Liberal MP for Ripon Louise Staley (Image: Supplied)

It hits you most keenly in the old gold rush towns — what we take to be the obvious architecture of any one way of life is as frail as Dresden china, the impermanence so much clearer when the tendrils connecting a place to its past are so visible.

In Ararat — in the preserved buildings, the immaculately maintained town hall, the chipped, fading façade of the old mechanics institute, the art deco Midland Complex — you see monuments to vanished time, echoes of a way of life that lasted a generation and came to an abrupt end.

Take the town’s pre-poll centre, the Gum San memorial, which marks the first non-Indigenous settlement in the area. Goldminers from southern China arrived in 1857, making Ararat the only town in Australian history to be settled by the Chinese. The beatific Confucius statue unveiled in 2008 wouldn’t have to crane his neck that far to see the local McDonald’s. The centre was closed for two years during the COVID peak, a period where one world became another, just as surely as the eventual depletion of Ararat’s gold.

Do you really want to talk about severing links with the past? The Indigenous peoples of this area are the Djab Wurrung people, and it was for a long-promised highway unspooling from Ararat that their 800-year-old sacred trees were destroyed back in 2020.

After the gold boom, the town was most famously known for the Aradale lunatic asylum, a knotted, fraying collection of every nightmare we’ve come to associate with the asylum system — experimental treatments, ice pick lobotomies, inmates with undiagnosed disabilities or vague eccentricities, a tonne of women with “hysteria” committed for years of abuse and abject misery. It wasn’t closed until 1994. Older locals, those who would talk about it at all, told researcher Nathaniel Buchanan about the screams you could hear coming from the building. It hosts “dark tourism” ghost tours now. I wouldn’t attend one for a billion dollars.

Ararat is a major hub in the seat of Ripon, north-west of Melbourne. The seat was a humdinger last time. Liberal Louise Staley won by the molecule at the tip of her nose — 15 votes decided it. A redistribution has shifted it nominally in favour of Labor, but that’s based on Danslide numbers, and no one’s expecting a Danslide this time.

Adding to the intrigue, Staley is the MP who fronted the “just asking questions” campaign regarding how Dan Andrews sustained his back injury in March 2021. The ALP is running 31-year-old Martha Haylett, whose background is in housing and as an adviser to Andrews.

Ararat is a town near impossible to read — even by the standards of a regional town, people are cagey about their intentions. From one end of the town to another, I see one cluster of Staley corflutes (albeit on one property) and one single corflute for Haylett.

The weather is symphonically dramatic all day. As I arrive at my motel, stinging pearls of hail are shattering all around me on the pavement; as I leave my room, it’s blazing sunshine; on my walk back, it’s raining again. So the streets, and the pre-poll spot where I briefly chat with Haylett, are zombie-movie empty most of the time I’m there.

Craig Wilson, who edits the Ararat Advocate, and as such writes a small book about the town every week — he also almost certainly represents 100% of Crikey subscribers in town — is finding it equally hard to fathom.

“Partly there just feels like less engagement this time,” he says. He’s seeing fewer corflutes, fewer attendees at candidate forums, fewer people at pre-poll and, significantly, fewer visits from high-profile members of either party.

And of course he’s keen to remind me that even if you could get your head around Ararat, it’s only one of dozens of communities in Ripon, all with their own issues and voting patterns.

We speak at the Ararat RSL after Tuesday night’s candidates forum. Two Anzacs in copper silhouette flank the entrance, their heads bowed, and mannequins are set up in various defence force uniforms throughout. The menu board, among other things, assures regulars that staff are here to talk if that’s what they need.

The event draws roughly 70 people, about as many as the buzzing, multi-coloured confusion of pokies on the other side of the building. The crowd is, even by the standards of such things, mature and immaculately turned out. There is one guy in hi-vis who is cradling a giant black chicken with such gentle, unthinking affection that I initially think it’s a cat. This turns out to be Bernard Quince, one of the two independent candidates.

Staley’s office had told me she wasn’t available for an interview while I was in town, perhaps having googled my name and “Victorian Liberals” and found more uses of the phrase “malfunctioning clown car” than she cared for, so this is my only chance to see her up close.

With recent events, I thought she might take attendees frame by frame through a video of an Andrews presser to show them the point his lizard-mask slips, but there’s none of that — she’s just, well, good. Measured, controlled intensity on the right points, deliberate rhythm, hitting the right points, selling herself as a tough and frank campaigner for the area.

Only once does that visceral loathing for Andrews come out, when she’s nicely set up with a “What do you do if you win but you’re in opposition?” question and she doesn’t have to do any hypotheticals because that’s been her entire career: “You need someone to fight the premier when he’s in full-on, sneering, ‘put it all out there’ mode. I do that every day.”

I note two things from her performance: first, she doesn’t mention Matthew Guy, which leaves the grand total of shout-outs to the Liberal leader from his own candidates across all my election coverage at one. Second, if that conspiracy stuff (which doesn’t come up either) wasn’t for her constituents, who the hell was it for?

Haylett is a bright, energetic speaker, the rougher edges of her speaking style landing as authenticity rather than nerves. On a question about attracting and keeping teachers in places like Ararat, you can imagine her as a strong MP — her answer weaves Labor policies on housing, transport and infrastructure into a joined-up idea of how education and other industries might find and keep workers in rural areas.

There’s certainly a different vibe in the country. The first question is from an Animal Justice Party voter who asks about duck shooting and where she might be coddled in the city; every member of the panel, even the one cradling the chicken, voices full-throated support for the practice.

Then there’s Wayne Rigg, who seems to sum up a lot of the contradictions of regional politics that are hard to fathom for city reporters — he’s been a member of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers and Labor, and both sides of his politics get a workout.

“If there’s a wild card in this electorate, it’s him,” Wilson tells me. “He’s a unionist, a hunter, a firefighter who attends every single CFA funeral, a former councillor in Ballarat. So there’ll be areas in the electorate where he’ll get a bit of respect.”

He won’t win, but he could get just enough of a chunk of the vote for his preferences to be significant. Wilson shows me Rigg’s Facebook page, which features a series of pictures of foxes Rigg has gleefully dispatched.

“Would that appeal to people?” I ask in that faintly scandalised city-boy way.

Without a second’s hesitation, Wilson says: “Oh, round here, if you’ve got chickens, you’re voting for that.”