Seeing orange: Nationals under threat in regional Victoria as angry voters consider One Nation

A logging truck parks beside a banner supporting Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party on the side of a highway motel in Victoria’s Gippsland region ahead of the November state election. Photograph: Lauren Murphy/The Guardian

On a Friday afternoon last month, the Victorian Nationals leader, Danny O’Brien, was driving around his electorate putting up corflutes when he came across a herd of cows blocking a road near Poowong.

As he waited for them to pass, O’Brien began talking politics with the woman herding them.