Class struggle at the golf club: the battle for Indi on the Central Plains

“Things really began to change round here with the dog-walking protests,” says Jeffrey, seated at the big Table of Knowledge in the Weekend Local, the “good coffee” cafe in the main street of Euroa.

Jeffrey, retired teacher, 40 years here, neat grey beard, pharmacy glasses perched on his nose, isn’t holding court, but he sorta is, with the regular breakfasters around him: Jennifer, retired academic; Alan, honest-to-God hippie with swept-back grey hair and a David Crosby moustache; and Ted, retired businessman. 

“Who organised that?”

“Oh, that was us,” Jeffrey says. “Pretty much the same people who organised the pokies protest …”

“And the Seven Creeks bridge protest …”

“That too …”

“So this was some ancient anti-dog by-law that …”

“No, it was recent!” Jeffrey says.

“People moving in were walking their dogs in the evening, and the council didn’t like that.”

“The council’s change- ” said someone from another table. ” … sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear … it’s sure changed now!”

“It sure has.” And there’s a little laugh …

The Weekend Local is more or less the common room for Euroa’s intelligentsia, those who’ve been there a long while — like Jeffrey, completing a history of the region — and the more recent arrivals, academics and public servants, retirees and tree-changers, riding in on a tide of super. They have all found each other, and here they are.

I had found them at the candidates’ forum at the golf club the previous night, and now they were instructing me in the town’s secret ways. They were well-met, because I had just had a morning of vox popping the locals. The other locals. And what a shellacking that was.

***

“Well, look as far as the Uluru Statement and the Voice to Parliament, I feel, look, wouldn’t it be great if we all learnt an Aboriginal language …” said Ross Lyman, Liberal candidate for Indi. 

“Look, I think Australia’s one of the least corrupt countries in the world, and this is one of the best places there is … I was walking through the markets and someone gave me a jar of pickles …” said Liz Fisher, Nationals candidate.

Fifteen minutes into the candidates’ forum the night before, and the conservative side was on fire! We were all gathered in the old golf club to hear the latest episode of the great Indi candidates’ travelling roadshow, a rolling series of forums across this shining electorate, from Mansfield up to the Murray River.

Above us loomed the brown polished honour boards of the golf club, bloody dozens of them — “holes-in-one”, “albatross”, the TS Smyth Award, “ladies’ championship” and the huge ones for the office-bearers of president and secretary, records of reigns spanning decades, small empires built in this green corner of the Garden State. 

Once, the doings of the shire would have been sorted out here, year upon year, with a quick chat over a few whiskies in club chairs, the old rural ascendency and the town bourgeoisie sharing out the mayoralty, the state and federal seats. The powerbrokers were gone now, or in hiding, and this evening was being run by the Euroa Community Action Group, and we had begun with an acknowledgement of country, interrupted by a mooky-looking bloke in black, who appeared to be associated with the UAP, wanting to know on what authority the acknowledgement had been made. 

Six-member roadshow it may be (One Nation and UAP were absent this time), but it’s really a two-person head-to-head: independent Helen Haines, seated at one end of the panel, wearing dazzling white and a vaguely Sophia Loren coiffure, up against Liberal Ross Lyman — dashing, besuited, with a tendency to leap up — at the other.

Haines won the seat in 2019, succeeding Cathy McGowan, first independent elevated by the “Voices of” movement, taking it from hilariously bad drop-in Sophie Mirabella. To try and get the seat back, the Libs have been putting up local boys with solid backstories — Lyman, this year’s candidate, is no exception.

Bronzed, bearded, barrel-chested, local winemaker, ex-Commandos, ex-Sandhurst, ex-Gurkhas, focused, smouldering, powerful, he … well, look, I’m boringly straight as they come and I’d fuck him. I presume that’s kinda what the Libs are going for on a division-wide scale. On the evidence of one night in Euroa — the candidates’ forum, I should clarify, oh my — they’ve haven’t cracked it yet. 

Indeed, I think they may have underestimated what the electorate wants, and how good Haines has become at arguing for it. She’s already become identified with the region’s push to continue and extend its advantage as a renewable energy early adopter and innovator, and identified as the prime mover on a federal ICAC bill. Somewhat tentative on her first outing in 2019, she can now package up an argument and land it. 

The questions and issues are predictable — climate change, housing, integrity — but Haines’s challenge is to hold to a genuinely independent politics that is also clearly progressive. She runs a few thousand behind the Libs on primaries, and needs preferences from everywhere to get across the line. Even with the Liberals cycling through several candidates, the independent margin is only 1.6%. Haines, Labor and the Greens compete to outline similar plans, but it’s Haines who can make the most compelling case, tying labour shortages to the local housing crisis, for example.

The Nationals candidate, Liz Fisher, a local farmerwife type (actually an actual farmer), whose jolly, folksy, naivete — “I just love we’re a multicultural society,” she said in response to a question on the Uluru Statement — made me think she was just someone who had wandered in and taken a seat on the stage. The Green? The Green is Ben Stiller. Not “like Ben Stiller” — he is. Well, I mean, look at him. Runs a public artworks workshop in Yackandandah. Worked as an ice sculptor. Come onnnnnnn. He’s Ben Stiller. It’s all research for a new Wes Anderson movie*. (OK, he’s Benjamin Gilbert.) He was good, and he and David pincered Haines on the disgusting boondoggle of government funding to private schools.

Haines, rural independent, turned it around: “Well, look, I believe in a thing we got up — that Julia Gillard got up — called Gonski! Remember that? Let’s fund education based on need. How about doing that?” Very good, very smooth. 

And Lyman? Well, he has his schtick, and it’s almost all military. “Look, when I was in the military, we had this thing called rules of engagement, and as far as climate change is concerned …” “Look, when you’re on a mountainside, and all your goats have died …” A little of that goes a long way, really; you soon start sounding like an audiobook of Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero. 

Lyman has the backstory, and he has facts at his fingertips. But he didn’t seem to be able to join them together and tell a story about the place, its possibilities, its changes. This is the second military type the Indi Liberals have chosen to go up against Haines. It’s possible they really don’t understand how rapidly the whole place is changing. And the Lib-Dem? O mirabile dictu, he talked of vouchers! For education! For everything! Vouchers! He was not devoid of jerkiness. “Just watch my Greens friend’s face when I say this,” Fidge said in that smug Quadrant/Connor Court microchip-in-my-butt way they have. “The answer is-” “VOUCHERS!” someone yelled to general laughter. “Very amusing,” said Fidge. “Nuclear power.”

“Trouble is, Julian, we don’t need it,” Ben Stiller said patiently. “Energy is everywhere. We just have to harvest it. We can do it. Electrify everything!” In the general uproar, the UAP mooky boy passed me a note, slightly damp from his palms. “Hey Guy. Tell Kos I.C.U. Luke”. Kos, I presume, is Kos Samaras, former ALP state secretary, now selling his expertise back to them as Redbridge. So, Kos, if you’re out there, our scheme has been busted. Fine body of men you’ve got, Clive. 

***

“Well, look, let’s face it, there was only one section of the town there last night,” Jeffrey said, in The Weekend Local the next day.

“Well, yeah, I got that this morning,” I replied. In the chill autumn, with grey clouds building in the vast sky above the shop porticos, I’d taken a vox pop stroll down the main street and received just about the most hostile response I’d had in a long time.

Let’s be direct about this. I avoided everyone in a puffer jacket, sporting a neat beard, their hair in a bright scarf, wearing designer shades — everyone who looked like they might be an ex-academic, which was, no crap, about a good 40% of ’em. I went for perms, tracksuits, Ned Kelly beards, wraparound shades, faded Miller shirts. From those two dozen or so, one got a resistance to politics, to any discussion of it, as hard and slate-grey as the gathering sky.

Now, of course you get some of that, but usually some people are willing to talk. Here? No one. “I’m not really political”, ‘they’re all the same”, and the centrepiece — three guys, with three beards, standing around a bike outside the bakery, who started with the usual “Ah, politicians, fuck ’em, they’re all the same, fucking shit, wouldn’t waste my …” “What are the issues round here?” “You got six months?” said the weediest one, poking at the bike’s innards. “Nah, we can’t help you here, mate,” said the head guy, shooting Dogberry a dark look, and dismissing me, and I must admit for all the talk about the disenfranchised, excluded, etc, I thought, yeah, you really got those pollies, fellas, they tremble at your disengagement from your own interests.

Meanwhile, the Weekend Local crowd had kept the town free of pokies, resisted a proposed (and cloddishly ugly) traffic overpass, and have gradually begun to take over the council, the old rural ascendency’s last hideout.

“War on the golf club!”

“Exactly, exactly!” said Jeffrey.

“The president’s board there,” I said. “There was a TJ Nolan who was president from 1948 to 1957, and then a G Wakehurst from 1958 to 1962, and then a TB Nolan comes back in 1963. So, what hideous protracted power struggle do those simple listings describe?” Was this Euroa’s ’60s? Was TB Nolan the Raul Castro of Euroa Golf Club?

“No one really knows anymore.”

Here on the plains, the revolution never really happened. The old ascendency has departed, but the new ones are moving in. And why should they not? The country is changing. The country of the country is changing. In places like Euroa, it’s becoming something other than country, as it has been known and understood. One half of the town is leaning in to remake it, the other half is withdrawing into a silence staked out as a last line of resistance. 

However it changes, we will have to go with it, understand it, remake our politics around it. In the main street, the dogs bark and the political caravan moves on.

*The Yackandandah Public Art Workshop and Ice Sculpture Emporium, written and directed by Wes Anderson and starring Ben Stiller, Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, Greta Gerwig, Owen Wilson, Shia LaBeouf, Tilda Swinton, Benjamin Gilbert and 46 others is now streaming across all platforms.