Black and teal, north and south — socialists and socialites slug it out

Wet Melbourne afternoon, plane trees dripping, Victorian villas, Audis everywhere. Hawthorn mon amour.

Outside the division of Kooyong’s only pre-polling booth, a sea of teal, up and down the street. Monique Ryan must have 30 supporters out, placards everywhere, T-shirts the works, a spreading lake. About half that of darker blue Libs, a long banana of UAPers, a speck of red and green here and there.

There’s a queue stretching out the station and down the street, and the spruikers are crowded around them, the two lead candidates too. Joshie Frydenburg is close to the door, in a blue beanie, small and neat, dark-blue Kathmandu windcheater and jeans, looks like he’s just dug the Rover out of a mudhole at the farmlet. Ryan is a few spaces down, in a beige overcoat, confident enough to sport a shirt with royal blue stripes. They’re rotated about 30 degrees away from each other, like a bitterly divorced couple at the daughter’s wedding they both paid for. Ryan’s in fine form, twirling her umbrella.

“Oh, yes, it’s been great fun… Yesterday the queue was all the way down the street… People really want to vote… Hang on…” A phone is passed up to me. “Guy,” a voice breathes down the line. “It’s Campbell here, Monique’s media adviser. I’ll be down there in a few minutes.” “There’s really no need,” I say. “It’s just a colour pi–” But he’s gone. Ryan’s dealing with a young Lib type, in a T-shirt, not a spruiker, sort of chatty-annoying-clueless.

She finishes, turns away and mutters: “Their eyes were dull, their heads were flat, they had no brains at all … Is that, uh, Lawson?” “Banjo Paterson.” “Ha, I’m not supposed to talk to the media without Campbell here.” “I wonder why!”

Next to us is a sprightly chap at the end of the Liberal line, shorter than both me and Joshie, which is something. Terrier fresh. He’s the tail-gunner, making last appeals. “Can I say, we’re all liberals here, just liberals of a different type. Have a last think…” He proffers the dark-blue leaflet. The voter, salt ‘n’ pepper beard, cashmere zip up, check shirt. Just a guess but I’d say second-tierAPSCarey?St Kevin’s?Melbourne/medical/something/notsurgeon/lovedTheAgeonce/missesFaine/Turnbull/readsJohnRalstonSaul/TimFlannery/TheMonthly/MTCnotMCC/AireysInlet/notPortsea/kidsongapyear/NGOAfrica/divingIndonesia. Just a guess. He laughs politely, refuses the leaflet. Terrier is not dismayed.

“Didn’t you used to be John Pesutto?” I say, suddenly twigging. Former state member, Hawthorn, lost in the 2018 Dan-slide.

“Well, that’s, uh, one way of putting it…”

“What have you been up to since being defenestrated?”

“Well, that’s one way to put it…”

“Hawthorn way. All these lovely window surrounds.”

“Well, I resumed my legal practice, and I had a column for The Age. I’ve written various things…”

“Here you are.”

“Here I am.”

He seems a nice guy, trailing the sadness of political failure. Thrown out of heaven. He’s being a good soldier, but it has an air. Like Banquo’s ghost spruiking for Macbeth (“You must number all boxes for Evil King of Scotland”).

Waiting for a break in the phalanx so I can get some face time with Joshie, I chat to the solitary Lib Dem. “Must be hard yards here?” “Oh well, I’m not always here,” said the tall young woman, with a very few cards in her hand. “But there’s a good turnout by the freedom-friendly parties.” “Can I have a how-to-vote card?” “Oh well, these are for the Senate. The others haven’t been printed yet… Bit of a stuff up…” She smiles weakly. A John Humphrys operation: so well oiled the wheels keep sliding off.

Comes puffing up a solid chap. “Campbell’s here.”

“We can do an interview with Monique over there,” he says.

“I wasn’t really here for the… you know, competence thing — Oh OK.” I turn to Ryan: “What’s the view on ScoMo’s superannuation mortgage thing?”

“Well, I think the government should have a vision for homeownership that goes beyond bandaid solutions…”

“Ah, but what about negative gearing?”

“Well, that should be reviewed as part of a wider plan to make home ownership possible for more people of all ages…” as the plaster parapets of the Hawthorn villas rise above us to the sky. Still, no opening for Joshie.

My next Uber is trying to get in. They should have street valet parking, like they used to have at 21sts for all the rich kids. 

* * *

“When we can actually talk to people, we get a really positive response,” says Aran Mylvaganam of the Victorian Socialists, a thin, neat Tamil man in VS black, chainstore glasses and what I suspect is a moustache behind his light-blue mask. “But it’s tough.” 

Seems to be. We’re outside the old Salvation Army hall in Thornbury, northern, now inner-northern Melbourne. The trip up from Hawthorn was an instructional newsreel unrolling: where does the money come from? From northside and flows south, and let’s follow it in reverse. Through da Kew ghetto, and Richmond, as the shop fronts lower, the terraces narrow, the graffiti blossoms everywhere. High Street Northcote, bougie and spick now, and then things fray again, north of Northcote, Thornbury, just south of the hipster/hummus/dhukkah/kombucha curtain of Bell Street, the great Greens-Labor divide. Tired old unpainted awnings for ancient chemists and newsies and pet stores, Greek cafes, doilies and glass shelves in the window, the old furniture and junk stores, and the quirk shops, here for the low rents: the antique tools shop, the Thai tiki, Dial a Lasagne, Greens collectibles.

Bloody love it, life primaveral and fulgurant. To say that Thornbury is the oppressed proletariat would be a stretch: this end of High Street has finally fallen to the new money, cool cafes, bars, a great second-hand bookshop, and the cinema that wouldn’t show Ride Like A Girl out of animal cruelty concerns. But it’s still very mixed, and you can see it at the old Salvos hall, all sorts. 

This is Cooper, Batman as was, Ged Kearney the now safeish Labor member, having snatched it back from the brink. Huge red and pink “GED” signs everywhere. The Greens did not take up my slogan suggestion (“Vote Kearney, Get Adani”), and their presence is thus somewhat less striking, though high-profile candidate, First Nations author and activist Celeste Liddle is giving her more of a run than anyone else might.

But the Greens also have collegial competition from the Victorian Socialists, who are running hard in the seat and the Senate. It’s the largest socialist grouping around (Socialist Alliance is running, its highest-profile candidate Pat O’Shane in Cairns/Leichhardt. And the Socialist Equity Party is also running. They all differ on… eh) and, oh what, OK (disclosure: I had a bit of involvement in setting the party up in 2018) they’ve made some inroads in the north. Aran, its Senate candidate is a Tamil refugee. As the “freedom-friendly” candidates spruik — Cooper has several crackpot anti-vax etc independents — Aran wants to talk about the issues. I want to talk about him. “This is Imran,” he says, first introducing another VS spruiker to me and passers-by. “He was in the Park Hotel. Would you like…?” No one’s much interested in talking.

“Well, I came here in 1997. I was 13, out of the war in Sri Lanka and into Villawood.”

“How long was your family in Villawood?”

“No, just me. For three months.”

“Must have been tough…”

“Well after the war… my school was blown up, I saw my friend torn apart by a shell…” He gives that slight melancholic shrug of someone who has seen all the horrors, very young. “I was at Monash, involved with Labor, but I got disillusioned with their acquiescence to the Sri Lankan government under Rudd and Gillard. You know 110,000 people killed, and…” A flash of anger. Another shout: “This man was in Villawood would you like to…”

“Shut up,” yells someone from the Freedom Ghetto, banana-yellow UAP and indie crackpots. “If he wasn’t welcome…” or some such.

“It’s been quite rough here, a couple of times,” Aran says. He set up Tamil and refugee groups, joined and left the Greens, turned off by electoral-first politics. “The socialists were the only ones really taking up our cause.”

Imran is quieter, less assertive. From Myanmar, via Bangladesh, he arrived in 2013, was shipped to PNG, and then got trapped in the post-medivac limbo for two years. “First at the Preston Mantra. I’ve stayed there, weeks on end.”

I said, “I know your suffering,” my one perhaps unforgivable flippancy.

“Then two years in the Park Hotel.”

We talk a little more, but they’re both eager to get back to getting actual voters. It’s a hard, relentless grind, and they’ve been doing eight and more hours a day. Tough to get here, tough to turn towards the politics of it, when no one could blame them from turning to self-interest. Quiet courage that is not silence, on these scruffy, ever-changing streets. 

* * *

Back at Hawthorn, after a swing through Macnamara, to see if I could find one of the Michael Danbys, I get face time with Josh at last, as the crowd thins.

“… from Crikey,” I say, as he takes my hand and his smile sort of fades.

“Heeeeeelloooo,” he says, very slowly.

“How’s it going?”

“I’m not doing interviews.”

One shot left: “I hear your mother’s writing a book.”

“Well, my mother’s written a lot of books.” The voice is acid now. Arguably, I did pile in on the section 44 stuff, which might ultimately have got his aged mother deported, so fair enough.

“On child development?”

“Could be.”

“Needy Baby, Greedy Baby?”

But he has turned away.

Day’s over. Darkness is gathering over Kooyong. On the way out, at a corner there’s two of Josh’s walking billboards, young men encased in metal signs, with the Frydenberg face all over, armour against the future perhaps.