at Maitland, for the connection to Singleton, Singo, and a half-dozen of us sailed into the sepulchral calm of the Upper Hunter, sprawl and flatland giving way to dark-green treed hills going viridian in the evening rain. 

Down in coal country

“We’re used to not getting much attention,” said the MC in the Doug Walters after the candidates had spoken. (“Ten minutes each and there will be no questions from the floor afterwards.” “Questions from the floor!” yelled someone, the town’s resistance. Turned out to be a veteran ecology activist and Crikey subscriber.) “It’s all over there,” he said, gesturing westward. Over there being Singleton, coal country, its capital, a place which, in the FIFO era, boomed with great Singo mansions, concrete slab and yellow brick with white lions out the front. 

The seat’s population and the Labor vote is concentrated around Singleton and the west, and the larger rural area to the east favours the Nationals. Heavily favours the Nats — or did. From the seat’s creation in 1859, it has never been in Labor hands, even when it was a dual-member seat. But that may change this time, and that change may be the crucial seat Labor needs to form government. For near 30 years, George Souris, the National perennial, sat on a 65-35 margin (though Dungog wasn’t in this seat for much of that time), but that collapsed when Michael Johnsen became the candidate in 2015, ran on a “family values” campaign against a local independent (who later joined the Shooters), narrowly won 52-48, had his wife leave him nine months later. In March 2021 it was announced the police were pursuing rape allegations against him and he quit the Nationals and then Parliament in short order. Later that year police said there was insufficient evidence to proceed with charges.

The seat has thus been marginal since the 2019 election. Then a redistribution lopped off some National areas and included some new territory to the north. This has made it the second or third most marginal seat in the state, an absolute must-hold for the Perrottet Coalition government. 

Which is unlucky, since the feeling around is that the seat and this part of it have been taken for granted for decades now, and the mossed-on locals who define themselves very much the seat’s eastern part might finally have had enough.

All roads lead to Dungog

“Well, I haven’t really made up by mind yet,” says Bev outside the IGA (“This supermarket was a pony abattoir in 1913, and for many years housed a jazz ballet school”). Square-cut hair, solid rural gal in a drover’s wife plain summer dress.

“But I do like that Mr Perrottet. He’s very well-spoken, not like the last one — what was his name?”

“I have no idea.”

“He’s well presented too.”

“He’s very neat,” I say.

“He’s very neat.”

“He’s, like, an honorary gay man.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that…”

“What about the Labor leader? Do you know his name?”

“Ohhhhhh noooooo,” Bev says, as if the suggestion was a little teasing. She thinks. “But I’d know who he was if someone said his name!”

Ultra-marginal seat. How many millions on messaging? Heck of a job, Team Minns, heck of a job.

“It’s an ultra-marginal seat,” I say. “Yours could be the vote that swings it, and the election.”

“I know! It’s very exciting!”

“So what will you decide on?”

“Oh, the roads…”

Talking money

“Look, I don’t like being from the place with so many potholes. They say that’s where potholes were invented.” At the mic at the RSL, Dave Layzell is giving a speech whose parts of speech are verbs and cash amounts: “We’re putting in $25 million for concrete bridges and…” My notes say: “some other thing…” 

Dave had got in before Archie Lea, but after Elizabeth Farrelly, yes, the GOAT, the full double Caro was here, on her way up to Byron Bay, more propitious hunting territory for the upper house run of the Elizabeth Farrelly Independents (formerly Keep Sydney Open, which would have been a hard sell).

Props to her for attending, not an easy crowd, not because they were all Nats — though Labor and the Greens had their mob. James White, the poor old Shooters ring-in (“They put out a call for a candidate and I put my hand up”), sat with me and mused, “I shoulda brought a posse, eh?” His speech was four minutes and seemed to suggest the government was getting too much in mining royalties (or the region not enough). After he drank with the Nats. (Today he got Labor preferences.) But ah, it was the full Farrally, like seeing Steely Dan when they started touring after decades in the studio. Just one long riff and I couldn’t get enough.

“I acknowledge country here, I always like acknowledging country here, it’s more about acknowledging place as a place-maker myself which I always been what we’re talking about is getting a really diverse group of people of humans into Parliament and you know everyone is asking me who will you back who will you back and it’s not about that and I’m saying think about the upper house because that covers the whole state and we can do some incredible things in there working together we have to end coal seam gas in this area and Santos is just exploiting us, how much do we get in royalties, the money is going to Amsterdam and London, and what we have in society is a kind of ecosystem and if we can get this ecosystem into Parliament with gay and trans and everyone in there a really diverse bunch of humans, and what we’ll get is not so much a geolocated clump as a stratum and oh one minute left we believe in honest government climate action and liveable community, making places, making places thank you.”(Heavily redacted.)

Dave by contrast was a little dull, unless you’re interested in the economics of roads — which actually everyone up here really, really is. “We’ve had the concrete bridge building program, $25 million for that locked in and another $10 million for this area alone, and we’re putting one billion into regional roads across the state,” and then gave a couple of minutes to healthcare: “We’re putting in 10,000 new healthcare workers in the state, and you know better IPTAAS, you ask city people” — glance at Farrelly, who he is not running against — “they don’t know what IPTAAS is.” I don’t know what IPTAS is. He goes a minute over time but lands well, gets applause and a loud whisper: “He spoke a lot better than last time.” (“Sam Farraway is practically handcuffed to him,” someone told me the next day in The Long Room café — rural nu-style, ferns, mirrors, wooden tables, black-and-white art photography on walls — “He was hopeless in the byelection; if Labor hadn’t rolled Martin Rush in preselection, they’d have won it.”) 

Peeps that pass in the night

The Royal Dungog Hotel is a time tardis, a faithfully (and beautifully) restored country hotel, a schmicked-up version of what it would have been in 1920, 1910, even a little anachronistic, since the outside is that distinctive Australian style, anti-tank defence art deco, curves of thick yellow bricks and solid pillars encasing a Victorian pile. Boutique rooms with a shared bathroom in the hall. Groping down the corridor at 3am for a piss, I wonder how many people have made the exact footfalls I am now, shirtless, holding my pants up, I should have suspenders over my hairy man boobs, hair on hair. A lean bloke’s coming out of the toilets in his jocks. “G’day.” “G’day.” “Following the election at all?” “What?” “The election, you got any thoughts?” He recovers from the impact of this weird and creepy vox pop. “Mate, just, they’re generally hopeless. And the roads.” “Thanks.” “Hooroo.” In the morning, he and three other guys are in the foyer, in full bike gear, touring riders, names on their gear. Is everyone sponsored in this state? Is that the final stage of capitalism? But when the Nats have lost touring riders…

Linda the swinging voter

“Well, for the first time I’m thinking of changing my vote,” said Linda, a Bev-esque woman at the table nearest the not-unmoving painting of Jesus comforting an Anzac, said to the head-turning surprise of one of her companions. “I’ve been National for…ever, but I’m going to change my vote.”

“What, you’re an actual swinging voter?” I had an order for lemon chicken at the RSL’s Happyman Chinese bistro in the next room — specials: crab claw, salt and pepper trout, beef lasagne — but I sat my arse down. An actual swinging voter? “What’s made you change?”

“Well, Peree’s a very good candidate.” Peree Watson, mine union leader’s daughter, local gal, in big social-administrator glasses and a red blazer, had given a barnstorming performance, assailing the government on building hospitals but not staffing them, underpaying teachers to the point where the profession is collapsing, and giving Sydney more money per kilometre for roads than the regions (a point Farraway disputed afterward, claiming that Labor has merely counted council top-up funds, and excluded specific regional roads programs). It was commanding in a way Dave wasn’t. Watson’s hometown of Branxton has come into Upper Hunter, with a swathe of Labor territory, and that might be the Nats’ hooroo. 

“But really it’s just everything.”

“Could you, um, specify?”

“Well, no, I mean … no, it’s just everything. Nothing seems to be going properly. And I liked Peree, so I’m going to change my vote.”

“You might determine the election and the government.”

“And I’m not political!”

“What would you like to be called for the purposes of this article?”

“Linda,” she said. “I always wanted to be a Linda.”  

Dave and the kids’ bonus

I drifted back into the main bar for a last go-round, badingbading and Married At First Sight on the TV, to quiz Dave Layzell on the Perrotet family bonus bung. A couple of staffers hovered nervously, in varied check shirts, like a row of back-to-school exercise books. Being a bit careful these days:

“Isn’t it socialism?” I lied again.

“It’s more like individualism,” Dave said.

“Paid for by the state.”

“Well, look, it’s like my dad used to say to me, ‘You save up, you get your first car, then you get your first house’ and that’s helping that, incentivising it.”

“Yeah but Dave, your dad was saying you do that. Not the government. Shouldn’t it be families doing this? Smaller government and all that.”

“Well, it’s allowing families to incentivise because we’re providing matching funds … I mean my daughter, she’s working at the supermarket, she’s building a nest egg that will help her build.”

Fair point, I thought.

“But it could also go the other way…”

“Yes,” he laughed. “My eldest daughter, she’s a bit laissez-faire. She won’t do that…”

Katherina and Bianca of the valley.

“So it’ll act as a disincentive…”

“Oh,” he snaps out of loving reverie. “I wouldn’t say that. More it won’t mobilise her.”

“Thanks, Dave.”

“Well, bye.”

“Hooroo.”