Keeping Up with the Mandy Nolans

“With what’s happening to our oceans after the recent floods, you can’t deny the reality of climate change any more, and the need for real action. Do you think, in that TV spot we just did, I talked too much about vaginas?” says Mandy Nolan, Greens candidate for Richmond, from behind the wheel of a rental as we zip along the road from Byron Bay to Ballina.

“Too much?” I said. “I’m not the one to ask.”

We’re flying, just under the speed limit, hitting roundabouts, not always rounding them. Clunk-badabunk. Trees fly by, yellow signs saying “Watch for koalas”. Nolan, six feet tall, platinum blonde, your average Byron Amazonian, is squeezed into the driver’s seat.

“Had a bit of a prang yesterday, this is what they gave me.” More koala signs fly by as Nolan gives me snippets of her early life story. Central Queensland, a mum deserted by an alcoholic husband. As we roar into the turn to Ballina: “One of my grandads had been a communist when it was big in Queensland. His… determination, the idea you’ve got to do something, that was a big inspiration, that was what it meant to him, communism.” Pause. “I really might have talked too much about vaginas.” 

* * *

Right now, somewhere in Sydney, a Greens national assistant media director reading on their tablet spits out a mouthful of chai, starts making a phone call.

* * *

“Look at what that seagull’s doing…”

An hour earlier, Nolan and I had been on Clarkes Beach at Byron, with a camera crew, an NBN reporter, Nolan’s campaign manager Lollie Barr, two surf riders Nolan was going to speak to about ocean poisoning, and a freelance documentary filmmaker. Nolan was talking about a wave of infections for beach users after the washback into the sea after recent floods: “Ear infections, eye infections, and women are getting vagina infections.”

We’d all stopped to remark on the dick tree, and now, as filming was about to begin, we had stopped to watch the gull. All of us, no one saying, “Get back to work.” It was on its own, on our side of the beach inlet, hundreds of other gulls on the other side among the sparse crowds. In the shallow water of the inlet it stood and paddled and stamped its little feet.

“Stirring up critters,” someone said, and indeed, every minute or so it would take a peck or two. Then it would start again, stamp stamp stamp. It looked like a British holidaymaker, gingerly stepping into the water at the sand at Bognor Regis, pants rolled above knees. All it needed was a little knotted handkerchief on its head. One or two of us had noted it, and then gradually work had stopped for a while. In the middle of this dire federal election campaign, its headline moments the acme of unpleasure, it was a small moment of pure joy. 

Mind you, I can’t imagine other campaigns just stopping to gather round a gull. Labor would have got a candidate photo with it, and then focus-grouped seabird friendliness, subset gulls in key marginals, to decide whether to use it or not. Peter Dutton would have bitten its head off and spat it over the inlet, Ozzy Osbourne-style. But there was still enough green in the Greens here, to just stop and watch for a moment.

After, the NBN camo got some strolling shots, bending low shooting upwards, trying to get the shorter surfer and Nolan into the same shot. Platinum hair flashing in the winter light, green blouse like seaweed tresses, she looked like Venus arising from the waves, with attendants. The gull glances up briefly, a tiny T-rex checking out how the mammals turned out, before going back to work.

“What’s going on?” says an old bloke going by, very old, brown slacks and cap, pre-Byron Byron.

“We’re doing a spot about climate change.”

“Ah, I used to live here.” He points to the edge of the eroded beach cliff. “Grew up here. Clarks. It was named after us. They added an ‘e’. All the houses had to go in the ’70s.”

“So, climate change?”

“Maybe,” he says. “Nature changes all the time.”

Nolan’s in front of the camera now: “The floods are showing us that climate change is here. Ear infections, eye infections, vagina infections…” Paddle paddle paddle. 

* * *

Nolan’s campaign for the seat of Richmond may well be the last Greens hippie run we shall see in our lifetimes. She isn’t a hippie actually. “Got to Brisbane and did journalism at UQ. They told me I would never be a journalist because I wouldn’t follow the formula; that’s how I eventually became one. Anyway, I transferred to English. This was the mid ’80s, still the Joh years.” She had a couple of inspirational teachers in Carole Ferrier, a formidable socialist-feminist theorist, and Dan O’Neill, the legendary teacher-activist-organiser. Was part of the Fortitude Valley scene: “Pubs like the Easts Leagues Club and the White Chairs. My God, there were some great nights.”

Protester, activist and also a stand-up comedian in Brisbane’s early and very rough comedy scene. “Looking back I’m not sure how I did it. It was a blood sport. You’d get stuff thrown at you, people getting on stage. The good thing was you could pretty much make it up as you go along. We didn’t see much international stuff. Wendy Harmer was a big influence, attitude and style, just give it back to ’em as hard as they give it.”

We’re nosing around the mildly depressing suburban backblocks of East Ballina now, looking for a group of volunteers for the afternoon doorknocking, trying to guess what a bunch of Greens looks like these days. “So when I got to Byron I…”

“How did you get to Byron?”

“Oh, I followed this man. He was like… he was everything for a while. He wanted to go to Canberra for a while to change politics, then to Byron to change himself. I would have followed him anywhere at that stage.”

“What happened to him?”

“He… faded a bit. Oh, here they are!”

There were about eight people standing around a LandCruiser, a couple of tree changers, an actual hippyish type, some middle-class normies. We jump out, they greet us with smiling joy, we do too — before both sides realise that they’ve got the wrong party. They’re assembling for a birthday barbecue. Interesting that we could even mistake them for Greens, and they us.

Ballina’s a former light-industrial regional town, not yet Byronised. Nolan arrived in Byron 20-something years ago when you could still just get a house and hang out, and quickly made a life as a comedian, then as a life coach of sorts, then MCing every charity do, professional do, RSL, etc.

“Did a lot of painting, lived partly off that for about 10 years, and I was also running a whole bunch of comedy rooms up and down the north coast. About eight at one time.” 

“And the bloke?”

“One day I just took all my stuff, walked up the street, and said, ‘Can I live here?’ “

“So now, the –“

“Five kids! By three men!” she said with exuberance. “Oldest is 26.” She stops. “The kid, not the man.” Then adds: “It’s a very Byron story.”

* * *

Byron, good lord. Your correspondent had arrived a couple of days earlier, soft warm rain and blue-black evening light over the main crossroads, a local Uber driver telling me about his cryptocurrency-centred early retirement plan. Byron’s still a collection of brightly painted wooden verandas, at the centre backpackers in boardies and tie-dye wandering around, sea changers sitting outside at the Northern Hotel, old Byron, neat, white-haired, surfers’ lean bodies down at the Lifesaving Club.

Behind the verandas, though, much has changed, arcades tunnelled in, flash restaurants and shops, and chains too. Byron now has a Betty’s Burgers and a Subway, conglomerations of brand capital landing in paradise. And among it all is this new(ish) tribe who symbolise Byron to the world: the very rich, the rock stars and movie stars and their influencer spouses, lean and tanned and decked out in raw linen, its white shafts, adult and child alike.

Nolan now lives in Mullumbimby, a little up the coast, as do many old Byron hands, not merely priced out of paradise but psyched out of it too. “I don’t really come into Byron more than, God, once every six months, I think,” one of her staffers said. “It just doesn’t occur to me to.” Nevertheless, her posters are everywhere here, all on private fences, put up by people who wanted them there. In the standard Greens frame, Nolan stares out through flattened lighting.

This part of the Richmond coast is Greens heartland, with Labor sitting member Justine Elliot much stronger around Tweed Heads on the Queensland border, but even so the level of support and activity is impressive. This is Richmond, after all. For decades it was the property of the Country then National Party, the county seat of the Anthony clan, Doug then Larry.

The victory of Elliott in 2004 was a sign the seat had moved leftward. Now it’s looking like Labor may have been just a way station to a Greens victory. For a while, Labor was quietly worried about the Greens surge. Not any more. It is very loudly and visibly fffffffreaking out, maaaaaaaaaan. How very Byron.

* * *

“We didn’t stage this, you know,” Barr says as we traipse around a couple of shoreline streets in East Ballina, big houses from the ’70s and ’80s, a few smaller, older flats commingled in. 

She’s joking — well, 90% joking, I suspect. Nolan, with NSW Greens Jenny Leong accompanying, is working a few streets of mixed political aspect; Buddha statues on the porches of some, three big black cars in the garages of others. But hand on heart, I’ve rarely seen such a rapturous reception through a doorknock. “I’ve voted for you/I’m voting for you” — spontaneously from half a dozen people, people coming out from behind their doors to give her a hug. Some sketchy slacker couple in a driveway yell at us as Nolan knocks on a nearby door. “Hey! HEY!” Uh oh. “We voted for you!”

Earlier, at the pre-doorknock briefing with the actual Greens crew under a park gazebo, the volunteers mainly pixie-looking, 60-something leftie women (often it must be said, the backbone of this sort of campaign grind) had been addressed by the area captain: “This is the first time we’ve doorknocked this area. It hasn’t been a high priority before, but now we have the numbers to do it. Just remember, there’s good streets and bad streets. If you get a terrible day, it’s likely someone got a really good one…”

“Someone else is weeping at the end of a Nats street right now,” I said.

“Not necessarily,” says Leong, with the slightest stern note. “This is just what seems to be happening all over.” A touch of the commissar in her voice. Heh, to find the hippie in Leong, a new Green, homeopathic measuring equipment would be required, supplies of which are available in a dozen stores in Mullumbimby. 

* * *

“A vote for the Greens in Richmond is a vote for SCOTT MORRISON!” Elliot’s inaccurate, possibly AEC-breaching tweet went out while I was there, causing a scurrying of activity. Elliot would double down in the days ahead. It’s a sign that Labor has been caught napping, badly. With her base being in the northern Tweed area, and the bulk of Richmond’s population there, Labor appears to have assumed that the Greens would do well farther south, but not bust out of its 20-30% range. Labor says Elliot has visited the region, and inland, several times after the devastating floods and equally devastating inaction by government; some locals, at pre-polling, say that it was barely enough. “Where was she? I didn’t see her.” 

Mind you, many didn’t rely on the government. “Round here,” says Phil Frazer, Mullumbimby resident, editor supreme (Go-Set, Rolling Stone, Multinational Monitor, inter alia) in an Australian-American growl. “When the floods came, people just swung into total self-reliance, started emergency radio networks, had their own helicopters coming in. They came here to get away from the government; they didn’t need it to save them.” Frazer spruiked Nolan as a likely seat-winner in his weekly column for the Byron Shire Echo, the world’s wackiest local newspaper, still continuing, and it’s partly on the fact of that self-reliance that Nolan’s candidacy may triumph. 

Indeed, Labor twigged late to the fact that Nolan wasn’t your typical new Greens candidate, some atmosphere physicist with a consultancy and Birkenstocks doing her best to talk to the humans. Everyone knows her. In Ballina, as we stop at the newsagents, your typical country newsie with old salts coming in to buy The Weekly Times, and six different pig-shooting magazines on the racks, three or four people come up to say hello within a couple of minutes, come up on the street to say, “I voted for you.”

“We didn’t stage this!” Barr says again. If they did, it’s a Truman Show of epic proportions, and they deserve election on the basis of that organisational triumph alone.

Next we pop over to the local independent radio station to record an ad, Nolan doing the first take, piss-takey.

“Are you tiiiired of the same old political product, telling you how to vote? Then vote one Mandy Nolan!” voice going high and low, like an old comedy room skit.

“Possibly could we try that a little more, um…” says the mildly anxious producer at his desk, Nolan towering above him, almost too tall for the wooden booth, an Alice in Wonderland moment for the rest of us, like the room is shrinking.

“Oh, that was just for time,” Nolan says. “Let’s do it.” She reels off a perfect 55-second ad about climate change, the floods, housing and the rest. Then it’s off to a meeting about MCing a charity gig for local troubled youth, where the talk is all of attachment disorder and unvoicing amid complex trauma. (“Are they particularly troubled here?” I ask someone later, who I’d better not name. “Oh, yes. Rich fuck-ups meet poor bogans meet drugs. Plus the floods screwed a lot of kids up. It’s a perfect storm.”) Then after that it’s off to pre-poll. I’m running out of steam. They’re just getting started. 

* * *

Looooooook… you know it’s pretty obvious that all this, Byron and Mullum, the sun-bunny influencers, the remnant hippies, the raw linen, the occasional whiff of patchouli, the Hemsworths and the head shops — it would all be ripe for a piss-take. But I’m really not the one to do it.

Twenty years ago, when the Greens were getting single figures, even in places like this, their candidates were types like a legal-aid lawyer who sued the US for trespassing on the moon, tree people who came in naked from the forest to vote for themselves, maybe, and women who had once tried to blow up electricity pylons and now ran a goat sanctuary.

That’s all gone now, and the party is thoroughly professional. Nolan has that professionalism, but also enough of the old crazy left to remind one that life is still out there, wild and free and wonderful, ready to be lived. To take the piss out of this, you’d have to send out someone like Gray Connolly, book him a sleeper on the night train (which doesn’t run any more), pack his tartan dressing gown and his folding Morphy Richards toaster, and two (two only) bath battleships for ablutions at the Railway Hotel (which is gone). He’d ace it. My heart wouldn’t be in it. I want a big win for the last hippie. 

* * *

Mr Clark, back at Vagina beach earlier. “There were huge dunes here when I was a kid. We walked over sand barefoot to go to school. People lived round the point had to get their groceries delivered by skiff.”

What did he think of the place now?

“It’s changed, but everything changes. Who’s the lady? Mandy Nolan? She’s not bad.”

The gull’s still paddling. 

* * *

We finish up at a Stone & Wood brewery, a local success story, the new Byron, a huge venue, like a big old shed, artfully designed to look so, lines of gleaming vats and big raw-wood tables before a stage. There’s going to be a locally made film about the ocean damage — everyone under 25 is a filmmaker here — and a band first, and a talk and debate, and the whole thing is slated to go for six hours.

I ask for a dry ginger ale; the barkeep tells me with pleasure that they have no soft drinks except for kombucha, which I uncontrollably recoil at the mention of, and a pleasing passive aggressive mutuality descends. Over in one corner, the blonde tresses and linen flash in the light, the Byroyalty, about 20 or so of them, a gaggle of astoundingly beautiful teens, all in the white linen in one sort of glowing-limbed cuddle pile, nodding along, as the band cranks out blues rock.

Something went a bit wrong here in Byron, the town itself. The place which once welcomed anyone who wanted to turn up is now the place where everyone who doesn’t have an Oscar or a billion feels a little bit shit. I suspect the trauma of local kids has a bit to do with being reminded in no uncertain terms that in this country, from an early age, the fix is in, wherever you are. I make my excuses and depart. Team Greens is still there, and the candidate has a column to write for the Echo tonight, before a 6am strategy meeting the next day. Paddle paddle paddle your feet in the waters, until the good stuff comes to the surface.

It’s tough keeping up with the Mandy Nolans.