You pass through maybe 10 distinct countries on Indian Ocean Drive, a 270km stretch of road along the edge of Western Australia that gets you most of the way from Perth to Geraldton.
You go past gnarled alien trees, leafless and hunched in supplication to the sea breeze; then rocky fields of pale desaturated green; then rolling hills of those scrubby bushes that thrive by the ocean; then still glistening salt lakes, or great cliff-like white sand dunes bursting through the greenery to the east.
Small communities rise and shrink to the west, signs for new housing estates pop up in the middle of nowhere, bleached near-white by the sun. A little less than an hour north of Perth, near Guilderton, you enter the electorate of Durack. It’s another 330km till you hit Geraldton, Durack’s southernmost regional hub.
The night I’m there, Geraldton is hosting a candidates forum, organised by the local chamber of commerce and industry. This is a tougher prospect than it would be elsewhere given Durack is one of the world’s biggest electorates, covering 1.6 million square kilometres.
Geraldton, or at least the area, is the site of the alternative origin story for European settlement in Australia.
The Dutch ship Batavia was wrecked on what’s now called Beacon Island in 1629, 80km off the Geraldton coast, and became the site of a horrifically grizzly mutiny. This in turn led to the first executions sanctioned under European law in Australia. Two mutineers convicted of lesser crimes were marooned on the mainland (probably closer to where Kalbarri now sits, further north). It was the first such permanent settlement, however long it lasted. (They were never heard of again.)
Geraldton is a mix of settings — a relaxed seaside town, the streets lined with palms and pines, great coffee places, nice bars and places where you can buy Birkenstocks and hippyish jewellery, and then something like the Batavia Motor Inne erupts out of the street, an abandoned hotel that has become a de facto shelter for local homeless after a local alternatives closed.
Local member Melissa Price has held the safe Liberal seat since 2013. No one is talking about it changing hands. Electorally the action is elsewhere. It always has been — that’s the whole problem. The vastness of the electorate means no single set of community concerns can act as an obvious anchor point. Labor’s Jeremiah Riley, a Yamatji man, is Zooming in from the Kimberley, about 2500km north-east, a whole world of different communities and issues.
Journalists were allowed to attend the event, but not ask questions (a better deal than some have had from Price in the past). In the room are Price, former Liberal Party state MP for Geraldton Ian Blayney (now a National), and Greens candidate and Malgana woman Bianca McNeair. Andrew Middleton from the United Australia Party is also on Zoom.
Price does a creditable job — rattling off numbers and achievements and local conversations with breathless speed, hard to isolate any one point you can interrogate — and I guess that’s all she has to do.
It’s not that shocking given a strain of this kind of thinking is invariably gulped down with the briny sea air. But far from being booed off stage, Middleton gets the most dixers of the night, questions on human rights, vaccine mandates and the constitution.
One such question, a long one about about “medical conscription”, elicits Price’s worst answer of the night, an equivocation on how limited the mandates were from the federal government and how the questioner really ought to be mad at Premier Mark McGowan — but clearly she’s under the impression anti-mandate sentiment is relatively strong.
The questioner tries to launch into a follow-up (the moderator having made the mistake of promising everyone would be asked if they were satisfied), but the microphone is given to a young woman who quietly asks what the candidates will do for mental health services, particularly aimed at LGBTIQA+ Indigenous youth given their disproportionate suicide levels.
Riley, visibly exhausted — he’s driven 1000km in the past 24 hours — and not always fantastically prepared, gives the most affecting answer all night.
“This comes up everywhere I go,” he says. “It’s never the first thing people ask, but it always comes up towards the end, quietly. Our people are hurting.”
As this happens, the previous questioner shifts in his seat and scrolls his phone, no doubt searching for the section of the Magna Carta that prohibits QR code-based discrimination or something.
Blayney says it’s always been a Nationals’ ambition to have a federal MP in WA, but he doesn’t give the impression it’s particularly urgent to unseat Price. Despite, or possibly because, of this he’s probably the standout performer on the night: his answers are frequently rambling, a consideration of an issue rather than a sharply honed pitch, but showing a knowledge of the local area and a sincere investment in it.
Middleton gets the loudest, showiest applause of the night, but Blayney regularly gets ripples of approving murmurs, a “hear, hear” or two, which I think counts for more with a crowd like this.
As I retire to the bar to get vox pops (everyone is far too diplomatic, I’m sad to report), the “conscription” guy has penned in the candidates and Price is doing that “I hear and understand you” stone-faced nod that politicians are so good at.
In some ways Durack is the most Western Australian of seats — with its mind-boggling vastness, a strip of humanity perched on the edge of the continent, miles to the next community, and much farther still between you and the people who make decisions about your life.
